WWII Profile: Chiune Sugihara
During WWII, there were countless brave people who
risked their own safety to fight against the oppression of others. This is the
story of a man who used what little power he had to fight against injustice and
save as many Jewish people as he could from Nazi persecution.
Chiune Sugihara was a Japanese diplomat. For part
of the war, he served as the Vice Consul for the Japanese empire in Lithuania.
As a consul, Sugihara was given a long list of criteria that people had to meet
if they were to obtain a visa – part of it was that they had to have a large
amount of money. Issuing visas was not his main job – he was supposed to be
spying on the Soviet Union for the Japanese. However, many Jewish people began
to ask him for refuge in Japan. Sugihara knew that if he only handed out visas
to the small number of people who met the Japanese criteria, he would have to
turn down lots of people. Furthermore, he knew that the people who he had to
turn down were likely to die. To Sugihara, this was not ok. He disobeyed the
orders of his superiors and issued thousands of visas to Jewish people so that
they could move to Japan. For more than a month in 1940, he would sit in his
office all day and handwrite the necessary certification for visas.
When Sugihara had to leave Lithuania, he and his
wife, Yukiko Kikuchi, spent the entire night before they had to leave
feverishly writing these visas. As he boarded his train, he released a stack of
blank (but signed) visas into the crowd of people around him, so that more
people could be saved. It is estimated that Sugihara saved 6000 people
(possibly more, due to the fact that some of the visas he issued were family
visas). Some accounts claim that he helped around 10,000 people, of which 6,000
survived.
Sugihara issued these visas from mid July through
the beginning of September 1940. In June 1914, Lithuania was taken over by Nazi
Germany at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa (Lithuania had been taken over
by the Soviet Union in 1940). The Nazis immediately began murdering Jewish
Lithuanians. Estimates say that the Nazis killed around 93% of Lithuania’s
prewar Jewish population of 210,000. Thanks to Sugihara’s quick actions and
sketchy/cunning deals with the Russian, thousands of Jewish Lithuanians were
able to sneak there way through Russia and into Japan. Based on the number of
Jewish the Nazis killed in Lithuania, there is a large chance that had Sugihara
never intervened, these people would have been murdered. When the people with “Sugihara
visas” went to Japan, they ran into some trouble because the visas issued were
meant to be temporary, but eventually they were allowed to stay and joined the
small Jewish community of Kobe.
A transit visa issued by Sugihara
Sugihara knew that his heroic actions would not be
without cost. While working in Lithuania, he wondered what the repercussions
from higher up officials would be, but apparently they did not realize he had
been releasing so many visas. Later, he lived in Romani, and he and his family
were in a Soviet POW camp from 1944 till 1946. When they returned to Japan in
1947, Sugihara was asked to resign due to his actions in Lithuania.
Hitler was able to mobilize such a terrifying
killing machine by using propaganda to make his Nazis believe that Jewish
people were less than human. But even within the Axis powers’ governments, a
man had the ability to save his empathy and humanity, and ultimately he saved
thousands of people. I believe it must have been extremely hard for him to act
on his principles while working for a country allied with such a hateful group.
What do you guys think of the actions of Sugihara and people like him? What makes
someone able to act so heroically in the face of the Nazi takeover?
Sources:
Another great post Maya! I think this man's accomplishments are especially significant considering we tend to demonize the enemy, and yet this Japanese man did so much to save the lives of countless people he had never met. Sugihara probably could have had serious repercussions for his actions, and yet he did so anyway. I think its important for us to remember that war is not always as clear cut as we think it is. The enemy is just as human as we are, and often times, both sides commit egregious acts and both commit heroic deeds. Great job highlighting another often forgotten part of history!
ReplyDelete