Encounter 18 · 18 of 42 · July–August 1940
Visas for life
In July 1940 a Japanese consul in Kaunas wrote transit visas by hand until he was made to stop. He did not know how many would be used.
Kaunas, Lithuania
A stranger does not arrive knowing why a Japanese stamp in Kaunas could open a railway. The Trans-Siberian route still ran. To board it, a refugee needed to cross the Soviet Union toward Japan. Japan would not, on paper, be the destination. Someone had to name a place beyond.
That place, for many in the queue, was written first at another desk. Jan Zwartendijk, acting Dutch consul in Kaunas and a Philips director, stamped passports to the effect that Curaçao required no visa. The island would not have recognized the stamp as entry. It was a destination on paper. Sugihara then issued ten-day Japanese transit visas against those stamps, and, before the consulate closed, to some people who lacked even that.
How the desk got this queue
- November 1939Sugihara posted to Kaunas. First Japanese diplomat in Lithuania. Russian from years in Harbin. The post included intelligence.
- June 1940Soviet occupation. Arrests. Foreign consulates told to leave by the end of August.
- July–August 1940Zwartendijk’s destination stamps. Sugihara’s transit stamps. Tokyo restates the conditions: a finished destination visa, and money for the stay. He keeps writing.
- Early September 1940They leave. Recipients later said he was still writing at the station. Yad Vashem notes it as what is said, not as a contemporaneous log.
Yukiko Sugihara later described the nights: a queue from morning, telegrams that came back the same, the knowledge that issuing against instruction could cost the post. That is later recollection. It is not a 1940 diary in our hands. The queue is not in doubt.
He wrote.
1940
The desk
A stamp, a name, another name. Two consuls. A railway that still ran. No one at the desk knew who would live.
1984–85
The title
Righteous Among the NationsYad Vashem, 4 October 1984; ceremony in Jerusalem, January 1985. Not a 1940 fact.
He returned to Japan in 1947. The Foreign Ministry ended his service. USHMM records a staff reduction under occupation. Popular retelling treats the visas as the cause. The files do not settle that for us. The later title does not prove the nights were wise. They were nights.
Who else had to write before his stamp could become a route?
Private. No one else will see it.
Source
- institutional01 · United States Holocaust Memorial MuseumContemporaneous spine: November 1939 posting; June 1940 occupation; Curaçao destination papers; Tokyo cable after some 1,800 visas; 2,140 persons named by departure; 1984–85 recognition.Record
- institutional02 · Yad VashemRighteous Among the Nations file, visa-number range, later testimony including Yukiko Sugihara. Station writing noted as what is said.Record
Kaunas · 1940 · transit visas against instruction