The quiet hero: how Japan’s Schindler saved 6,000 Jews

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/04/chiune-sugihara-my-father-japanese-schindler-saved-6000-jews-lithuania

Jennifer Rankin
Sat 4 Jan 2020 16.04 EST

As a child in Japan in the 1950s and 60s, Nobuki Sugihara never knew his father had saved thousands of lives. Few did. His father, Chiune Sugihara, was a trader who lived in a small coastal town about 34 miles south of Tokyo. When not on business trips to Moscow, he coached his young son in mathematics and English. He made breakfast, spreading butter on the toast so thinly “nobody could compete”.

His son had no idea his father saved 6,000 Jews during the second world war. Over six weeks in the summer of 1940, while serving as a diplomat in Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara defied orders from his bosses in Tokyo, and issued several thousand visas for Jewish refugees to travel to Japan.

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Now the life and legacy of his father will be celebrated in Lithuania, 80 years after he issued “visas for life” to refugees who sought his help. Lithuania’s government has declared 2020 “the year of Chiune Sugihara”: an official programme promises an exhibition of photographs in Lithuania’s parliament, as well as concerts, conferences, films, postage stamps and a monument erected in Kaunas, Lithuania’s former capital, where Sugihara was posted in 1939. It is all part of the burgeoning memorialisation of Sugihara, who in 1984, two years before he died, was declared “righteous among the nations” by Yad Vashem, the Israeli state organisation that commemorates the Holocaust.

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Beyond the record of 2,139 names Sugihara filed belatedly to Tokyo months after issuing visas, there is no certainty over how many lives were saved. The estimate of 6,000 comes from assuming each holder of a transit visa travelled with two other people, a wife and child. Other researchers have suggested that 10,000 people were saved.

In an undated letter to a Polish scholar written after the war, Sugihara said 3,500 people might have benefited from his visas. “The actual numbers nobody knows,” said his son.