A Japanese Diplomat in the Baltics
In November, 1939, Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara was assigned as vice consul to the consulate in Kovno, Lithuania’s capital. In 1940, the USSR Union occupied Lithuania, along with Estonia and Latvia. The locals were brutally repressed by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. Sugihara began to make creative use of his consular authority to help those at risk.
He recognized that, with most of Europe engulfed by war, the best escape route for refugees in Lithuania was not westwards, but eastwards through the Soviet Union, and thence to Japan. So he started granting visas to those seeking to flee impending doom. Members of the Polish underground approached Sugihara with bogus visas to Curacao and other Dutch possessions in the Americas. To facilitate their escape, he granted them 10 day transit visas through Japan to their destinations.
That entitled the visa bearers to cross the Soviet Union, en route to Japan or Japanese-controlled territory. Sugihara started discreetly at first. He issued transit visas, and eventually visas to Japan as a final destination, to those who fed him intelligence. He then expanded that to members of the underground in general.
Eventually, he abandoned any pretense, and set aside the fiction that he was granting transit visas to facilitate the travel of those already in possession of final destination visas. Sugihara stamped visas for all and sundry, even those who lacked any travel papers whatsoever. By the time it was over, he had stamped thousands of visas that were most likely the difference between life and death for those who got them.
