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Historic Figures Who Set Out to Save Jews From the Holocaust

Khalid Elhassan December 15, 2020 32 min

Hanns Albin Rauter - World War II — A Dutch Resistance cell during WWII. For God and Country

23. This Angel of Mercy Deliberately Failed an Exam to Thwart an Overbearing Father

Chiune Sugihara, was born into a middle-class Japanese family. His father was a civil servant who worked for Japan’s version of the IRS. Growing up, Sugihara hit the books hard, proved himself a model student, and received top honors. His father wanted him to become a doctor, but Sugihara had other ideas. So he deliberately failed to get into medical school by writing only his name on the entrance exam.

Instead of studying medicine, he majored in English in college, and in 1919, passed the Japanese Foreign Ministry Scholarship exams. Sugihara took a two-year break in 1920 to fulfill his national service obligations, serving as an infantry officer in the Japanese army. He resigned his commission in 1922, and took and passed the Foreign Ministry’s language qualification exams. He was then assigned to Harbin, China, where he further studied German and Russian.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.