Chiune Sugihara: Unsung Hero of the Holocaust

The Holocaust, a point in time in which millions of people were murdered due to one man’s philosophy (if you can even call it that). However, handfuls of people resented this situation, going out of their way to help victims of this time. Their bravery was often met with consequences, normally death, however some prevailed. Among these people is a man named Chiune Sugihara.

Sugihara saved thousands of people during that desolate time period and due to that he is and always will be considered a hero of the holocaust.

Chiune Sugihara was born in Gifu Prefecture of Honshu Island, A bit north of Nagoya, ion January first 1900. He had graduated from Harbin Gakuen, a training center for experts on the Soviet Union and eventually negotiated the purchase of the North Manchurian Railroad in 1932. Because of his fluency in Russian, Japan sent him to the Lithuanian capital of Kuanas (which at the time was only the temporary capital). Sugihara had just managed to settle in when Hitler’s army had begun its invasion of Poland.

Due to this invasion many Jewish refugees from Poland started flooding into Lithuania. While socializing with the refugees, they had told Sugihara

of the cruelties that the Germans had done to the people of said religion. Many of the Jewish Lithuanian citizens had helped the refugees with money, clothing and shelter however they never quite believed the tales the Polish Jews had told them. That all changed on June fifteenth, 1940. The Soviets had invaded Lithuania, none of the Jewish Lithuanians were able to leave, however the Polish refugees were able to continue emigrating out of Lithuania as long as they had the necessary documents.
In the July of 1940, the Soviet Union requested that all of the foreign ambassadors and diplomats leave Lithuania. Most had left immediately, however Sugihara had requested a twenty day extension, which he received. By this time everyone had left except Chiune Sugihara and the Dutch consul Jan Zwartendijk. As Hitler’s grasp on Europe tightened, the refugees’ time was running out. The Polish refugees managed to come up with a plan. At this time the two Dutch colonies of Curacao and Suriname (at the time was called Dutch Guiana) did not require formal visas. Zwartendijk had permission to stamp their passports, but they also needed the permission of the Soviet consul. Fortunately he felt sympathetic for them and would allow them to pass if they were able to get permission from the Japanese. Sugihara could not just allow them transit visas without permission first, so he had wired his government three times and all three times he was denied.
Sugihara then decided that it was time to take things into his own hands.

He had discussed the situation with his wife Yukiko as well as his children. Knowing that he could potentially lose his job and well as all respect, he finally made his decision to sign the visas. From July thirty-first to August twenty-eighth, Sugihara and his wife spent many countless hours signing the visas by hand. They managed to write around three hundred visas every day (for an example of sorts, three hundred was around the total amount a consul would do in a month) and he didn’t even stop to eat. Even on his train for Berlin he had continued giving out as many visas as he could, throwing them out of his train window. Before leaving, he gave the consul stamp to another refugee who then used it to save many more Jewish

people.
In the end, as many as six thousand Jewish refugees had made it to Japan and China, as well as other countries. Due to his disobedience, the Japanese government had dismissed him of his service. For a while he could only find a job as a part-time translator and for the last two decades of his life, he worked as a manager for a business in Moscow. So yes, he was a holocaust hero. And he will always be remembered for saving thousands of refugees.