October 12, 2018
My Father’s Brother and his Japanese Keeper in WWII
Sugihara's widow and eldest son estimate that he saved 10,000 Jews from certain death, whereas Boston University professor and author, Hillel Levine, also estimates that he helped "as many as 10,000 people", but that far fewer people ultimately survived.[15] Indeed, some Jews who received Sugihara's visas failed to leave Lithuania in time, were later captured by the Germans who invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, and perished in the Holocaust.
Sugihara's widow and eldest son estimate that he saved 10,000 Jews from certain death, whereas Boston University professor and author, Hillel Levine, also estimates that he helped "as many as 10,000 people", but that far fewer people ultimately survived.[15] Indeed, some Jews who received Sugihara's visas failed to leave Lithuania in time, were later captured by the Germans who invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, and perished in the Holocaust.
Jack Kemp
This story is stranger than fiction – but true.
However, when I first heard as a teenager that my uncle Avram spent WWII in
Kobe, Japan, I didn’t believe my parents. How could a poor Jew (and my father’s
family was very poor) both get a visa and pay for a trip from Poland to Japan,
of all places, an ally of Germany? It sounded absurd, a fictional delusion. It
took decades – and both the internet and documentaries I found on Amazon.com -
to explain how this actually was true.
The first issue, not well covered in my high
school WWII history (as best I can recall it), is that when Germany invaded
Poland in September of 1939 to start WWII in Europe, they "only†took the
Western part of the country. Secret pre-war deals between Joseph Stalin and
Hitler left the eastern part of Poland to the Soviet Union which invaded that
area three weeks after the German Army invaded from the west. But with the
chaos of war, people were able to flee to the east and on into the Baltic
states such as Latvia and Lithuania. Later, of course, Hitler double crossed
Stalin and invaded eastward into Russia itself, but that’s another matter.
Word spread quickly that a Japanese diplomat in
Lithuania was writing transit visas enabling Jews to travel across Russia on
the Trans-Siberian Railroad and on to Japan and Japanese held Shanghai, China. He
did this in defiance of instructions from his own government. This diplomat,
Chiune Sugihara, saved the lives of roughly six thousand Jews, one of them
being my father’s brother, my uncle Avram.
Now Avram had no money for a ticket on the Trans-Siberian
Railroad and there is the question of why would Stalin honor those visas? My
uncle wasn’t the only poor person who fled first to Lithuania, yet he got
financial aid from an American Jewish charity. As for why autocratic Joseph
Stalin honored those visas, that was a question of hardnosed realpolitik. Stalin
was facing an upcoming war with Germany on his Western Front. Japan was not
then at war with the Soviet Union but had a large army in Manchuria (occupied
China) facing a large Soviet army just across the border from them in Siberia.
The last thing Stalin wanted was a two front war. He did not want to give the
Imperial Japanese government any excuse, such as an insult to their diplomat or
his official visas, to become a cause for a war on Siberian soil. So Stalin’s
travel agents (they were all secret police members) honored those visas issued
by Mr. Sugihara with great respect. Refugees got to ride the Trans-Siberian
Railroad to the Pacific Port of Vladivostok. There they boarded ships to Japan
and a large number of them were also transported to the international city of
Shanghai, one of the very few places one could go in the world without a formal
entry visa. For some reason, my uncle Avram went to Kobe, Japan, along with
some of the other fleeing refugees. He spent not only all the rest of WWII
there, but the next few years until Israel became an independent country which
took in all Jewish refugees. The British, before, during and after WWII,
severely limited the number of Jews allowed to enter what was then officially called
The British Mandate of Palestine because of British politics and their related
economic interests in the oil business in the Middle Eastern Moslem countries.
So in May of 1948, my uncle was able to go to
Israel – where he promptly entered the fledgling Israeli Army. He married a
woman born in Israel and he later passed away in the 1960s. In 1970, I visited
his widow one day. And in the 1990s, I and my father visited uncle Avram’s
grave in a cemetery located in a suburb of Tel Aviv.
Uncle Avram’s life story reads like the outline
to a thriller novel but he was no writer, but the man who lived his story. As I
said before, my parents couldn’t even explain how and why his travels happened
in a few or more words to me as they didn’t know enough general background
historical details to make it sound plausible. Had Avram gone to a Western
publisher with the outline of a story (he could not speak English, French or
German), it might well have been rejected as a totally absurd phony biography by
some strange man they couldn’t understand. Or they might have seen it as a not
well written fictional story. Had Avram gone to an Israeli publisher, his story
would have been similar to thousands of other people’s personal European escape
autobiographies of people who fled to Israel after or before WWII and would have been seen as nothing unique. After
all, Israel had a Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, who had started WWII in the
Polish Army and fled east to Russia with his unit and then south through Iran
and on to British controlled Palestine. His Christian commanding officer liked
him and urged Begin to resign and stay in the country and fight for Israel’s
independence while the rest of his unit joined the Free Polish Army under the
command of Great Britain. These other Polish soldiers would go on to fight
valiantly in battles such as Monte Cassino in Italy and Arnhem in Holland. So
my uncle’s story was just that of another refugee who now lived an ordinary
quiet life in Israel. But it still, to someone from America, such as myself, was
all quite amazing – and true.
As for the Japanese diplomat, Chiune Sugihara, he
received many honors both later in his life and after his death. I’ve spoken to
people who grew up in Japan who were told about him in school and were familiar
with what he did. That includes the wife of couple living a few doors away from
my apartment.
Below is the detailed Wikipedia biography of
Mr. Sugiahara’s life.
Chiune Sugihara
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Chiune Sugihara, also called Sempo Sugihara[1] (æ‰åŽŸ åƒç• Sugihara Chiune, 1 January 1900 – 31 July 1986)[2] was a Japanese government official who
served as vice consul for the Japanese Empire in Lithuania. During the Second World War, Sugihara helped some six thousand Jews flee Europe by issuing transit visas to them so that they could travel
through Japanese
territory, risking his
job and his family's lives.[3] The fleeing Jews were refugees from German-occupied
Western Poland and Soviet-occupied
Eastern Poland, as well as
residents of Lithuania. A few decades after the war, in 1985, the State of Israel honored Sugihara as one of the Righteous
Among the Nations (Hebrew: חסידי ×ומות העול×) for his actions. He is the only
Japanese national to have been so honored.
Sugihara told
the refugees to call him "Sempo" – the Sino-Japanese reading of the Japanese characters of his given name – as it was
easier for non-Japanese persons to pronounce.[4]
|
(SEE NEXT SECTION FURTHER BELOW) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Sugihara had cooperated with Polish intelligenceas part of a bigger Japanese–Polish cooperative plan.[11] As the Soviet Union occupied sovereign Lithuania in 1940,
many Jewish refugeesfrom Poland (Polish Jews) as well as Lithuanian Jews tried to acquire exit visas. Without the visas, it was
dangerous to travel, yet it was impossible to find countries willing to issue
them.
From 18 July to 28 August 1940,
aware that applicants were in danger if they stayed behind, Sugihara decided to
grant visas on his own. He ignored the requirements and issued ten-day visas to
Jews for transit through Japan, in violation of his orders. Given his inferior
post and the culture of the Japanese Foreign Service bureaucracy, this was an
unusual act of disobedience. He spoke to Soviet officials who agreed to let the
Jews travel through the country via the Trans-Siberian Railwayat five times the standard ticket price.
Sugihara himself wondered about
official reaction to the thousands of visas he issued. Many years later, he
recalled, "No one ever said anything about it. I remember thinking that
they probably didn't realize how many I actually issued."[13]
SECTION
OMITTED
Sugihara's widow and eldest son estimate that he saved 10,000 Jews from certain death, whereas Boston University professor and author, Hillel Levine, also estimates that he helped "as many as 10,000 people", but that far fewer people ultimately survived.[15] Indeed, some Jews who received Sugihara's visas failed to leave Lithuania in time, were later captured by the Germans who invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, and perished in the Holocaust.
SECTION OMITTED
Legacy
and honors
Port of Humanity Tsuruga Museum in Tsuruga, Fukui, Japan
contains a Sugihara Chiune Corner.
Sugihara Street in Vilnius,
Lithuania, Chiune (Sempo) Sugihara Street in Jaffa, Israel, and the asteroid 25893 Sugihara are named after him.
A corner for Sugihara Chiune is set
up in the Port of Humanity Tsuruga
Museum near Tsuruga Port, the place where many Jewish
refugees arrived in Japan, in the city of Tsuruga, Fukui, Japan.[20]
SECTION OMITTED
When Sugihara's widow Yukiko
traveled to Jerusalem in 1998, she was met by tearful survivors who showed her
the yellowing visas that her husband had signed. A park in Jerusalem is named
after him. The Japanese government honored him on the 2000 centennial of his
birth.[2]
SECTION OMITTED
He was posthumously awarded the Commander's Cross with
the Star of the Order of Polonia
Restituta in 2007,[24] and the Commander's Cross Order of Merit of the
Republic of Poland by the President of Polandin 1996.[25] Also, in 1993, he was awarded the
Life Saving Cross of Lithuania. He was posthumously awarded the Sakura Award by the
Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre (JCCC) in Toronto in November 2014.
In June 2016, a street in Netanya
Sugihara's widow and eldest son estimate that he saved 10,000 Jews from certain death, whereas Boston University professor and author, Hillel Levine, also estimates that he helped "as many as 10,000 people", but that far fewer people ultimately survived.[15] Indeed, some Jews who received Sugihara's visas failed to leave Lithuania in time, were later captured by the Germans who invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, and perished in the Holocaust.
, Israel was named for Sugihara in
the presence of his son Nobuki, as a number of Netanya's current residents are
descendants of the Lithuanian Jews who had been given a means of escaping the
Third Reich.[26] There is also a street named Consul
Chiune Sugihara in Londrina Brazil.
Now Avram had no money for a ticket on the Trans-Siberian
Railroad and there is the question of why would Stalin honor those visas? My
uncle wasn’t the only poor person who fled first to Lithuania, yet he got
financial aid from an American Jewish charity. As for why autocratic Joseph
Stalin honored those visas, that was a question of hardnosed realpolitik. Stalin
was facing an upcoming war with Germany on his Western Front. Japan was not
then at war with the Soviet Union but had a large army in Manchuria (occupied
China) facing a large Soviet army just across the border from them in Siberia.
The last thing Stalin wanted was a two front war. He did not want to give the
Imperial Japanese government any excuse, such as an insult to their diplomat or
his official visas, to become a cause for a war on Siberian soil. So Stalin’s
travel agents (they were all secret police members) honored those visas issued
by Mr. Sugihara with great respect. Refugees got to ride the Trans-Siberian
Railroad to the Pacific Port of Vladivostok. There they boarded ships to Japan
and a large number of them were also transported to the international city of
Shanghai, one of the very few places one could go in the world without a formal
entry visa. For some reason, my uncle Avram went to Kobe, Japan, along with
some of the other fleeing refugees. He spent not only all the rest of WWII
there, but the next few years until Israel became an independent country which
took in all Jewish refugees. The British, before, during and after WWII,
severely limited the number of Jews allowed to enter what was then officially called
The British Mandate of Palestine because of British politics and their related
economic interests in the oil business in the Middle Eastern Moslem countries.
So in May of 1948, my uncle was able to go to
Israel – where he promptly entered the fledgling Israeli Army. He married a
woman born in Israel and he later passed away in the 1960s. In 1970, I visited
his widow one day. And in the 1990s, I and my father visited uncle Avram’s
grave in a cemetery located in a suburb of Tel Aviv.
Uncle Avram’s life story reads like the outline
to a thriller novel but he was no writer, but the man who lived his story. As I
said before, my parents couldn’t even explain how and why his travels happened
in a few or more words to me as they didn’t know enough general background
historical details to make it sound plausible. Had Avram gone to a Western
publisher with the outline of a story (he could not speak English, French or
German), it might well have been rejected as a totally absurd phony biography by
some strange man they couldn’t understand. Or they might have seen it as a not
well written fictional story. Had Avram gone to an Israeli publisher, his story
would have been similar to thousands of other people’s personal European escape
autobiographies of people who fled to Israel after or before WWII and would have been seen as nothing unique. After
all, Israel had a Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, who had started WWII in the
Polish Army and fled east to Russia with his unit and then south through Iran
and on to British controlled Palestine. His Christian commanding officer liked
him and urged Begin to resign and stay in the country and fight for Israel’s
independence while the rest of his unit joined the Free Polish Army under the
command of Great Britain. These other Polish soldiers would go on to fight
valiantly in battles such as Monte Cassino in Italy and Arnhem in Holland. So
my uncle’s story was just that of another refugee who now lived an ordinary
quiet life in Israel. But it still, to someone from America, such as myself, was
all quite amazing – and true.
As for the Japanese diplomat, Chiune Sugihara, he
received many honors both later in his life and after his death. I’ve spoken to
people who grew up in Japan who were told about him in school and were familiar
with what he did. That includes the wife of couple living a few doors away from
my apartment.
Below is the detailed Wikipedia biography of
Mr. Sugiahara’s life.
Chiune Sugihara
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Chiune Sugihara, also called Sempo Sugihara[1] (æ‰åŽŸ åƒç• Sugihara Chiune, 1 January 1900 – 31 July 1986)[2] was a Japanese government official who
served as vice consul for the Japanese Empire in Lithuania. During the Second World War, Sugihara helped some six thousand Jews flee Europe by issuing transit visas to them so that they could travel
through Japanese
territory, risking his
job and his family's lives.[3] The fleeing Jews were refugees from German-occupied
Western Poland and Soviet-occupied
Eastern Poland, as well as
residents of Lithuania. A few decades after the war, in 1985, the State of Israel honored Sugihara as one of the Righteous
Among the Nations (Hebrew: חסידי ×ומות העול×) for his actions. He is the only
Japanese national to have been so honored.
Sugihara told
the refugees to call him "Sempo" – the Sino-Japanese reading of the Japanese characters of his given name – as it was
easier for non-Japanese persons to pronounce.[4]
|
(SEE NEXT SECTION FURTHER BELOW) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Sugihara had cooperated with Polish intelligenceas part of a bigger Japanese–Polish cooperative plan.[11] As the Soviet Union occupied sovereign Lithuania in 1940,
many Jewish refugeesfrom Poland (Polish Jews) as well as Lithuanian Jews tried to acquire exit visas. Without the visas, it was
dangerous to travel, yet it was impossible to find countries willing to issue
them.
From 18 July to 28 August 1940,
aware that applicants were in danger if they stayed behind, Sugihara decided to
grant visas on his own. He ignored the requirements and issued ten-day visas to
Jews for transit through Japan, in violation of his orders. Given his inferior
post and the culture of the Japanese Foreign Service bureaucracy, this was an
unusual act of disobedience. He spoke to Soviet officials who agreed to let the
Jews travel through the country via the Trans-Siberian Railwayat five times the standard ticket price.
Sugihara himself wondered about
official reaction to the thousands of visas he issued. Many years later, he
recalled, "No one ever said anything about it. I remember thinking that
they probably didn't realize how many I actually issued."[13]
SECTION
OMITTED
Sugihara's widow and eldest son estimate that he saved 10,000 Jews from certain death, whereas Boston University professor and author, Hillel Levine, also estimates that he helped "as many as 10,000 people", but that far fewer people ultimately survived.[15] Indeed, some Jews who received Sugihara's visas failed to leave Lithuania in time, were later captured by the Germans who invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, and perished in the Holocaust.
SECTION OMITTED
Legacy
and honors
Port of Humanity Tsuruga Museum in Tsuruga, Fukui, Japan
contains a Sugihara Chiune Corner.
Sugihara Street in Vilnius,
Lithuania, Chiune (Sempo) Sugihara Street in Jaffa, Israel, and the asteroid 25893 Sugihara are named after him.
A corner for Sugihara Chiune is set
up in the Port of Humanity Tsuruga
Museum near Tsuruga Port, the place where many Jewish
refugees arrived in Japan, in the city of Tsuruga, Fukui, Japan.[20]
SECTION OMITTED
When Sugihara's widow Yukiko
traveled to Jerusalem in 1998, she was met by tearful survivors who showed her
the yellowing visas that her husband had signed. A park in Jerusalem is named
after him. The Japanese government honored him on the 2000 centennial of his
birth.[2]
SECTION OMITTED
He was posthumously awarded the Commander's Cross with
the Star of the Order of Polonia
Restituta in 2007,[24] and the Commander's Cross Order of Merit of the
Republic of Poland by the President of Polandin 1996.[25] Also, in 1993, he was awarded the
Life Saving Cross of Lithuania. He was posthumously awarded the Sakura Award by the
Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre (JCCC) in Toronto in November 2014.
In June 2016, a street in Netanya
, Israel was named for Sugihara in
the presence of his son Nobuki, as a number of Netanya's current residents are
descendants of the Lithuanian Jews who had been given a means of escaping the
Third Reich.[26] There is also a street named Consul
Chiune Sugihara in Londrina Brazil.
Jack Kemp
This story is stranger than fiction – but true.
However, when I first heard as a teenager that my uncle Avram spent WWII in
Kobe, Japan, I didn’t believe my parents. How could a poor Jew (and my father’s
family was very poor) both get a visa and pay for a trip from Poland to Japan,
of all places, an ally of Germany? It sounded absurd, a fictional delusion. It
took decades – and both the internet and documentaries I found on Amazon.com -
to explain how this actually was true.
The first issue, not well covered in my high
school WWII history (as best I can recall it), is that when Germany invaded
Poland in September of 1939 to start WWII in Europe, they "only†took the
Western part of the country. Secret pre-war deals between Joseph Stalin and
Hitler left the eastern part of Poland to the Soviet Union which invaded that
area three weeks after the German Army invaded from the west. But with the
chaos of war, people were able to flee to the east and on into the Baltic
states such as Latvia and Lithuania. Later, of course, Hitler double crossed
Stalin and invaded eastward into Russia itself, but that’s another matter.
Word spread quickly that a Japanese diplomat in
Lithuania was writing transit visas enabling Jews to travel across Russia on
the Trans-Siberian Railroad and on to Japan and Japanese held Shanghai, China. He
did this in defiance of instructions from his own government. This diplomat,
Chiune Sugihara, saved the lives of roughly six thousand Jews, one of them
being my father’s brother, my uncle Avram.
Now Avram had no money for a ticket on the Trans-Siberian
Railroad and there is the question of why would Stalin honor those visas? My
uncle wasn’t the only poor person who fled first to Lithuania, yet he got
financial aid from an American Jewish charity. As for why autocratic Joseph
Stalin honored those visas, that was a question of hardnosed realpolitik. Stalin
was facing an upcoming war with Germany on his Western Front. Japan was not
then at war with the Soviet Union but had a large army in Manchuria (occupied
China) facing a large Soviet army just across the border from them in Siberia.
The last thing Stalin wanted was a two front war. He did not want to give the
Imperial Japanese government any excuse, such as an insult to their diplomat or
his official visas, to become a cause for a war on Siberian soil. So Stalin’s
travel agents (they were all secret police members) honored those visas issued
by Mr. Sugihara with great respect. Refugees got to ride the Trans-Siberian
Railroad to the Pacific Port of Vladivostok. There they boarded ships to Japan
and a large number of them were also transported to the international city of
Shanghai, one of the very few places one could go in the world without a formal
entry visa. For some reason, my uncle Avram went to Kobe, Japan, along with
some of the other fleeing refugees. He spent not only all the rest of WWII
there, but the next few years until Israel became an independent country which
took in all Jewish refugees. The British, before, during and after WWII,
severely limited the number of Jews allowed to enter what was then officially called
The British Mandate of Palestine because of British politics and their related
economic interests in the oil business in the Middle Eastern Moslem countries.
So in May of 1948, my uncle was able to go to
Israel – where he promptly entered the fledgling Israeli Army. He married a
woman born in Israel and he later passed away in the 1960s. In 1970, I visited
his widow one day. And in the 1990s, I and my father visited uncle Avram’s
grave in a cemetery located in a suburb of Tel Aviv.
Uncle Avram’s life story reads like the outline
to a thriller novel but he was no writer, but the man who lived his story. As I
said before, my parents couldn’t even explain how and why his travels happened
in a few or more words to me as they didn’t know enough general background
historical details to make it sound plausible. Had Avram gone to a Western
publisher with the outline of a story (he could not speak English, French or
German), it might well have been rejected as a totally absurd phony biography by
some strange man they couldn’t understand. Or they might have seen it as a not
well written fictional story. Had Avram gone to an Israeli publisher, his story
would have been similar to thousands of other people’s personal European escape
autobiographies of people who fled to Israel after or before WWII and would have been seen as nothing unique. After
all, Israel had a Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, who had started WWII in the
Polish Army and fled east to Russia with his unit and then south through Iran
and on to British controlled Palestine. His Christian commanding officer liked
him and urged Begin to resign and stay in the country and fight for Israel’s
independence while the rest of his unit joined the Free Polish Army under the
command of Great Britain. These other Polish soldiers would go on to fight
valiantly in battles such as Monte Cassino in Italy and Arnhem in Holland. So
my uncle’s story was just that of another refugee who now lived an ordinary
quiet life in Israel. But it still, to someone from America, such as myself, was
all quite amazing – and true.
As for the Japanese diplomat, Chiune Sugihara, he
received many honors both later in his life and after his death. I’ve spoken to
people who grew up in Japan who were told about him in school and were familiar
with what he did. That includes the wife of couple living a few doors away from
my apartment.
.
Below is the detailed Wikipedia biography of
Mr. Sugiahara’s life.
Chiune Sugihara
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Chiune Sugihara, also called Sempo Sugihara[1] (æ‰åŽŸ åƒç• Sugihara Chiune, 1 January 1900 – 31 July 1986)[2] was a Japanese government official who
served as vice consul for the Japanese Empire in Lithuania. During the Second World War, Sugihara helped some six thousand Jews flee Europe by issuing transit visas to them so that they could travel
through Japanese
territory, risking his
job and his family's lives.[3] The fleeing Jews were refugees from German-occupied
Western Poland and Soviet-occupied
Eastern Poland, as well as
residents of Lithuania. A few decades after the war, in 1985, the State of Israel honored Sugihara as one of the Righteous
Among the Nations (Hebrew: חסידי ×ומות העול×) for his actions. He is the only
Japanese national to have been so honored.
Sugihara told
the refugees to call him "Sempo" – the Sino-Japanese reading of the Japanese characters of his given name – as it was
easier for non-Japanese persons to pronounce.[4]
Sugihara had cooperated with Polish intelligenceas part of a bigger Japanese–Polish cooperative plan.[11] As the Soviet Union occupied sovereign Lithuania in 1940,
many Jewish refugeesfrom Poland (Polish Jews) as well as Lithuanian Jews tried to acquire exit visas. Without the visas, it was
dangerous to travel, yet it was impossible to find countries willing to issue
them.
From 18 July to 28 August 1940,
aware that applicants were in danger if they stayed behind, Sugihara decided to
grant visas on his own. He ignored the requirements and issued ten-day visas to
Jews for transit through Japan, in violation of his orders. Given his inferior
post and the culture of the Japanese Foreign Service bureaucracy, this was an
unusual act of disobedience. He spoke to Soviet officials who agreed to let the
Jews travel through the country via the Trans-Siberian Railwayat five times the standard ticket price.
Sugihara himself wondered about
official reaction to the thousands of visas he issued. Many years later, he
recalled, "No one ever said anything about it. I remember thinking that
they probably didn't realize how many I actually issued."[13]
SECTION
OMITTED
Sugihara's widow and eldest son estimate that he saved 10,000 Jews from certain death, whereas Boston University professor and author, Hillel Levine, also estimates that he helped "as many as 10,000 people", but that far fewer people ultimately survived.[15] Indeed, some Jews who received Sugihara's visas failed to leave Lithuania in time, were later captured by the Germans who invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, and perished in the Holocaust.
SECTION OMITTED
Legacy
and honors
Port of Humanity Tsuruga Museum in Tsuruga, Fukui, Japan
contains a Sugihara Chiune Corner.
Sugihara Street in Vilnius,
Lithuania, Chiune (Sempo) Sugihara Street in Jaffa, Israel, and the asteroid 25893 Sugihara are named after him.
A corner for Sugihara Chiune is set
up in the Port of Humanity Tsuruga
Museum near Tsuruga Port, the place where many Jewish
refugees arrived in Japan, in the city of Tsuruga, Fukui, Japan.[20]
SECTION OMITTED
When Sugihara's widow Yukiko
traveled to Jerusalem in 1998, she was met by tearful survivors who showed her
the yellowing visas that her husband had signed. A park in Jerusalem is named
after him. The Japanese government honored him on the 2000 centennial of his
birth.[2]
SECTION OMITTED
He was posthumously awarded the Commander's Cross with
the Star of the Order of Polonia
Restituta in 2007,[24] and the Commander's Cross Order of Merit of the
Republic of Poland by the President of Polandin 1996.[25] Also, in 1993, he was awarded the
Life Saving Cross of Lithuania. He was posthumously awarded the Sakura Award by the
Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre (JCCC) in Toronto in November 2014.
In June 2016, a street in Netanya, Israel was named for Sugihara in
the presence of his son Nobuki, as a number of Netanya's current residents are
descendants of the Lithuanian Jews who had been given a means of escaping the
Third Reich.[26] There is also a street named Consul
Chiune Sugihara in Londrina Brazil
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
08:50 AM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
Post contains 4770 words, total size 88 kb.
106kb generated in CPU 0.0112, elapsed 0.4978 seconds.
35 queries taking 0.4896 seconds, 157 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.
35 queries taking 0.4896 seconds, 157 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.
