Sugihara Chiune: His Defining Moment.

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Sugihara Chiune was a Japanese diplomat who risked his carrier to save thousands of Jewish refugees in WWII. 



Fig. The Sugihara family in Kaunas. This is a schematic picture. The interested reader can visit the following for real image at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:

https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1071694

In 1983, when Sugihara was 83 years old, three years before his death, he wrote a memoir how he decided to take his action in 1940. The following is from [1] (translation by the author).

“On the day I received the first instructions from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I thought all night about it. If I told the refugees the instructions as they were, I would have been obedient to the home government and praised.

If someone other than me were the person in question, probably everyone would have chosen the path of visa refusal, as in the Tokyo instructions. This is because promotion suspension or dismissal is more terrifying than anything else, according to violations of the civil service regulations. To tell the truth, I thought about it all night on the day I received the instructions.”

“After much agony and distress, I finally came to the conclusion that humanity and philanthropy come first. And I am still convinced that I was able to execute this faithfully without fear of anything by risking my job."

Yukiko, Sugihara’s wife, wrote a Tanka [2], a traditional Japanese poem which was written in 1940 [3] (translation by the author):

“I hear my husband’s bed creaks. He must be unable to sleep.”

[1] Watanabe, K. and Sugihara, Y., “Ketsudan”, Taisho Shuppan, Tokyo, 1996

[2]Wikipedia site: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanka

[3] Sugihara, Y., “Byakuya”, Taisho Shuppan, Tokyo, 1995

 

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