Eric Saul served as founding curator of the Military Museum at the Presidio
of San Francisco from 1973-1986. He has designed and circulated a number of exhibits on the contribution of minorities
to the US military. Included among them were exhibits on African American soldiers, women in the military, Filipinos
in the US Army, and the famous Japanese American soldiers of the 100th/442nd/MIS. The 100th/442nd/MIS exhibit eventually
evolved into an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution entitled A More Perfect Union: Japanese Americans and the Constitution.
For this exhibit, he was a technical advisor and consultant.
In 1980,
Eric Saul co-founded of the Go For Broke 100th/442nd/MIS Foundation, later called the National Japanese
American Historical Society (NJAHS). He was curator from 1981 to 1987, producing exhibits including East to America,
which chronicled the story of Japanese American immigration to the United States. Eric Saul has also curated an exhibit
entitled Unlikely Liberators on the Japanese American soldiers of the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion who liberated
the infamous Dachau Death March. In the 1990's, Saul served as a consultant for the Japanese American National Museum.
In 2002, he created a national project, the Kansha Project, to honor people who risked their reputations to help Japanese
Americans during World War II.
Eric Saul has been Guest Curator at the
Simon Wiesenthal Center - Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles since 1994. He curated a major exhibit entitled Art
in the Holocaust. In 1998, he curated an exhibit entitled I am My Brother's Keeper on Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal. He also curated Liberation: Revealing the Unspeakable, an exhibit on
the liberation of the concentration camps by the allied Armies, 1944-45. This exhibit premiered at the Simon Wiesenthal
Center Museum of Tolerance in 1995.
In 1993, Eric Saul founded
the Visas for Life: The Righteous and Honorable Diplomats Project to document and honor Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara. In 1996, the project expanded to honor all diplomats who helped Jews during
the war. Under his direction, the Visas for Life Project created six traveling exhibits on the topic of diplomatic rescue,
which have been shown in more than 150 institutions worldwide, including: the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust;
the United Nations headquarters in New York and Geneva; the headquarters of the European Union, the Japanese Parliament; Yad
Vashem Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority; and the US Capitol in Washington, DC.
Saul has independently curated a number of additional traveling exhibits. In 1997, he created a series of traveling
exhibits and programs on Chinese diplomat Dr. Feng Shan Ho. The exhibit traveled to numerous venues in the United States
and to China on the 100th anniversary of Dr. Ho's birth. In 2000, Saul created another exhibit entitled
Light One Candle: A Child's Diary of the Holocaust. The exhibit tells the story of Solly Ganor (Zalke Genkind), who was a survivor of the Kovno Ghetto in
Lithuania and the Landsberg-Kaufering concentration camps. It premiered in Detroit, Michigan, in 2001. In 2006,
Saul created the exhibit A Man for All Times: The Story of Mexican Ambassador Gilberto Bosques and the Rescue of Jews in Marseilles in cooperation with the Tuvie Maizel Museum of the Holocaust and the Simon Wiesenthal Center - Museum of Tolerance.
The exhibit opened in Mexico City at the Jewish Community Center, and then toured to the Mexican foreign ministry.
In 2006, the Visas for Life: The Righteous and Honorable Diplomats Project became a nonprofit
organization under the umbrella of the Institute for the Study of Rescue and Altruism in the Holocaust, a nonprofit corporation
(ISRAH). The mission expanded to document a comprehensive history of rescue, relief and altruism during the Holocaust.
As Executive Director of ISRAH, Eric Saul continues to document rescue, and has nominated many individuals for the title
of Righteous Among the Nations.
In 2007, Saul instituted a major research
program to document and honor Jewish rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust. Saul has created a major database of Jewish
rescue organizations and Jewish rescuers. He is cooperating with two programs in Israel. He is currently preparing
a traveling exhibit on Jewish rescue.
Eric Saul has been a consultant
on numerous documentary films, including Yankee Samurai (1981), The Color of Honor (1982), Nisei Soldier
(1984), and the Holocaust documentaries entitled Diplomats for the Damned (1999) and Sugihara: Conspiracy of Kindness (2000).
Eric Saul was an early consultant for Steven
Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.
Eric
Saul was the co-author of The Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906 (1982) and contributed to Go For Broke: The Story
of the Japanese American Soldier in World War II (1981). He was coeditor of Yukiko Sugihara's memoir, Visas
for Life (1995). He also authored Unlikely Liberators: The Story of Chiune Sugihara and Japanese Americans
of the 522nd Field Artillery (1995).
Eric Saul is presently
writing a major new book on diplomatic rescue.