Chiune Sugihara, Japan Diplomat Who Saved 6,000 Jews During Holocaust

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/24/chiune-sugihara-japanese--jews-holocaust_n_2528666.html

Jaweed Kaleem
Posted: 01/24/2013 7:15 am EST | Updated: 01/26/2013

Most Americans know of Oskar Schindler, the German businessman who saved more than 1,200 lives during the Holocaust by hiring Jews to work in his factories and fought Nazi efforts to remove them.

But fewer know about Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese diplomat who disobeyed his government's orders and issued visas that allowed 6,000 Jews to escape from Nazi-occupied territories via Japan.

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Without him, many of the most accomplished minds of our world would not exist today. His legacy produced doctors, bankers, lawyers, authors, politicians, even the first Orthodox Jewish Rhodes Scholar," said Richard Salomon, a board member of the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center.

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Sugihara, who in 1940 became the Japanese consul general to Lithuania, an area where Polish Jewish refugees had relocated during World War II. As Nazis threatened to invade Lithuania, thousands of Jews surrounded the Japanese consulate and asked for visas to escape. Disobeying his bosses in Japan, Sugihara issued thousands. From July 31 to Aug. 28, 1940, Sugihara and his wife stayed up all night, writing visas.

The Japanese government closed the consulate, located in Kovno. But even as Sugihara's train was about to leave the city, he kept writing visas from his open window. When the train began moving, he gave the visa stamp to a refugee to continue the job.

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The group has documented 2,139 Sugihara visas (many were for entire families). It's unknown exactly how many people can trace their ancestry to a Sugihara survivor, though Akabori's organization estimated it to be more than 100,000. More conservatively, the Simon Wiesenthal Center has estimated that 40,000 people are alive today because of the Sugiharas.

Salomon's son, Mark Salomon, a 23-year-old law student at New York University, said knowing that his family would not have existed without Sugihara has ingrained a lifelong lesson in him about the "power of an individual."

"Most people have this idea that you can't really help the whole world, so what's the point?" said Mark Salomon. But Sugihara showed that "whatever you are doing with yourself, you are having a much broader impact. Sometimes it's hard to see the forest through the trees, but it's important in every aspect of your life to remember you are having an effect and to make it a positive effect."