10,000 Acts of Kindness

Hanni Vogelweid of Huntington Beach doesn’t remember seeing Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese diplomat who provided her family with transit visas so they could leave Lithuania in early 1941. But she’ll never forget what Sugihara did.

She’s alive because of him.

Vogelweid, a 73-year-old German-born Jew, is one of as many as 10,000 who received transit visas from a man who risked his own life to help Jews avoid the Holocaust.

As Japan’s vice consul in Lithuania, Sugihara used a combination of strategy and subterfuge to stretch his government’s policy for issuing visas during the chaotic days between the Soviet annexation of Lithuania and Nazi occupation.

As word of Sugihara’s actions spread, hundreds of desperate Jews, most of them Polish refugees who had fled their German-occupied homeland, thronged outside the Japanese Consulate in Lithuania’s capital city of Kaunas each day. Vogelweid, the then-17-year-old daughter of Moritz Sondheimer, a German factory owner in Kaunas, was among the mob.

Sugihara--and others under his direction inside the consulate--issued transit visas at a furious pace for 20 days in August 1940. Even after the 40-year-old Japanese diplomat was reassigned to Prague, Czechoslovakia, and then to the Baltic Sea port of Konigsberg, he continued issuing visas to Jews.

Sugihara, who died at age 86 in 1986, has come to be known as “Japan’s Oskar Schindler.”

But unlike Schindler, the Nazi industrialist who initially profited from exploiting the Jewish factory workers whose lives he saved, Sugihara was never motivated by personal gain.

So what spurred Sugihara’s supreme act of moral courage?

Why was a Japanese consulate established in Lithuania, an eastern European backwater, for the first time in September 1939?

Why did the Japanese government recognize Sugihara’s torrent of transit visas?

Those are some of the questions author Hillel Levine asked when he began researching the life and times of the elusive Japanese diplomat, whose story was virtually unknown in his own country for four decades.

Levine’s new book, “In Search of Sugihara” (The Free Press; $25), sheds new light on the Japanese man honored by Israel in 1985 with its Yad Vashem Prize for Righteous Gentiles.

Levine will discuss his “investigation into the mystery of goodness” at 7 p.m. Sunday at the Jewish Community Center of Orange County, 250 E. Baker St., Costa Mesa. He also will speak at the Community Jewish Relations Council in Los Angeles and at UCLA on Monday. A Brookline, Mass., professor of sociology and religion, Levine is the first historian to examine in detail the story of Sugihara and analyze it based on documentary evidence--a paper trail that took Levine to foreign ministry and spy agency archives around the world.

It was in the Nazi archives in Germany that Levine confirmed what he suspected was the reason Sugihara was sent to Lithuania in 1939: Sugihara was a spy for the Japanese army and foreign ministry.

A Soviet expert fluent in Russian and experienced in spy work from his years serving in Manchuria, Sugihara was sent to Lithuania to monitor Soviet and Nazi troop movement on Lithuania’s German and Russian borders in the days before Japan’s alliance with Germany and Italy.

As a spy, Sugihara was naturally spied upon--by the Gestapo and other Nazi intelligence agencies, Levine says.

“They wrote in great detail about what he was up to, but no one bothered to write anything about his rescue effort on behalf of the Jews,” Levine says. “It wasn’t of interest to anyone. They wrote about his conversation with the Italian ambassador, about his personal life, but nothing about this great public act.”

The reason, Levine says, is that at that point the thrust of Nazi policy was largely to get rid of Jews--”to scare them, kill a few, to make life miserable for them, to get Jews out of Europe. They didn’t care that he was helping get rid of Jews.”

And the implications of that are immense, Levine says.

It means, he says, that as late as 1940 and early 1941 there were enormous opportunities to save Jews if there had been more people like Sugihara: If one man was responsible for the rescue of 10,000 people, what if there had been a hundred like him?

“That’s what haunts me all the time,” says Levine, 50, a fourth-generation Jewish American. “Sugihara proved that the Holocaust could have been stopped up to the last moment had there been more Sugiharas.”

*

Various accounts of the Sugihara story say that three times he defied orders from his government telling him not to issue visas to Jews.

But Levine found no documentation showing that Sugihara sent urgent cables asking governmental permission to issue the visas and nothing to show that the Japanese government ordered him not to accommodate the Jews.

In fact, Levine says, the Japanese government “had positive feelings about helping Jews because they saw usefulness in the possibility of having Jews settle in Manchuria. They also thought that by rescuing Jews, they would make a positive impression on America, so there were positive sentiments in the Japanese government for what he was doing.”

Levine says, however, that Sugihara was unaware of such policies. As far as Sugihara knew, he could be punished for what he was doing.

If not directly defying government orders to stop issuing visas to Jews, Sugihara was clearly stretching the rules. Many of the Jews he helped had no travel documents or final destinations.

Other Japanese diplomats in Europe were also issuing transit visas to Jews in 1940, but they were doing so only to Jews who had the proper paperwork.

The fact that the Japanese government was amenable to rescuing Jews doesn’t lessen the risks Sugihara took in issuing the visas, Levine says.

In the chaotic weeks after the Soviets took over Lithuania, Sugihara’s diplomatic immunity wasn’t worth much--he might easily have been killed by the Soviets, Levine says.

“He also knew he was being sent to Nazi Germany from there, and for all he knew he could have gotten in trouble with the Nazis,” Levine says. “Drawing any attention to your activities like having a thousand people waiting in line at your building does not increase your security.”

When Sugihara finally returned to Japan in 1947, he lost his job as a diplomat. His widow, Yukiko, has said it was because of his insubordination in Lithuania. But the Japanese Foreign Ministry has denied any connection and says Sugihara was laid off because of Allied orders to streamline the government. Levine finds the Foreign Ministry version of the story convincing.

“If there were any objections to what he had done in Lithuania, he would not have been fired seven years later,” he says.

Sugihara, who received full retirement benefits, nevertheless was reduced to peddling light bulbs and taking other jobs, such as that of a translator for international radio broadcasts. In 1960, he moved to Moscow, where he worked for a trading firm for the next 15 years.

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The Israeli government and many scholars credit Sugihara with saving the lives of anywhere from 2,000 to 6,000 Jews (an entire family could travel on one visa).

Levine puts the number even higher.

While going through the archives of the Japanese Foreign Ministry in Tokyo, Levine found a list of 2,139 names of Jews who had been issued visas by Sugihara. After Sugihara left Lithuania, he compiled the list at the request of the Japanese foreign minister.

But that list is incomplete, says Levine. He also found shorter lists of Jews Sugihara issued visas to in Prague and Konisberg.

And there were untold numbers of forged visas made with official visa stamps Sugihara left behind in Lithuania. Sugihara should be credited for the forgeries as well, says Levine. He estimates that at least 10,000 Jews were helped by Sugihara.

Levine believes, however, that no more than half of those who received visas from Sugihara survived the war.

Not everyone may have used their visas, he says. Some may have feared winding up in Siberia if they tried to use them. Many simply didn’t have the money to pay for passage through Russia--a two-week train trip to the eastern port of Vladivostok, where they would board a ship bound for Japan and, they hoped, continue on to America, Palestine, England or Latin America.

Vogelweid, her mother, father and younger brother Karl weren’t able to leave Lithuania until February 1941--six months after Sugihara issued their visa and only four months before the German army stormed into the country.

Her father had lost his comb and button factory, and all their bank accounts were frozen when the Russians invaded Lithuania the previous summer. They had to wait for relatives in the United States to send them the paperwork that would allow them to enter the United States and the money--$800--they would need to travel to Japan.

Like many of the Jews who reached Japan, however, Vogelweid and her family were unable to proceed to the United States. By then, she says, America was no longer taking in refugees.

When their transit visas expired after six months, they were sent to the Japanese-occupied section of Shanghai, China.

They spent most of the war living in a small, bug-infested room with no kitchen, no toilet. Japanese soldiers guarded the refugee ghetto, and its inhabitants had to adhere to a curfew. Vogelweid, who was allowed outside the ghetto during the day to work in a weaving factory, says many refugees died of typhoid.

But no matter how bad the living conditions in Shanghai were, they were preferable to what Vogelweid and her family would have endured had they stayed in Lithuania. Jews who remained in Lithuania when the Germans arrived in June 1941 were either killed immediately or sent to concentration camps.

After the war ended, Vogelweid married a U.S. Army officer she met in Shanghai. She and her husband arrived in the United States aboard a troop carrier in 1946. They had one child, a daughter, before they divorced in 1952.

Vogelweid’s mother, father and brother arrived in the United States in 1947, settling with her mother’s sister in Hollywood.

Vogelweid, who worked as a switchboard operator and later office manager for a Los Angeles warehouse and trucking company, moved to Orange County in 1977. She then worked in the billing department of an Irvine manufacturing company.

She and Lloyd Vogelweid, her husband of 39 years, now live in a comfortable retirement community in Huntington Beach.

From time to time, Vogelweid takes out some of the souvenirs she has kept from the war years--documents that allowed her to get in and out of the ghetto in Shanghai for work. The identification badge she had to wear. And the German passport with the red J, for “Jew,” stamped on the front page--and inside, the transit visa stamped by Sugihara.

Last year, when Sugihara’s widow, Yukiko, was honored at a banquet hosted by various Jewish and Japanese organizations in Los Angeles, Vogelweid was invited to sit next to the guest of honor. Vogelweid was accompanied by another survivor: her 97-year-old mother, Setty, who has since died.

Though neither spoke Japanese, Vogelweid and her mother were able to talk to Yukiko Sugihara in a common language: German.

“I gave her flowers and kissed her hands. I told her, ‘The whole family survived because of your husband.’ ”

*

In setting out on his search for Sugihara, Levine says he tried to discover “the nature of goodness.”

“There’s lots of that in the world,” he says. “Most of the Holocaust has been focused on the mystery of evil and destructiveness: What makes ordinary people who are kind to their wives and children and who may be religious and go to church--what makes them mass murderers?”

What Levine did was try to flip this question on its head and ask, “What makes this man a mass rescuer?”

Quoting a favorite saying of rabbis, Levine says, “the question is better than the answer.”

Sugihara himself provided his own answer in an interview a year before his death: “I had to do something. Those people told me the kind of horror they would have to face if they didn’t get away from the Nazis, and I believed them.”

Says Levine: “That’s not a profound philosophical statement. It’s a simple statement of human goodness.”