The Visas of Chiune Sugihara

Early one morning in late July 1940, Chiune Sugihara looked out of a window of his house in Kaunas, Lithuania, and saw a crowd at the gate.

There were men in dark coats, women holding small children, students, rabbis and old people. More were arriving all the time. They pressed against the iron railings and waited, quietly, for the Japanese consulate to open.

Sugihara was the consul. He was forty years old, a careful, hard-working diplomat with a wife, Yukiko, and young sons. His office was also his family's home.

A door closing across Europe

The people at the gate were mostly Jewish refugees from Poland. When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, thousands had fled east into Lithuania. For a few months, it had been a fragile place of safety.

Now that safety was ending. In June 1940, the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania. Foreign consulates were being ordered to close. The refugees knew that if they stayed, they could be trapped between two dangerous powers. To the west, the Nazis were already persecuting Jews across the lands they had conquered.

There seemed to be one way out: east, across the Soviet Union by train, then by sea to Japan, and on from there to anywhere that would take them.

A Dutch consul in Kaunas, Jan Zwartendijk, had been writing a note in refugees' passports saying that no visa was needed to enter Curaçao, a Dutch island in the Caribbean. It was a thin piece of hope. But to reach Curaçao, the refugees needed to pass through Japan. And to pass through Japan, they needed a Japanese transit visa.

Only one man in Lithuania could give them that.

Three telegrams

Sugihara spoke with representatives of the crowd and understood what was at stake. But he was not free to act alone. Issuing visas on this scale needed permission from the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo.

He sent a telegram asking for it. The answer came back: no. Visas should go only to people with proper papers, enough money and a final destination already arranged. Most of the refugees had none of these.

He asked again. Again the answer was no. Accounts say he asked a third time and was refused once more.

Sugihara talked it over with Yukiko. Disobeying orders could end his career. It could put his family in danger. Japan was growing closer to Nazi Germany, and a diplomat who defied his government might pay a heavy price.

Later in life, he explained his choice simply. He said that he could not abandon people who had come to him for help, and that he chose to follow his conscience over his orders.

Writing until his hand ached

He began issuing visas.

Each one had to be written out by hand. He worked from morning until night, day after day, for weeks. The crowd at the gate kept coming. Yukiko later recalled that his hand grew so tired and sore that she would massage it in the evenings so he could carry on.

Sugihara did not stop to check every rule. Where papers were missing, he wrote the visa anyway. Many visas covered not just one person but a whole family.

His official list records more than two thousand visas, and many more were probably issued without being written down. Historians estimate that around six thousand people may have escaped with his help, though the exact number will never be known.

The train window

By early September 1940, the consulate had to close and Sugihara was ordered to leave Lithuania. Even then, he kept writing. He issued visas from his hotel room.

The story goes that when his train pulled out of Kaunas station, he was still signing papers and handing them through the open window to people running alongside the carriage. When he could do no more, it is said, he bowed to the crowd and asked for their forgiveness.

The long road east

The refugees who held his visas began an extraordinary journey. They rode the Trans-Siberian Railway for many days across the Soviet Union to Vladivostok, on the Pacific coast. From there, ships carried them across the sea to the Japanese port of Tsuruga.

In Japan, many found kindness. Local people in the port and in the city of Kobe helped them with food and shelter. Some refugees went on to the United States, Canada, Palestine or Australia. Many spent the war years in Shanghai, which was under Japanese control. Among those saved were the students and teachers of a whole religious school, the Mir Yeshiva.

Quiet years

Sugihara served in other European posts during the war. After it ended, he returned to Japan, and in 1947 he left the Foreign Ministry. He believed he had been pushed out because of what happened in Kaunas, though the ministry's account was different, and historians still discuss the reasons. He took ordinary jobs and for years spoke little about the visas.

Some of the people he had saved spent a long time searching for him. In 1985, Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust remembrance centre, honoured him as Righteous Among the Nations, a title given to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews. He died the following year.

Today, the families of the people who carried his visas across Siberia number in the tens of thousands.

Want to read more?

Hillel Levine's In Search of Sugihara is a detailed history, and Yukiko Sugihara's memoir Visas for Life tells the story from inside the family. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's online encyclopedia has a clear short account.