European Reading Challenge #4

Visas for Life – Yukiko Sugihara

Chiune Sugihara was the Japanese Consul General in Kaunas, Lithuania in 1939 and 1940. After World War II broke out, his office was inundated with requests for visas from thousands of Polish Jews that had to escape from Nazi-occupied Poland.

With the aid of his wife Yukiko, Sugihara issued 2,000 transit visas and saved about 6,000 lives. Because he issued the visas against orders, he risked his diplomatic career and his future. After the war, with the mean-spirited cowardice of bureaucrats at their most spineless, the Japanese government did indeed fire him from the dip service. Instead of honoring a man directly responsible for saving 6,000 lives who later built families that number as many as 55,000 descendants, the Japanese government canned him and forced him to live in impoverished obscurity, eking out a living translating and interpreting.

But before he died in 1986, in 1985 he received Israel's highest honor, recognized as "Righteous Among the Nations" by the Yad Vashem Martyrs Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem.