Jews, mostly Polish, had managed to escape the Nazi pogrom in Lithuania, but now they had nowhere to go. The Lithuanians did not want them among them. Most of them would have preferred to get rid of the Jews who had lived among them for centuries. Through Europe, the paths to freedom were sealed. The only way to safety, perhaps to America, was through the East, but even there they could not go. No country would grant them a visa, not even a transit visa. In Lithuania, they were trapped like animals in a trap. The savings they had saved to save their bare heads were gone. Many slept on the streets and starved. They were sinking into despair when, in July 1940, the incredible news hit them: the Japanese consulate was issuing transit visas. Consul Chiune Sempo Sugihara was signing them, even though his superiors had clearly forbidden him to do so three times. He knew that the price of disobedience would be high, but he had to follow his conscience. He saved some 6000 people from almost certain death before he was forced to leave Lithuania.
He had been encountering rivers of exhausted refugees on the roads leading to Kaunas since October 1939, when he moved into his new Lithuanian home with his wife Yukiko and sons Hiroki and Chiaki. On the streets of the city, he saw Jewish refugees whom the strong local Jewish community tried to help, but could not offer more than soup and a piece of bread in the soup kitchens. At dinners with acquaintances, he heard survivors’ stories so horrifying that even Lithuanian Jews could not believe them.
But he did nothing. He was only allowed to issue a visa or two a month without his country’s permission, nothing more, but otherwise he drove around Lithuania gathering information on military movements. Fortunately, he was at least on good terms with his new masters, the Soviets, who occupied Lithuania on 15 January 1940. It helped that he was fluent in Russian from his days in Harbin, when he was preparing for diplomatic service.
It was not his first choice. He wanted to become a teacher, but his father demanded that he become a doctor, and he stopped supporting his son when he resisted. At the age of 19, he was left to fend for himself. His dream of becoming a teacher floated away, and he managed to pass the difficult entrance exams, which earned him a scholarship to study at the Diplomatic School in Harbin. He had to choose one foreign language and chose Russian because he loved vodka and Russian literature.
He could not complain about his stressful life then, even though he could see Jewish refugees at the local train station in Harbin in 1919, and he cannot complain about it now, in Kaunas. The war had not yet touched Lithuania directly, although by June 1940 Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium had already fallen, and Hitler had struck France.
Nevertheless, Chiune Sugihara was concerned. He had recently had another son, Haruki, whose name meant Life Force. Should he send his family to Japan? Yukiko was strongly against it. They would not be separated, no matter what.
The way out of the trap is through Japan
But the Jewish refugees could not separate even if they wanted to. Those “better off” who could still afford a meal in the smoky Alexander pub debated what to do. All routes out of the country were either illegal or dangerous, and usually both.
For example, we could cross Russia to Odessa, continue to Istanbul and finally reach Palestine. But you would need a Russian and a Turkish visa. To get to America or Canada, you would have to cross Asia, but again, for Asian countries, you needed visas.
The fact was that no one wanted them. Well, almost nobody. They could have lived on the island of Curaçao, in a small Dutch colony. But how would they get there? They would take a train across the Soviet Union to Vladivostok, from there they would take a boat to Japan and from there they would go to Curaçao or even to Shanghai, for which Jews did not need visas.
But they needed a Japanese visa for this plan. On July 27th 1940, the Japanese Consul, Chiune Sugihara, looked unsuspectingly out of the window. He saw a huge crowd outside his consulate. Nothing was clear to him. What did these people want from him? Why are they here, all exhausted, dirty and visibly agitated? Why are they trying to climb over his fence?
He knew that they expected his help, but it was also clear that his superiors would not allow him to help. He looked at his two older sons. They were disturbed. Yukiko reassured them that the people outside the house were good, but they were running away from the evil ones who were trying to kill them.
The boys knew, above all, that they were not allowed to go to the park because it was too dangerous. The annoyance was such that when the maid tried to go to the market, they pushed her back into the garden and tried to break in through the gate, which she opened for them to see.
Sugihara still didn’t know what these people really wanted from him, so he sent his chauffeur Borislav among them. He asked the refugees to choose five representatives and to come to him for talks.
Led by Zorach Warhaftig of Poland, they did indeed come and unveiled the map in front of Sugihara. They explained to him in detail how they were going to escape from Kaunas and enlightened him that they needed his help to do so.
Impossible, he refused, explaining that he could only issue the few hundred visas they were expecting from him with special permission from the Japanese Foreign Ministry. Will he apply for it? For the time being, he promised, he would think about it.
As he sat alone in his office, a Japanese proverb crept into his mind: even a hunter cannot kill a bird that comes to him. But what was he supposed to do? He has no time anyway. The Soviets have already written to him to tell him to close the consulate in the first week of August. Does he have any power at all?
The next morning, he nevertheless invited the refugee representatives and the Dutch consul, Jan Zwartendijk, to his office. Yes, on behalf of the Netherlands, he will issue as many visas for the island of Curaçao as necessary, he assured, adding with a laugh that that way there was no one on the island to check them.
Absolutely not
Now it was Chiune Sugihara’s turn: should he write to his Foreign Minister or not? In any case, he was encouraged by his wife Yukiko. If he can help people, he must help them, she told him, and he sent a telegram to the foreign minister, saying, among other things:
“Their suffering is immeasurable. As a human being, I cannot refuse their pleas. Please allow me to grant them visas. This request is humanitarian. Refugees’ requests for visas should not be refused.”
Two days later, the reply came back that “absolutely” he was not allowed to issue visas, that the ban was “without exception” and that he should not ask any more questions about it. Nevertheless, he asked again. This time, the reply added that if he issued too many visas, he would endanger public safety, and that the owners of the ships that run between the Russian city of Vladivostok and the Japanese port of Tsuruga also did not want extra passengers because they would be overloaded.
The second answer was also a clear no. But Sugihara sent a third telegram just in case. He had heard nothing he hadn’t heard before. He sat silently in his office. He still knew by heart the rules of life he had learned as a child: Don’t be a burden to others; Take care of others; Don’t expect rewards for your good deeds.
He looked out of the window. There were people all around. He looked at the boy. He was not dangerous. He was not a spy. He was not a traitor. He was just a Jewish boy who wanted to survive.
Chiuno walked over to his wife. He will issue visas on his own. Does he agree? He needed her consent. They both knew that by doing this he would not only risk his own future, but also the future of other family members. If he went against his government’s orders, he would very likely lose all chances of promotion, ruin his career and be left without honour. He may also endanger the lives of his three children, his wife and her younger sister Setsuko, who lived with them.
“I may indeed have to give up obedience to my government, but if I don’t, I will give up obedience to God,” he explained why he simply has to help. No one objected.
Early the next morning, he went to the Soviet embassy and explained in his perfect Russian that he needed permission for a large number of refugees to travel across Russian territory to Vladivostok, from where they would go to Japan. He had to negotiate a little with the ambassador, but not for long and not laboriously. He quickly had him on his side.
At home, he stood in front of people. In a soft but firm voice, he announced that he would issue visas to everyone, everyone. At first, those gathered were shocked. Then they were overwhelmed with joy. No one knew that Chiune Sugihara was turning the Japanese Consulate into a visa factory of his own making.
At first, despite everything, it worked according to the rules. Each visa applicant came to him and told his name, age, number of family members to be covered, country of origin, country of destination, place of entry and how much money he had.
He had to show his documents and Chiune checked that they were valid and authentic. He entered all the information manually into the form, stamped the visa officially and signed it. Finally, he shook each refugee’s hand, looked them in the eye and wished them good luck.
Having to enter the visa serial number and the name of the person to whom it applied into the register made the job extremely time-consuming. By late evening, he had written 22 visas and his hands were cramping before it was even time for lunch.
He didn’t make time for it. He and his staff, including the German Wolfgang Gudze, could not afford to take a break. How many people were still outside, Chiune asked his wife once in between. A lot, she replied. She dared not tell him how many. It was better not to know.
A race against time
From then on, he started writing visas at eight o’clock and stayed up late into the night writing them. He did not stop even when he got a second letter from the Soviets and read that he had to close the consulate and leave the country.
But as if the Soviets had not already put enough pressure on him, on 2 August 1940 he received a telegram from his Foreign Minister. He too demanded that the consulate be closed immediately. Chiune overheard him, and sent a complaint to the Soviet embassy, which was more like a plea: could he at least get a bit of a reprieve? We will consider it, he was told, but Chiune knew that water was already running down his throat.
Then Moshe Zupnik, a German Jew from Frankfurt, came before him. He was clutching 300 passports or documents of all the students, professors and their relatives from the renowned Mir Yeshiva religious school in Poland. Will the Japanese consul save them from almost certain death? In return, Zupnik offered to help him issue visas, and Sugihara sat him down with Gudzu, a German, and they stamped them together.
But it was still boiling outside the consulate. Wealthier Jews were angered by their fellow Jews. It was hard to accept that they had heard the news earlier, because they had enough money to sit in the Alexander, so they were among the first in line for visas. The poorer people stood far behind, not knowing whether or not they would ever get their hands on the precious paper, even though they had been waiting for it for days.
Tension was also building in the Japanese Consul. No longer the reserved and orderly man he had always been, he was now a sleepless, tense and neglected man who turned 40 on 1 January 1940.
Yukiko massaged his hands every evening and made sure he relaxed a little, but she never asked him to relax. She knew that time was running out. At any moment the Soviets could reply that they had to close the consulate.
The ink started to run out. Chiune did not wait for new supplies. He diluted the ink with water and pressed the paper so hard that it broke the pen. It was 10 August 1940. He looked out of the window.
“They were not only men, but also women, the elderly and children. They all seemed extremely tired and exhausted. I didn’t know where they slept in Kaunas. Maybe at the train station or on the road,” he later wrote about his thoughts that day.
Now, only the poorest refugees are left standing in the queues. He looked at them through the window, then went back to his office and told his staff that they would no longer check any documents and would no longer enter visas in the register. Now they will issue a visa to anyone who wants one, including refugees with forged passports, those whose documents have expired and those who did not have them at all. All that mattered now was to give as many people as possible a path to freedom.
The refugees on the street spoke of him as a Mensch, or a man of honour and dignity. One proclaimed him to be the prophet Elijah, whom God sends to earth when people are in trouble. Each time he comes in a different guise and this time he is said to be hiding in the body of the Japanese consul Sugihara.
But this “prophet” took a deep breath in mid-August. Finally, a letter arrived from the Soviet embassy. The Japanese consulate was allowed to operate until 28 August 1940, at which time it must be closed for real, it said. The news spread quickly among the people. The relief was palpable. Time was short, but hope for a solution was growing.
Please forgive me
Sugihara just wrote, day after day and night after night. He entered his apartment only to have his wife massage his tired hands and encourage him not to give up. The more visions he wrote, the more lives he would save.
She couldn’t help him. He wouldn’t let her. In fact, she was not allowed to enter the office with the children. If he wrote the visas himself, he was responsible for them. If she did, they would both be liable, putting the family at risk.
The responsibility for helping the Jews was shared by Wolfgang Gudze, a German, and Moshe Zupnik, a Jew. Together they stamped visas and talked. You support Hitler, Zupnik wanted to know. Yes, replied Gudze. Sometimes he doesn’t, he explained, but since Hitler was the leader of all Germans, and therefore also his own, he does.
But Hitler hated Jews, Zupnik reminded him. So does he hate them too? No, he respects some of them, Gudze explained, after all, he almost married a Jewish woman, but the truth is that he helps them now because he feels sorry for them.
Two men from completely different worlds, they worked together as the war around them grew more and more intense. Bombs were falling on England, Italy was preparing to conquer North Africa, the Jews were increasingly out of favour.
Now even Chiune Sugihara could no longer help them. He received one last warning from his government to close the consulate and go to Berlin immediately. He could no longer evade.
He ordered them to start urgent procedures to stop the deals, while he continued to write the visas himself. And he continued to write them even after his wife was ready to leave and he and his family had checked into a city hotel on 28 August 1940. Although the official seal of the consulate had by then travelled to Berlin, Sugihara still had the official forms.
And so he continued to write the visas, not knowing whether the Japanese border officials would accept them or not, because he could not stamp them. He could only advise the refugees to greet the Japanese at the border with a friendly Banzai, Nippon and hope for a good outcome.
But even now, there were more people in need of help than he had time for. The more visas he wrote, the longer the queue for them. He even wrote them on the train, waiting on the platform to take his family to Berlin.
“Please forgive me”, he bellowed to those he couldn’t help, and threw the blank forms out of the window. People shouted behind the train: ‘We will never forget you! We’ll see you again!” He could only hope that they would. But he didn’t give it a second thought on the ride to Berlin. Exhausted, he immediately fell into a dream and slept almost the whole way.
The awakening was not peaceful. True, he was greeted as a diplomat should be, but he was still filled with fear. What was going to happen?
Nothing. The Japanese Foreign Minister tells him that he and his family are moving to Prague. Chiune was relieved and so was Yukiko, but each kept to himself. Neither admitted to the other how worried they were about the future of their family, and now the Foreign Minister said nothing about visas.
But Chiune mentioned them in an exemplary way when he wrote his report on his service in Lithuania. The visa register he had to submit listed 2193 names. Some visas were issued for individuals, others were for families, so it is impossible to say how many people travelled to freedom on them. Another problem, of course, was that at some point Chiune simply stopped recording the visas.
Chiune and Yukiko never spoke about it and remained silent even when the Triple Pact was signed on 27 September 1940 by representatives of Germany, Italy and Japan. As Japanese, they now became German allies.
Soviet bombs in the Romanian story
In fact, they had no problem with that. They enjoyed Prague’s diplomatic and social life, but that came to an end when Joachim von Ribbentrop came to “visit”. He ordered the foreign diplomats to leave the country immediately.
Everyone remained silent, but Sugihara could not again, complaining that Japan was a German ally and therefore no one could just send him home. Ribbentrop’s eyes seemed to show a shred of respect, but the Sugiharas began to prepare their suitcases.
Shortly afterwards, they were in Konigsberg, Germany, and from there they travelled to Bucharest. It was the winter of 1943 and the war was already turning strongly in favour of the Allies.
Chiune Sugihara and his family lived in Romania as they had everywhere else – working little and exploring the countryside a lot. He was doing quite well until the Soviet bombs started raining from the sky in the spring of 1944. Hoping to be safer, the Sugiharas moved first to the outskirts of the city and then to the small town of Poiana Brasov.
But the bombs kept coming and finally Chiune, who continued to go to work in Bucharest, decided to return to Japan. In May 1944, Yukiko and her chauffeur set off for Bucharest to run last errands.
Halfway there, their car broke down. Yukiko was taken along by German soldiers who drove past, but had to turn around before reaching the town. Inside, they learn, the German army has been defeated, so they all flee into the forest. Yukiko had no choice but to go with the retreating German soldiers.
When they hit a roadblock not far from Bucharest and couldn’t go any further, she ran nervously under a tree. Around her, explosions crackled and exploded, and all she could see were the faces of her children and her husband. They did not know where she was, and she did not know very well where she had landed.
A young German officer offered to help her. He advised her to go with him to Germany, and she got into his car and continued her journey. So they drove day after day until they found themselves in the middle of a battle. Bullets were flying everywhere, bombs were falling.
Yukiko felt no fear. Even when a truck full of soldiers exploded in front of her and the flames were shooting into her car, she remained calm. She watched as everything around her burned.
The soldier shouted at her to leave the car. She crawled out. She felt the soldier push her to the ground and throw himself on top of her. She started to cry. With one eye, she saw an enemy soldier running towards her, pointing a rifle at her head. The explosion had just made it light and he caught her eye. He was in shock. He had not expected to see a Japanese lady on Romanian soil.
He did not shoot her. Yukiko lost consciousness. When she regained consciousness, it was daytime. The battle was over. Her protector was lying on the ground. He didn’t speak when she called out to him, and he didn’t wake up when she shook him. He was buried with the others in a makeshift grave.
The surviving German soldiers began to march towards Germany, while Yukiko herself headed in the other direction, towards Brasov. She reached the farm. She knocked and asked for help. After eight days of living in the forest, she finally saw her children and husband again.
When the past catches up with you
But the real test for the Sugihara family was just beginning. They met the end of the war in Romania and became Soviet prisoners of war. A former neighbour offered to look after all three children, but Yukiko could not let them go. She would rather risk them all being sent to Siberia together than be separated from them. They landed in a camp not far from Bucharest.
The military barracks were cold and damp. Occasionally they could buy some vegetables from an old farmer who was allowed into the camp by the authorities, but otherwise they ate only soup prepared by German prisoners. They were allowed to walk in the courtyard once a day.
Every day was the same as the day before. The first year had passed and the second Christmas had come and gone when they were told they were going home. The children were overjoyed, even though they no longer remembered Japan at all. The youngest, born in Lithuania, had never set foot on its soil.
But first they had to get through Russia. They drove for more than a month in the worst snow and cold before landing in Odessa, in a camp at minus 45 degrees Celsius. From then on, they were shuttled from one camp to another, until finally, in April 1947, they stepped aboard the Koan Maru.
When she saw Hakata Harbour, Yukiko was overcome by tears. The children could not believe it. They had seen so much that had happened to her, but they had never seen her cry before. Chiune was also shocked, not only because he was home again, but also because everyone was still alive.
But returning home also meant he had to report to the Foreign Ministry. His face gave nothing away, but he had not forgotten the visas he had issued en masse seven years earlier. Will the past finally catch up with him? He and Yukiko were silent, but they both hoped not.
But it is. Because of Lithuania, there was no longer a vacancy for him in the Ministry. The Foreign Minister asked him to resign himself. At the age of 47, in the midst of post-war shortages, Chiune did just that.
For the first time, Yukiko now had to take care of her family on her own, as there was no money for maids. They lived on the small pension her husband received and on what he earned selling light bulbs in people’s homes. He worked for a short time as a translator and a salesman before settling down in an American company. He never showed anyone how bad it was. Never.
One day in 1947, his youngest son Haruki came home from school and started telling his mother about heaven, how he didn’t want to grow up and how he would die in his childhood to go to heaven and become an angel. Yukiko immediately replied how sad she would be with her dad if he went, but he promised to come back if she called him.
A few days later, he returned home from school with a headache. Then his nose started bleeding. The doctor could not help him. Before morning, he was dead. Chiune Sugihara could only sit helplessly. His work in the Lithuanian city of Kaunas had cost him his career and his reputation. Now he has lost his son, born in that city.
Four years later, in 1951, Yukiko became pregnant again. She was convinced that the child would be the reincarnation of Haruki. A boy, Nobuki, meaning Long Life, was indeed born, but he grew up differently from his brothers.
Two years after her son’s death, Yukiko lost her sister Setsuko, who had been living with the family all along. She became depressed and increasingly lonely. After 1960 she was more or less alone because Chiune got a job in Moscow. For the next 16 years he returned to Japan only twice a year. In 1976 he retired and moved with his wife to a small house near the mountains.
Final satisfaction
He did not talk about the Second World War. He did not explain to anyone why he was having a good name, but his story did not remain hidden. In 1968, or 28 years after he left Lithuania, he received an unexpected call from the Israeli embassy to come around.
There was an elderly man waiting for him. Sugihari waved an old, dirty, and charred paper under his nose. Chiune recognised his visa. The elderly gentleman was Yehoshua Nishri, one of the five representatives with whom he had negotiated the visas.
Nishri explained to his Japanese rescuer that he had been trying to find him for years, but to no avail. The problem was the name. Since the Jewish refugees could not pronounce Chiune’s name, Sugihara told them to call him Sempo, and so Mr Nishri looked for Sampo Sugihara.
Not long afterwards, Chiun and Yukiko were invited to Israel. There they were met by Minister Zorach Warhaftig, once the head of the refugee representatives. “Our messenger from God,” he addressed Chiun.
In 1985, he was awarded the Righteous Among the Nations Medal, but was too weak to make the journey. In the same year, Japanese civil society formally apologised for its attitude towards him and awarded him the Nagasaki Peace Prize.
The public only found out about his story when a journalist visited Yukiko in 1989. During the interview, she burst into tears. It turned out that she too had survived because of Sugihara’s visa, only until then she had believed that her life had been saved by an organisation and not by a single man with a name and a face.
It is difficult to say exactly how many people Chiune Sugihara saved by his defiance, but it was around 6000. They then had about 40,000 descendants, who are today called Sugihara survivors.
Their saviour is no longer with them. He died on 30 July 1986, having once told his wife: ‘I did nothing special … I made my own decision, that’s all. I followed my conscience and listened to it.”
