PASSAGE TO FREEDOM: THE SUGIHARA STORY

NOTE: This is a retelling from the book of the same title by Ken Mochizugi and illustrated by Dom Lee

Narrator:
This is the story of a diplomat representing Japan in Lithuania just before the beginning of WW 2. The diplomat's name Chiune Sugihara and he lived in Kaunas with his wife and 3 sons. In Kaunas, there were many Jewish families afraid of the coming Nazis. These Nazis believed that Jews should be sent away from their homes to places where other people couldn't see them and anything could happen to them.

We found out later that many bad things happened to those Jewish people that were taken away.

To be a diplomat, you have to understand people very well. Mr. Sugihara met Jewish people he even attended Hanukah with Jewish people. Many of those who needed these visas were older and frightened. He wrote to Japan to see if he could sign visas for these people. He asked three times, they said no three times. He decided to do something very brave first asking his whole family if that would be OK. He decided to sign the visas anyway.

Every day, people would line up outside Mr. Sugihara's house. His wife Yukiko would count them. He tried to fill out 300 visas a day. His son remembers seeing his mother put ice on his father's arm; it was so sore from writing. Even after the Sugihara family was on the Trans-Siberian train home, people ran alongside, hoping to get their visas signed.

Here in America, 66 years ago, the President was busy signing documents too, not ones to help people like Mr. Sugihara. The President, Franklin Roosevelt, signed Executive orders that said our government could create areas just like the places the Jewish people were afraid to go to in Kaunas. Many people here in America believed that Japanese people should be sent away from their homes to places where other people couldn't see them and anything could happen to them.

According to the history of Throop by Rev. Paul Sawyer:
"The reverend Clare Blauvelt, minister during the Second World War, helped our church, which had a sister church in Tokyo, give support to Japanese Americans who were being sent off to prison camps." This weekend, two of the people who were sent to those camps with their families are here at Throop, Hiro Nishikawa and Molly Fujioka

After the war ended, Mr. Sugihara was not a diplomat any more, though he still understood people very well. When he was very old, some of the people he had saved with his visas wanted to honor him by having their whole country of Israel name Mr. Sugihara to the Vad Yashim, or Righteous Among Nations and there is even a statue of him in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo.

May we all remember people who make a difference in the lives of others and this time we are together.