Chiune Sugihara

Refused Three Times, Wrote Anyway

Chiune Sugihara was a career diplomat, fluent in Russian, posted as vice-consul to Kaunas in 1939 — a listening post as much as a consulate. Jewish refugees fled east into Lithuania when Germany invaded Poland — then, when the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania in June 1940 and ordered every foreign consulate closed, found that exit closing too. A transit visa through Japan was one of the few remaining routes out. Sugihara asked his ministry three times for authority to issue them and was refused three times. He issued them anyway, writing for twenty-nine days, from 31 July to 28 August 1940, then continued signing forms from a hotel room after the consulate itself was shuttered, until he left Kaunas by train on 4 September. His own report to the Foreign Ministry, dated 28 February 1941, counts 2,139 visas — each one covering a whole family rather than one person, 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, officially as part of postwar staff cuts — though he and his wife believed it was punishment for the visas. He spent the rest of his working life in trading and translation, including years in Moscow, and did not discuss it.

A Secret His Neighbors Never Knew

He died on 31 July 1986 in a hospital in Kamakura, Japan, and was buried in the local cemetery. His neighbors had lived beside him for years without knowing what he had done. They found out at the funeral, when a large Jewish delegation arrived from around the world — the Israeli ambassador to Japan among them — to bury a man they had assumed was a retired businessman.