Out of the Train Window
Early September 1940 · Chiune Sugihara, leaving Kaunas by train as his consulate closes
The consulate is closed. He wrote visas by hand for twenty-nine days, and for the last of them he was writing in a hotel room because the building had already been shut around him. The official seal has been packed and handed back.
He is on the train and it is moving, and people are still running along the platform.
What is left in his bag is paper. Consular forms with his signature on them and nothing else filled in: no name, no date, no number, no seal. A blank one is not a visa. It is an object that looks like one.
If he throws them, some will reach the right hands and some will not, and every one that is filled in badly, or sold, or copied, gives a border guard a reason to look harder at all of them (including the two thousand real ones already out there, held by people who have not crossed yet).
If he keeps them, the bag goes to Berlin with him and the people on this platform have this platform.
The window is already down. He has been apologizing through it for the last minute.
Keep the papers in the bag
Throw them from the windowOn your own? Play it first, then reveal.
Reveal what happened
What really happened
He threw them. Family accounts describe him signing and handing papers out of the window of the moving train, and giving away the consular stamp itself at the last moment. His own report to the Foreign Ministry counts 2,139 visas issued, each covering a family, which is why estimates of the people saved run from 6,000 to 10,000. He was reassigned, then dismissed from the foreign service in 1947, and spent the rest of his working life in trade and translation without discussing any of it. His neighbors in Kamakura learned what he had done at his funeral in 1986, when a Jewish delegation arrived from around the world to bury a man they had assumed was a retired businessman.
The philosophers weigh in
Keep them"Courage sits between recklessness and cowardice, and the middle is not always where the feeling is loudest. He has done a very great deal already. The last handful of paper is for him, not for them."
Throw them"There were people running beside the train. I have never once been able to weigh that against a consideration, and I have stopped believing the people who say they can."