Remembering a Hero : Japanese Savior of WWII Jews Is Honored Posthumously

For one frightening month in 1940, Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara handwrote transit visas day and night, allowing thousands of Polish Jews to flee advancing Nazi soldiers.

“He wrote and wrote--sometimes even refusing to take his meals,” Yukiko Sugihara, his widow, recalled Tuesday.

When the pain in his fingers forced the Japanese consul general in Lithuania to stop momentarily, she massaged his hands and reassured him: “You’re doing the right thing; we must help these people. They have nowhere to turn.”

In issuing 1,600 transit visas--in defiance of his government’s orders--Sugihara enabled an estimated 6,000 people to flee, because an entire family could travel with a single visa. The insubordination cost Sugihara his job, and the brilliant diplomat--whose dream was to become Japanese ambassador to Russia--had to go there as a businessman instead.

Nearly 55 years after those agonizing days and nine years after his death, members of Southern California’s Jewish and Japanese American communities are paying tribute to his 81-year-old widow at a dinner tonight at the New Otani hotel in Little Tokyo.

Since Jan. 15, when she took part in the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s ceremony remembering heroes of the Holocaust, Yukiko Sugihara has received many accolades on behalf of her husband, who died in 1986 at the age of 86.

“I wish my husband could have seen some of this while he was alive,” she said.

Then, she smiled and added, “He’s probably watching from heaven. He was a devout member of the Russian Orthodox Church.”

While studying Russian in Manchuria in the early 1920s, Sugihara had become a member of that church. His widow also is a member.

Last week she was honored by the California Legislature. On Thursday evening, an exhibition featuring rare photographs documenting the lifesaving efforts of her husband will be held at the Museum of Tolerance on the Westside.

Sugihara says she appreciates all the recognition her husband is receiving in the United States, but she would prefer that people not refer to him as “Japan’s Oskar Schindler.”

“My husband issued those visas in defiance of his government’s orders, because he was following his conscience,” she said, speaking in Japanese during an interview Tuesday at the New Otani.

Schindler, a German industrialist who saved more than 1,000 Jews by hiring them to work in his factories, was the subject of the much-acclaimed movie, “Schindler’s List.”

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Sugihara said her husband only wanted to help other human beings. His effort to save Jews during World War II was a family affair.

The couple’s talk about the plight of the Jews, lined up outside the consulate for a visa, led their oldest child, Hiroki, 5, to tell his father, “Daddy, please help them,” Sugihara said, even though he was too young to know why Jews were fleeing. “Help the children especially,” he urged, peeking out the window at the throng below.

Sugihara knew that the transit visas he issued would enable the refugees to travel through Japan, but not elsewhere. The only escape route for the refugees was by way of Lithuania and a long trek through Siberia. So Sugihara negotiated a deal with Soviet officials in Lithuania to honor his transit visas by issuing permits allowing the Jews to travel through the Soviet Union, said Hiroki Sugihara, who was at his mother’s side with his wife during the interview.

That way, Hiroki Sugihara said, the refugees could get to the eastern port city of Vladivostok in the Soviet Far East, from which they could travel to Japan, and then make their way to China or North America.

“People don’t know about this,” the son said. “My father was a tough and persuasive negotiator. When he pleaded with Russian consulate officials in his fluent Russian, they were simply too impressed to turn him down.”

Even after he closed the consulate in Lithuania and moved to a hotel, he continued to issue visas. When the family was leaving for Berlin, he issued visas on the train, and handed the documents out the window.

“I saw my father throwing papers (visas) to the people outside our train window,” Hiroki Sugihara said. “I heard people thanking him and saying, ‘We’ll meet again.’ ”

It was not until 1968 that a Jewish survivor came to visit the Sugiharas in Kamakura, Japan, and asked if there was anything he could do for them. When Sugihara mentioned that his youngest son was college-bound, the man arranged for a scholarship for his youngest son, Nobuki, to study at Hebrew University in Israel.

Over the years, the Sugiharas have heard from 50 survivors.

Recalling those searing events of more than half a century ago, Yukiko Sugihara said the pressure on her was so severe she could not nurse her 3-month-old son.

It took the Japanese government 52 years to acknowledge Sugihara’s heroic deed. But it has yet to apologize for forcing him to take a “voluntary retirement.”

“An apology is difficult for the Japanese government,” Hiroki Sugihara said. “So officials found a way to acknowledge my father’s deeds without saying, ‘I am sorry.’ My father led a very sad life after he was forced to resign from the government. It meant that he could not pursue his diplomatic career for which he had prepared himself.”

But residents of Gifu, Chiune Sugihara’s birthplace, honored him three years ago by dedicating the “Hill of Humanity” to him, his son said.

As for Yukiko Sugihara, she writes and teaches poetry in Kamakura, a scenic city south of Tokyo where she lives, to spread her message of peace and love.

“Peace is achieved when each of us keeps our hearts open,” she said. “Love can make a difference. Only love can overcome barriers.”