Three months, a rubber stamp, and a conscience
Kaunas, Lithuania · summer 1940.
By the summer of 1940 the trap had closed. Germany held the west; in June the Soviet Union annexed Lithuania. Thousands of Jewish refugees — many already once uprooted from Poland — were stranded in Kaunas with nowhere legal to go. One by one, the consulates shut their doors.
Two stayed open a crack. The Dutch honorary consul, Jan Zwartendijk, realised the Caribbean colony of Curaçao required no formal visa and began endorsing passports for it. But to reach it a refugee had to cross the entire Soviet Union — and for that they needed a Japanese transit visa.
“I may have to disobey my government, but if I don't, I would be disobeying God.”— Chiune Sugihara
Sugihara, Japan's acting consul in Kaunas, cabled Tokyo three times for permission. Three times the Foreign Ministry refused. He decided to write the visas anyway. For some six weeks — often eighteen hours a day, his hand cramping, his wife Yukiko kneading it at night — he signed transit visa after transit visa, passing them through the consulate gate and, at the last, from the window of the departing train as he was recalled on 4 September 1940.
A single visa could carry a whole family. Those who held one began an improbable journey east — by rail across Siberia to the Pacific, and onward to refuge scattered across the world. This archive follows them by name, matching Sugihara's own list against the documents and stories their descendants have kept.
