Family of Jewish man Chiune Sugihara saved from Holocaust gives tribute

But here I am.

And so are an estimated 200,000 others in my situation. Hundreds, if not thousands of survivors all alive because of one heroic deed.

Back in February, 2008, this fact had little significance for my family in Sydney, Australia – about to celebrate the bar mitzvah of our first born child. In fact, it was an unknown.

But when my brother, visiting Sydney from Switzerland for the occasion, decided to interview my then 80-year-old (now deceased) father, the significance of the day blossomed into something equally as impactful.

And the trajectory of my life and its purpose changed forever.

We had been exceptionally close to my father’s mother – our hilarious, larger-than-life Polish grandmother who never talked about the past, never let on the grief and trauma she carried having escaped the Holocaust, or the fact that our family had been saved from certain death with a visa illegally issued by a stranger in 1940.

Why had she not spoken of it? No doubt trauma rendered her incapable of revisiting the past, as is common amongst survivors.

Instead, this astounding piece of information was pushed aside and then casually revealed to us on that day by my father as he recounted their hair-raising escape from Nazi-occupied Poland in December of 1939.

He relayed to us in incredible detail, their journey from Poland. My grandfather was in the Polish Army. Germany had already invaded in September, just three months prior. My great-grandparents saw the danger. They told their daughter (my grandmother) to get out as quickly as she could and take my father with her. The plan was to meet my grandfather on the Lithuanian border and go to my great-great grandmother’s home in Vilna.

My grandmother, a beautiful and resourceful woman, fluent in German, bribed a Gestapo officer to pick them up in a staff car in the dead of night and drive them to the border. I choose not to imagine how she managed to secure that arrangement. They kept their end of the bargain – but only in part – and my father and grandmother were unceremoniously dumped somewhere in the forest where they eventually met up with other fleeing Jews. Unfortunately, a patrol spotted the group. They were ordered to strip naked and line up to be shot. But a drunk officer, obviously in charge, approached when he saw what was happening, and told them not to waste expensive bullets on filthy Jews. Instead, he said they should let the Russians deal with them. They were ordered into a small boat by the nearby river and pushed into the water, left to their own devices.

Once in Lithuania my father was placed in school and learned fluent Russian in the year they spent there. When word got to them about a Dutch couple who managed to obtain papers from the Dutch consul to a Dutch colony called Curacao, which they had to access via Japan; and a Japanese diplomat in Kaunas who issued them transit visas there, they, like thousands of others, converged on both consulates, desperate for the same outcome.

He then took it upon himself to defy his government and decided together with Yokiko, his wife, to illegally issue Japanese transit visas to 6,000 Jewish refugees allowing them to leave Lithuania. He risked his life and that of his young family by doing this.

He wrote day and night for weeks, by hand, in intricate Japanese characters in ink, even when he was too tired, even when he fell ill, and when his hands were cramping from the constant writing. Until the embassy was forced to close by the authorities; and then he continued to write from his small hotel room, up until the time he was called back to Berlin and boarded the train. My father recalled traveling by train from Vilna to Kaunas with his father and meeting with Sugihara. My father remembered his “kind eyes.”

But that was only the beginning of the process. These people then had to purchase tickets from the authorities to travel on the train. For locals – a pittance. For desperate Jews, however, $150 was demanded, but not just in cash. No – these frightened, traumatized refugees had to then bargain for the equivalent on the Black Market in the form of US gold coins. If they were able to secure those, only then were they given the coveted tickets.

They fled Lithuania, and then traveled two weeks by train through Moscow to Vladivostok; and finally by ship to Japan, where the already-established, small Jewish community in Kobe took these refugees in until such time the JDC or Joint Distribution Committee found their relatives for them in other countries and organized their safe passage there. My family spent 10 months there and my father remembered it fondly – a paradise with exotic fruits and lovely, warm locals who welcomed them and accepted them.

He played baseball, went to the local cinema and saw American movies, and ate local Japanese food. Those without any connections were sent to the Shanghai Ghetto in China just before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. My grandmother had two brothers already in Sydney who sponsored them out to Australia.

It’s no secret the Lithuanians were even worse antisemites than the Germans or Poles. For those who remained, their fate was grim, with 95% of Jews being murdered by the end of 1941.

And so – the question from us, his children, always, was – where was this visa?

My father had kept every other artefact from his past – significant or incidental; stamps, envelopes, coins, booklets, identity papers, old photographs; he had all his parents’ documents from pre and wartime Poland. You can see an assortment pictured here.

And then a genealogist-friend suggested I look in files at the Australian Archives – they seemed to hang on to loads of documents and photos when refugees arrived.

I did so. And the very first file I opened, the very first document that showed up online… was my family’s original Sugihara Transit Visa from August 1940.

Sitting in a locked vault. Unopened for 79 years.  Never viewed by anyone. I asked for it back.

I said this document represents life to me.

They said no. So I began the process of fighting them. My fight appeared in The Guardian newspaper last year and is continuing with the assistance of a legal team who took great interest in the story. To date, the archives refuse to relinquish the visa to any museum outside of Australia and are maintaining it is Commonwealth property – despite not having been able to prove this as yet; And they maintain it is of vital national significance, despite not being aware of its existence or relevance until I drew their attention to it, and not being able to  even confirm it will be safely held in perpetuity by them without the possibility of it being destroyed in years to come because they cull their collection regularly – simply not having the room to accommodate everything they amass. We are in discussions.

Archives worldwide are notorious at refusing to give up prized historical documents once they have fallen into their clutches. The question remains – to whom do they legally belong?

I am also of the belief that the archives do not wish to hand over items such as this because it will set a precedent and open up a veritable Pandora’s box for them of other Australian citizens making a rush to reclaim personal affects.

The difference here, as I pointed out to my legal team, is that this is quite unique, in that although many significant genocides have taken place throughout history,

The Holocaust is the only one that has dedicated museums set up in most major cities around the world to house documents and items pertaining to this time, and specifically designed to prove this took place, to educate so the world remembers; and so this never happens again. No other culture or event has been documented in this manner, leaving a paper trail from a fastidious regime. Therefore, items such as this visa belong in their rightful place.

A wise friend put it to me in these terms – “During the Holocaust, our countries of origin robbed us of our rights, then our jobs, then our homes, then our belongings, then our clothes, our hair, even our teeth and finally – our names, so we were just a number. And now your country is saying, ‘Well – this was once yours too, but now it’s ours – you can’t have it anymore.’ Why? Why is it no longer yours? Because your grandparents forgot in their traumatized state? That is wrong on so many levels. They are doing what the Germans did in a watered-down way.”

As a writer by profession, the revelation that a stranger was the reason I was born catapulted me on a journey which has morphed into an all-consuming (my family will attest to that) passion project and my life’s purpose to honor the man to whom I and now around 200,00 others worldwide owe our existence by perpetuating his memory in a book and an epic film (See: https://thesaviourmovie.com/) – so the world knows his name and learns from his deed; as Steven Spielberg did for Oskar Schindler. This has resulted in the discovery of, and connection to hundreds of survivors and descendants – a virtual extended family of Sugihara visa recipients worldwide – all as indebted to this incredible individual as I am.

It is also my intention to highlight the themes of generational trauma – something very real and not yet dealt with adequately in Holocaust films, as well as the plight of refugees settling in a new homeland and their need to assimilate or “fit in” at the expense of their own heritage; plus the simmering, festering, often generational antisemitic tendencies born out of habit and ignorance, that lie dormant in many individuals, just waiting for the right moment to surface and be expressed, as we, the Jewish people so often see in times such as this pandemic, when the general man-in-the-street wants a scapegoat to blame for his woes.

And – as a daughter of a father who was dragged from a happy, carefree childhood at age 11, and forced to flee persecution with my grandparents who left their homeland leaving all four parents whom they never saw again, I was determined that this visa – this document that represents life, and was taken from them during the immigration process would not be permitted to remain in a vault – but should rather – be displayed in perpetuity in Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum – where it can educate millions of individuals from around the globe for generations to come and represent the power of one individual to think for himself and affect change.

I believe I was given life for a purpose. That purpose is to ensure the world never forgets about the Holocaust in the only way I know how – as a writer. And through the example of the brave man who risked everything for 6,000 strangers he didn’t even know.

In the Jewish religion it is said if you save one Jewish life, you save the world. Sugihara saved thousands, and from those are now hundreds of thousands.

And so – the right thing to do, I believe, is to make Sugihara a household name.