When I saw an image on social media of red paint sprayed across the face of a bronze statue of Chiune Sugihara in Little Tokyo in downtown Los Angeles, my first thought was not about politics. It was of anger. How dare the perpetrator desecrate the image of the brave individual to whom I owe my life!
I thought about my grandparents—people who had fled persecution and left their parents in Warsaw only to learn five years later, they had been murdered in gas chambers. I thought about my father—ripped from a warm and nurturing environment at the age of 11 and on the run for his young life.
A thin sheet of paper—a Japanese transit visa—was the only thing that differentiated his future from that of his Jewish classmates, who were rounded up and exterminated. That sheet of paper made my own life possible.
And I thought about how this vile act will allow me to educate more widely by publicizing it.
Sugihara was a Japanese diplomat who was stationed in Kaunas, Lithuania, from 1938 to 1940.
As the German Nazis took over Europe, thousands of Polish Jews, including my grandparents and father, poured into neighboring Lithuania seeking refuge. What they found instead was antisemitism on a level even greater than that they were escaping.
They were desperate to leave by any means. And so, Sugihara requested permission from his superiors to issue visas to them. In response, he was instructed by Tokyo not to. But as he and his wife started witnessing hundreds of Jews assembling daily at the gates of the Japanese consulate in Kaunas, Lithuania, he again asked for permission but was denied.
So he chose to take matters into his own hands.
For weeks, Sugihara wrote transit visas by hand, forming the intricate, Japanese characters in ink; working tirelessly, through exhaustion and illness, up to 18 hours a day, knowing he was saving lives. He issued 2,139 visas that covered 6,000 individuals. Even as he was leaving his post, he continued signing documents from his hotel room and, according to survivors, from the train platform until the moment he boarded his train and it pulled away.
Along with thousands of other thankful survivors who traveled across the Soviet Union to Japan and, ultimately, to Australia and other nations were my grandparents and my father.
From Kaunas, Sugihara was sent to open a consulate in Königsberg (today, Kaliningrad) and then to Bucharest. When he returned to his country of birth in 1947, he was dismissed from his posting within Japan’s foreign service.
Sugihara lived in relative obscurity for decades. He only learned of the number of individuals his visas had saved when a survivor located him in 1968. Sugihara passed away on July 31, 1986, at the age of 86. His only surviving son, Nobuki Sugihara, frequently speaks about his father’s actions in rescuing thousands of Jews during World War II.
For his efforts, he was designated a Righteous Gentile by Yad Vashem: The World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem.
Thanks to Sugihara, my father lived to 87, dying of natural causes instead of in a concentration camp like his contemporary, Anne Frank, born within weeks of him in 1929. She died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in early 1945 at age 15.
If not for this diplomat, I would not have been born. And I would never have penned my book that honors him, which was just published in the United States. It follows a young woman and her grandmother, who travel back to Japan to thank the man to whom they owe their lives.
Those who defaced his statue may believe they were making a statement about Israel or about contemporary conflict. Protest is a democratic right. Anger at governments, including Israel’s, is part of public life. But merging the heroic actions of a rescuer of Holocaust refugees into present-day political grievance diminishes both history and argument.
Sugihara was not a symbol of state power. He was simply an individual who defied his own government and, with moral clarity, a consular stamp and an ink pen, altered the course of thousands of lives, resulting in the existence of as many as half a million descendants.
Moral courage is rarely loud, usually costly and lingers for time immemorial, especially to those whose lives it has touched.
Paint can be removed. The bronze can be polished back to its original condition. What any act cannot tarnish is the fact that hundreds of thousands, including me, are alive because of one man. You cannot undo that with taunting words on a social-media post, chants at rallies or a red blotch of paint.
I’m living proof of that.
