Chiune Sugihara was born on 1 January 1900 in Yaotsu, a village in Gifu Prefecture in Japan. He studied Russian, and that language took him somewhere unexpected: into the Japanese diplomatic service's work on the Soviet Union. By 1939 he was a vice consul, and in that year he was posted to Kaunas, in Lithuania.
The timing was the whole story. In September 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union divided Poland between them. Polish Jews fled south and east into Lithuania, which was still independent. Then, in June 1940, the Soviet Union annexed Lithuania. Every foreign mission in Kaunas was ordered to close. Several thousand people holding Polish passports were now trapped in a country that had ceased to exist as a state, with no legal route out.
To leave, they needed somewhere to go on paper. The route east, across the Soviet Union, required a destination visa.
In Kaunas there was a Dutch honorary consul named Jan Zwartendijk, who was in ordinary life an executive for Philips and held a diplomatic stamp as a sideline. He began stamping a declaration into passports stating that no visa was required to enter Curacao, a Dutch colony in the Caribbean. It was not a workable route in practice. It was a real destination on paper, and on paper was enough to satisfy a Soviet transit clerk.
That solved half the problem. The other half was Japan. Crossing the Soviet Union required a Japanese transit visa, and those were issued by the Japanese consulate — by Sugihara.
He cabled Tokyo three times asking permission to issue transit visas to people who had no money and no proper documentation. Tokyo refused all three times. The reasoning was procedural: applicants must have sufficient funds for the journey and must follow the standard process.
He issued the visas anyway.
From late July 1940, he and his wife Yukiko sat and wrote. Visa after visa, by hand, roughly two hundred to three hundred a day. He did not turn away people who could not pay, and he did not apply the funding rule. The consulate's surviving visa list contains nearly 2,140 names.
That number is a floor, not a total. A visa was issued to the head of a household and covered the family members named in the passport, and some visas were issued without being recorded at all. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre's estimate of the number of people who escaped using these documents is around 6,000, and some accounts put it higher. Close to 4,000 are thought to have actually travelled on the recorded visas.
In early September 1940 the consulate was shut and Sugihara had to leave his post. He kept writing until the last moment. By the accounts of people who were there, he was still handing completed visas to people on the platform as his train pulled out of the station.
The people holding those papers travelled the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok, took a ship to Tsuruga in Japan, and fanned out from there — some into the Hongkou district of Shanghai, others onward to the United States, Canada, Palestine, Australia, Latin America.
After the war his reward was dismissal. The foreign service let him go in 1947. He spent years in work far below his training, selling light bulbs door to door and working at an American military post exchange, and lived modestly for the rest of his life. He said afterward that he had done it because it was the only thing he could do, and that a hunter cannot refuse a bird that flies to him for refuge.
In 1985, Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial authority, named him Righteous Among the Nations. He was extremely ill by then and could not travel, so his wife and one of his sons went to receive the honour in his place. He died on 31 July 1986.
The thing to notice is what the rescue was actually made of. Not an army, not a network, not a budget. Paper. Some two thousand pieces of paper, each with a name written on it by hand, because writing a name into a document was the one power he held. The entire intervention was an act of recording.
And the record is, by its nature, incomplete in the direction of more. Every visa he issued without writing it down is a person who got out and is counted nowhere. The true number cannot be recovered, because the true number is larger than the record.
He also had no idea who he was writing for. He was writing for people he would never meet, in a language he did not speak, for a future he would not live to see. Roughly two thousand names sit in an archive. The people behind those names, and their descendants, are estimated in the tens of thousands. Most of them have never heard of the man who wrote their grandparents onto a page.
https://3026alive.com