Sempo Sugihara saved about 6-10,000 Jews during the Holocaust. He was guided by his sense of morals and did what he thought what was right. Even when his country's government said otherwise, Sugihara continued to help send Jews far away from the Nazis of World War II Europe. Sugihara acted on his own account. There is no proof that any economic incentive was given or that he took pleasure in danger. Chiune, his nickname, means a thousand lives.
Sempo Sugihara of Japan explained, 45 years after the Soviet invasion of Lithuania, the reasons he had for issuing visas to the Jews:
You want to know about my motivation, don't you? Well. It is the kind of sentiments anyone would have when he actually sees refugees face to face, begging with tears in their eyes. He just cannot help but sympathize with them. Among the refugees were the elderly and women. They were so desperate that they went so far as to kiss my shoes, Yes, I actually witnessed such scenes with my own eyes.
People in Tokyo were not united. I felt it silly to deal with them. So, I made up my mind not to wait for their reply. I knew that somebody would surely complain about me in the future. But, I myself thought this would be the right thing to do. There is nothing wrong in saving many people's lives....The spirit of humanity, philanthropy...neighborly friendship...with this spirit, I ventured to do what I did, confronting this most difficult situation—and because of this reason, I went ahead with redoubled courage.
His wife Yukiko Sugihara also urged Chiune to issue visas to save Jewish refugees because she was inspired by “Lamentations,” a book in the Old Testament.
Sempo Sugihara studied at Waseda University in 1918 and majored in English language. At that time, he entered Yuai Gakusha, the Christian fraternity. In 1919, he passed the Foreign Ministry Scholarship exam and the Japanese Foreign Ministry recruited him and assigned him in 1924 to Harbin, China, where he also studied the Russian and German languages and later became an expert on Russian affairs.
In 1932, he became Deputy Consul of the Manchurian Government Foreign Ministry but quit his post as in protest over Japanese mistreatment of the local Chinese. While in Harbin, he converted to Orthodox Christianity as “Pavlo Sergeivich Sugihara.” He returned to Japan in 1935 and married Yukiko Kikuchi, and they had four sons (Hiroki, Chiaki, Haruki, Nobuki). In 1937, he became translator for the Japanese legation in Helsinki, Finland.
In March of the year 1939, Chiune Sugihara was sent to Kaunas (Kovno) to open a consular service as Japan's vice-consul. There, he could be found handling travel documents and commercial contacts. Kaunas was the temporary capital of Lithuania at that moment, a strategic point between the Soviet Union and Germany.
As part of his job, he monitored the maneuvers of the German Army across the border, so that Japanese headquarters would know in advance of the anticipated German attack on the Soviet Union.
Sugihara had barely settled down in his new post when the Nazi army invaded Poland and a wave of Jewish refugees fled towards Lithuania. They carried with them chilling stories about German atrocities perpetrated against the Jewish population.
Polish Jewish refugees of the famed Yeshiva Academy in Lithuania, who were Dutch nationals, were trapped. They should have been able to travel back to safety in the Netherlands, but this was not possible. No route could be found through the warzone, and passage through the anti-Semitic German allies was impossible. So the Dutch Ambassador, with the cooperation of the Dutch Consul and a leader of the Mizrahi Religious Zionist Movement, thought about other route possibilities.
They discovered that two Dutch colonies in the Caribbean, the islands of Curacao and the Dutch Guyana (Surinam), didn’t demand strict visas to enter their countries. Furthermore, the Dutch Consul informed them that he had been granted an authorization to seal their passports with entrance permits.
In order to reach these islands, however, refugees had to go across the Soviet Union. Hence, apart from the Dutch entrance permit, they had to get a transit visa from the Japanese consulate which would get them permission to cross the Soviet Union to reach Japan and from there reach the Dutch colonies.
On July of the year 1940, Lithuania was annexed to the Soviet Union and all foreign embassies were ordered to abandon Kaunas by the end of August. Most of them obeyed immediately. Instead, Sugihara managed to extend his stay for another three weeks. With the exception of the Dutch Honorary Consul, Jan Zwartendijk, Chiune Sugihara now was the only foreign consul that remained in the capital of Lithuania.
Picture above is of the former Japanese consulate in Kaunas, now a museum in honor of Chiune Sugihara.
As Sugihara was packing his belongings, he was informed that a Jewish delegation was waiting in front of his consulate, asking to see him. The delegation was headed by Zerach Warhaftig – a Jewish refugee who was to become years later a minister in the government of the State of Israel. Sugihara agreed to meet with the delegation for a brief conversation. The Jewish delegation had come with a desperate request.
At the time, the Japanese government required that transit visas be issued only to those who had gone through appropriate immigration procedures by showing visas for the country of final destination and had enough funds. Most of the refugees did not fulfill these criteria.
Sugihara dutifully contacted the Japanese Foreign Ministry three times for authorization to issue visas. Each time, the Ministry responded that anybody granted a visa should have a visa to a third destination to exit Japan, with no exceptions.
He talked this matter over with his wife and children. He had to make a difficult decision. He had been educated under the strict and traditional Japanese discipline. On one hand, he was limited by obedience. On the other, he had to help the needy. He knew that if he defied the orders given to him by his superiors he could be discharged and dishonored and probably could never again work for his government. This would have a repercussion on his economic situation and on his family’s honor.
He was afraid for his wife Yukiko and for his children’s lives, but he finally obeyed what his conscience commanded. Given his inferior post and the culture of the Japanese Foreign Service bureaucracy, this was an extraordinary act of disobedience.
Aware that applicants were in danger if they stayed behind, Sugihara ignored the requirements and began to grant a ten-day visa to transit through Japan on his own initiative, after consulting with his family, and after having established that the USSR would also issue transit visas if Japanese ones were issued first. Other Jews found out about the plans and applied for visas, too. They were accepted by Sugihara and were authorized to enter Japan for up to fifteen days to find a home.
During twenty nine days, from the 31st. of July to the 28th. of August of 1940, Sempo and Yukiko Sugihara spent endless hours writing out and signing visas by hand. More than 300 visas a day, an amount that normally meant a whole month of work for the whole consulate. Without even stopping to eat, Sugihara decided not to lose a single minute, reportedly spending 18–20 hours a day. Towards the end he got very tired, but fortunately he had a strong stamina.
People waited for their transit permits standing in line, day and night. Hundreds of applicants became thousands. Sugihara worked around the clock; he knew that in no time he would be forced to shut down the consulate and abandon Lithuania. By that time he had granted thousands of visas to Jews, many of whom were heads of households and thus permitted to take their families with them. On the night before their scheduled departure, Sugihara and his wife stayed awake writing out visa approvals.
He also enlisted the help of some of the Jews to stamp the passports. With no knowledge of Japanese, some of the stamps were put in upside down. While all this was going on, Sugihara was receiving dispatches from Tokyo warning him against issuing visas without due process.
According to witnesses, he was still writing visas while in transit from his hotel and after boarding the train to take him from Kovno to Berlin at the Kaunas Railway Station, on the 1st. of September 1940. When he was on the train, people threw their passports to him as he stamped them and tossed them back.
In final desperation, blank sheets of paper with only the consulate seal and his signature (that could be later written over into a visa) were hurriedly prepared and flung out from the train. As he prepared to depart, he said, “please forgive me. I cannot write anymore. I wish you the best.” When he bowed deeply to the people before him, someone exclaimed, “Sugihara. We’ll never forget you. I’ll surely see you again!”
Sugihara himself wondered about official reaction to the thousands of visas he issued. Many years later, he recalled, "No one ever said anything about it. I remember thinking that they probably didn't realize how many I actually issued."
The total number of Jews saved by Sugihara is in dispute, estimating about 6-10,000; family visas—which allowed several people to travel on one visa—were also issued, which would account for the much higher figure. Around 40,000 descendants of the Jewish refugees are alive today because of his actions
Moreover, there were also "some Jesuits in Vilna who were issuing Sugihara visas with seals that he had left behind and did not destroy, long after the Japanese diplomat had departed" which means that some Jews could have escaped Europe with forged visas issued under Sugihara's name.
Zorah Warhaftig, the head of the local Palestine Office for Polish Refugees, helped the refugees in the final step of the emigration process: applying for Soviet exit permits. Sempo Sugihara also spoke to Soviet officials who agreed to let the Jews travel through the country via the Trans-Siberian Railway at five times the standard ticket price.
Many refugees used their visas to travel across the Soviet Union to Vladivostok and then by boat to Kobe, Japan, where there was a Russian Jewish community. The first group of Jewish refugees arrived in October 1940. The residents of Kobe were friendly and helpful to the refugees. There are many stories about the generosity of the good people of Kobe. From October 1940 to August 1941, 3,489 Jewish refugees entered Japan.
The man charged with organizing their reception in Japan was the Polish ambassador in Tokyo, Tadeusz Romer. He organized a relief committee, which raised funds from the local Polish and Jewish communities and also from Jewish organizations in America, and found accommodations in Kobe.
One day a serious problem occurred as thirty people arrived in Tsuruga from Nakhodka with forged visas, all using the same name "Jakub Goldberg" written in the Japanese phonetic "katakana" syllabary. The Japanese were furious, and sent them back to Nakhodka, where they could not disembark as they no longer had Soviet entry visas. For several weeks they sailed to and fro, until Romer finally got the Japanese authorities to allow them to land on condition that they would leave Japan within three weeks, which he arranged with the help of the Dutch and American ambassadors.
From August 1940 to November 1941, Romer managed to get asylum visas to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Burma, immigration certificates to the British Mandate of Palestine, and immigrant visas to the United States and some Latin American countries for more than two thousand Polish-Lithuanian Jewish refugees, who arrived into Kobe, Japan, and Shanghai Ghetto, China.
In the spring of 1941, the Japanese authorities tried to stop Jewish refugees from entering Japan. However, over 500 Jews managed to enter between April and August. The remaining number of Sugihara survivors stayed in Japan until the summer of 1941 when the Japanese transferred the refugees, about 1,000 of them, to Japanese-held Shanghai, where there was already a large Jewish community, and where they stayed for the rest of the war.
Other refugees took a more southerly route through Korea directly to Shanghai without passing through Japan. Most of the around 20,000 Jews survived the Holocaust in the Shanghai ghetto until the Japanese surrender in 1945.
Despite German pressure for the Japanese government to either hand over or kill the Jewish refugees, the government protected the group. One hypothesis is that the Japanese decision was in gratitude for a $196 million loan that a Jewish banker from New York, Jacob Schiff, had given to Japan; the funds helped them to victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905.
A broader hypothesis involved the benefit of the supposed economic prowess to Jews (partly as some Japanese leaders had read anti-Semitic tracts attributing uncanny wealth and power to Jews), which was desirable to the Japanese empire. Finally, Jewish leaders pointed out that the Nazi ideal excluded "the yellow", and asserted that like the Japanese, the Jews were from Asia too.
Sugihara served in 1940 as Japanese Consul to Czechoslovakia, via Berlin, from March 1941 to late 1942 he served in Königsberg, East Prussia and then was in the legation in Bucharest, Romania from 1942 to 1944. When Soviet troops entered Romania, they imprisoned Sugihara and his family in a POW camp for eighteen months. They were released in 1946 and returned to Japan through the Soviet Union via the Trans-Siberian railroad and Nakhodka port.
When Sugihara returned to Japan in 1947, he was asked to resign, nominally due to downsizing, and his name was stricken from the roll of Foreign Service Officials. Some sources, including his wife Yukiko Sugihara, have said that the Foreign Ministry told Sugihara he was dismissed because of "that incident" in Lithuania.
Sugihara settled in Fujisawa in Kanagawa prefecture. Sugihara was seen as a "rule-breaker" by his peers, and he had a tough time living in occupied Japan. To support his family, he first only found a half-day job as translator and interpreter, and took a series of menial jobs, at one point selling light bulbs door to door.
He later began to work for an export company as General Manager of the U.S. Military Post Exchange. Utilizing his command of the Russian language, Sugihara went on to work in Moscow as a manager of an export company and live a low-key existence in the Soviet Union for sixteen years, while his family stayed in Japan.
In 1968, Jehoshua Nishri, an economic attaché to the Israeli Embassy in Tokyo and one of the Sugihara beneficiaries, finally located and contacted him. Nishri had been a Polish teen in the 1940s. The next year Sugihara visited Israel and was greeted by the Israeli government. Sugihara beneficiaries began to lobby for his inclusion in the Yad Vashem memorial.
In 1985, Chiune Sugihara was granted the honor of the Righteous Among the Nations in recognition of his noble acts by the Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Israel. Sugihara was too ill to travel to Israel, so his wife and son accepted the honor on his behalf. Sugihara and his descendants were given perpetual Israeli citizenship.
Sugihara died at the age of 86 at a hospital in Kamakura, on 31 July 1986. In spite of the publicity given him in Israel and other nations, he remained virtually unknown in his home country. Only when a large Jewish delegation from around the world, including the Israeli ambassador to Japan, showed up at his funeral did his neighbors find out what he had done.
The Japanese Foreign Ministry issued a position paper on 24 March 2006, that there was no evidence the Ministry imposed disciplinary action on Sugihara. The ministry praised Sugihara's conduct in the report, calling it a "courageous and humanitarian decision." Today he is considered a hero in Japan.
There have been several memorials established for Chiune Sugihara.
Chiune Sugihara memorial in Vilnius, Lithuania.
The Chiune Sugihara Memorial in the town of Yaotsu (his birthplace) was built in 1991-1993 by the people of the town in his honor. The "Hill Of Humanity" memorial park consists of 4 different zones, including a monument of peace and a lawn area. Sugiura Chiune Memorial Museum, which is located within the park, gives the history of his achievement and expresses the importance of peace.
The symbol of the park is the monument for "World Peace," meant to convey the message of peace sent by the people of Yaotsu to the people of Japan and the world. The monument resembles a pipe organ with 160 pipes, and it is run by computer software that control the water fountain, the lightening and the music. Every hour, the monument rises to life with a dazzling performance of all combined. The musical pieces were written especially for the monument and they are called "A Prayer for Peace.”
There is also one final monument to Sugihara, the Bells of Peace. Shaped to resemble the piles of visas Sugihara issued and inscribed with the words love, courage and heart, with every ring visitors can manifest their wish of sending those principles out to the world.
In April of 2000, a memorial garden to Chiune Sugihara was dedicated on the grounds of the Conservative synagogue Temple Emeth in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. Temple Emeth congregant Samuil Manski, one of those rescued by Sugihara, was instrumental in the memorial’s planning and implementation. Sugihara’s image is sketched on the stone monument, and a testimonial to his brave deeds is written in English, Hebrew and Japanese. The Sugihara Memorial Committee, composed of Temple Emeth members and the Boston area’s Japanese community, organizes an annual concert to honor Chiune Sugihara.
When Sugihara's widow Yukiko traveled to Jerusalem in 1998, she was met by tearful survivors who showed her the yellowing visas that her husband had signed. A park in Jerusalem is named for him. The Japanese government honored him on the centennial of his birth in 2000.
Chiune Sugihara Park in Vilnius Lithuania with Japanese blossems.
Sugihara's widow with Lithuania's then president Valdas Adamkus at a tree planting ceremony in Vilnius, Lithuania in 2001.
A memorial to Sugihara was built in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo in 2002, and dedicated with the presence of the consuls from Japan, Israel and Lithuania, Los Angeles city officials and Sugihara's son, Chiaki Sugihara, in attendance. The memorial, entitled "Chiune Sugihara Memorial, Hero of the Holocaust" depicts a life-size Sugihara seated on a bench, holding a visa in his hand and is accompanied by a quote from the Talmud: "He who saves one life, saves the entire world."
A solemn dedication ceremony was held at Waseda University on October 24, 2011 marking the 25th year since the passing of Sugihara Chiune, a former Waseda alumnus. In commemoration of the occasion and in remembrance of his actions, a monument stone depicting Sugihara’s visage in bronze relief was unveiled on the lawn.
A host of foreign dignitaries, as well as representatives from the Japanese government and notable leaders from the business world were among those in attendance during the event. Attendees included Waseda University President Kaoru Kamata; representing Israel were Matan Vilnai, Minister for Home Front Defense of Israel, and Nissim Beng Shitrit, Ambassador of Israel to Japan; Dr. Jadwiga Rodowica-Czechowska, the Ambassador of Poland; Dr. Albertas Aligirdas Dambrauskas, Minister Plenipotentiary of the Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania in Japan; distinguished members of the Japanese parliament; family and relatives of Sugihara Chiune; members of the Sugihara Chiune Inochi no Visa (“Visas of Life”) Organization; and the Tomon Sugihara Chiune Kensho-kai (Alumni Association Honoring Sugihara Chiune) which was established by members of the Waseda University Alumni Association.
There is also Sugihara Street in Kaunas and Vilnius, Lithuania, and the asteroid 25893 Sugihara was named after him. There is also the Sugihara House Museum in Kaunas, Lithuania.
He was posthumously awarded the Commander's Cross with Star of the Polish Order of Polonia Restituta in 2007, and the Commander's Cross Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland by the President of Poland in 1996. Also, in 1993, the Life Saving Cross of Lithuania, posthumously.
Further Reading:
The remarkable Recha and Yitzchak Sternbuch: they fought from Switzerland to save Jews in WWII
Abdol Hossein Sardari was an Iranian diplomat who saved Jewish lives during WWII
