Chiune Sugihara

[thomas]

I found this article on Chiune Sugihara at Kyodo News. Btw, here's more info on Mr. Sugihara.

The story:
=> http://books.japanreference.com/jump.cgi?ID=14

A book review:
=> http://books.japanreference.com/review.cgi?ID=14

Interview with "Japan's Schindler" made public

GIFU — A museum in Gifu Prefecture on Tuesday made a recording of an interview given by Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat known as "Japan's Schindler," available to the general public.

Sugihara rescued thousands of Jews from the Holocaust by issuing them transit visas when he was consul general in the then Lithuanian capital of Kaunas from 1938 to 1940.

The museum located in his hometown, Yaotsu, has a reproduction of his office at the time, and visitors can use headphones to listen to Sugihara's reasons for deciding to issue visas in defiance of Japanese government policy.

"It was a humanitarian issue. Jews were trying to flee because they were about to be taken to Auschwitz. Thousands of them, saying they have no place to go and requesting visas, flocked to the window of where I was staying," Sugihara says on the tape.

The recording of the interview, conducted in Moscow in August 1977, when Sugihara was 77, was donated to the museum by a former Moscow bureau chief of the Japanese broadcasting company Fuji Television Network.

Copyright © Kyodo News