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This week's hero is...
Chiune Sugihara
Chiune Sugihara was born on January 1, 1900. He was raised by a middle-class family in the town of Kozuchi (now the city of Mino), Japan. From a young age, Sugihara expressed a desire to travel abroad. He decided to pursue a career in foreign ministry. After becoming fluent in the Russian language, he was chosen to be Japan's main diplomat to the country of Lithuania in 1939. He was instructed to report the movements of the Soviet Red Army and inform the Japanese government of the brewing hostilities in Europe. Little did he know, he would witness some of the worst horrors of the coming storm.
By 1940, war had broken out and Poland had fallen to Nazi Germany. Sugihara was stationed at the Lithuanian temporary capital of Kaunas. It wasn't long before thousands of Polish refugees (mostly Jews) began flooding into Eastern European countries in order to escape the Nazis. Many of them gathered in Lithuania and spoke of atrocious acts of barbarity being committed against Poland's Jewish population. They also feared that it would not be long before the Nazis turned their attention to Eastern Europe and invade the Soviet Union.
Sugihara was horrified by these reports and asked the Japanese government for permission to issue travel visas to the refugees. To his astonishment, the Japanese Consul in Tokyo denied his request. Despite the denial, Sugihara refused to turn his back on those who needed help. He decided to issue the travel visas to the refugees without the consent of the Japanese government.
For the next 29 days, Sugihara and his wife Yukiko, signed thousands of travel visas. On one day alone, the two of them issued 300 different visas to 300 different people. With their new travel visas, the refugees were able to board trains that took them deep into Russia. Some were able to make it all the way to China and even Japan.
When the Japanese government learned of Sugihara's disobedience, the latter received a telegram that recalled he and his family back to Japan. Even as Chiune Sugihara began boarding the train, he continued to distribute last-minute travel visas to as many people as he could. By the time the train departed, Sugihara had successfully written more than 4,000 visas that enabled thousands of people to travel away from Lithuania and beyond the reach of the Nazis.
Sadly, Sugihara's good deeds did not go unpunished. In 1944, the Japanese government reassigned him to Romania, where he was captured by the Red Army. After spending the next eighteen months in a Soviet prison camp, Sugihara returned to Japan and was informed by the Japanese foreign office that he was to be dismissed from his position due to his disobedience nearly five years earlier. He spent the next three decades doing odd jobs to support his wife and children.
However, the thousands of people whom he had saved had never forgotten his brave acts of kindness to them. In 1984, Chiune Sugihara and his wife were invited to Israel to be honored as righteous among the nations. Sadly, the former was in ill health and could not attend the ceremony (Yukiko and one of their sons went in his place). In the last year of his life, Sugihara was asked why he did it. He answered, "They were people and they needed help. I'm glad I found the strength to make the decision to give it to them. I may have had to disobey my government. But if I don't, I would be disobeying God." Chinue Sugihara died on July 31, 1986. Yukiko Sugihara followed him on August 8, 2008.
During World War II, millions of people who were being targeted by Nazi Germany were arrested and killed in what would be known as the Holocaust. There were many people who were in positions that held the power to save those in need. Unfortunately most of these people (especially diplomats) chose to look the other way and not lift a finger to help them. Chiune Sugihara was one of the few who decided to make a difference. He used his influence to save people even if it meant defying his own country. Like so many before and after him, he did so much for others and received so little in return.
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/chiune-sugihara
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/chiune-sempo-sugihara
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/04/chiune-sugihara-my-father-japanese-schindler-saved-6000-jews-lithuania
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/01/27/chiune-sugihara-jews-holocaust-japanese-schindler/
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