The Visas
Chiune Sugihara — Kaunas, Lithuania, 1940
Sugihara heard them before light. The sound of many people standing in one place, the small shiftings, a cough, a child’s crying. The sound came through the window glass of the second-floor bedroom and it had come every morning for eleven days.
Yukiko was awake beside him. He could tell by her breathing.
“How many,” she said.
He went to the window and folded back the curtain. A fence ran along Vaižganto Street and the people stood against it three and four deep, down past the corner and out of sight where the street bent toward the river. The wind came off the water and it carried the smell of them up to the window — wet wool, paraffin, the sourness of the clothes they slept in. They wore grey coats in the summer. Suitcases served as seats. A man near the gate lifted a child so the child could see over the heads in front. The child held his eyes without any expression at all, and he let the curtain fall.
“More,” he said. “Too many.”
Yukiko got up and began to dress. In the next room one of the boys was talking in his sleep, a dream in Japanese, and then he was quiet. Sugihara shaved at the basin with cold water because the boiler had not been lit, and the house smelled of cold ash and carbolic soap. Through the wall he could hear Gudze downstairs already, the typewriter going. He dried his face and put on the gray suit and went downstairs.
In the kitchen, the cook had the pail out and the tin cup on its string, and she looked at him, and he nodded, and she carried it out through the side gate the way she had carried it out every morning since the fourth day. He stood at the office window and watched the cup go down the line hand to hand, each pair of hands holding it for the next, nobody drinking out of turn, and the pail came back empty and the cook filled it and carried it out again. He had never told anyone to do this and had never told anyone to stop.
The morning cable from Tokyo lay on the desk where Gudze had set it. Routine traffic. Rail schedules, a circular on currency.
Nothing about his request.
He read it twice anyway, standing, then set it down and looked out at the fence.
A woman at the front had been there three days. He knew her by the green scarf. She did not push and did not call out when the gate opened for deliveries. She stood with her hands folded on the rail of an empty baby carriage. He had stopped letting himself wonder about that on the second day.
“Herr Konsul,” Gudze said. “The delegation. You said nine o’clock.”
“Show them in when they arrive.”
“There is also the matter of the window latch in the visa office.”
“The latch can wait.”
Gudze went back to the typewriter. Sugihara sat down behind the desk and squared the blotter. Outside the feet went on shifting.
There were five of them. They came in with their hats in their hands and stood until he showed them chairs. Four sat and the fifth remained standing slightly behind the others, by the door, watching the room. The one who spoke was a small man with a lawyer’s way of choosing words. His name was Warhaftig and he spoke German with a Polish weight.
“We are told you are kind,” Warhaftig said.
“You are told wrong. I’m polite. The two are different in a consulate.”
Warhaftig took a passport from his coat and laid it open on the desk and turned it to face Sugihara. On the page reserved for visas someone had written, in Dutch, in a clerk’s careful hand, that no visa was required for entry to Curaçao or the other Dutch possessions in the Americas.
Sugihara read it. He read it again. “Curaçao,” he said. “And how does a family from Vilnius reach Curaçao?”
Warhaftig folded his hands. “By sea. From Japan.”
So that was it. He looked at the writing again. Nobody would ever board a ship to Curaçao. What they needed was the right to cross the Soviet Union to Vladivostok, and the Soviets would not let them cross without somewhere to land, and the somewhere was Japan, ten days, transit only. “A transit visa requires proof of onward passage,” he said. “Funds for the stay. A destination visa. You know this.”
“We know this.”
“The people outside don’t have those things.”
“No,” Warhaftig said. “They don’t.” He watched Sugihara’s hands rather than his face, the way a man watches the dealer in a card game he can’t afford to lose.
“I have no authority to waive the requirements,” Sugihara said. “I have cabled my ministry asking for instructions. When I have an answer, you will have one.”
Warhaftig stood. The others stood with him. At the door he turned, and for a moment Sugihara thought he would say what the situation made obvious — the German border where the trains were already moving in the west.
“Thank you for your politeness,” Warhaftig said, and put on his hat and went out past Gudze into the noise of the street.
Sugihara sent the second cable that afternoon and the answer came back in four days and it said what the first answer had said. No exceptions to be entertained. He sent a third, longer, and itemized: the numbers at the fence, the Soviet annexation, the closure of every other consulate in Kaunas one by one. He cited the Dutchman’s notation as constituting a destination. He requested discretion in cases of demonstrated emergency.
The answer to the third cable arrived on a Tuesday morning at the end of July. Gudze brought it in and laid it on the blotter and went out without being told. Sugihara read it standing up. CONCERNING TRANSIT VISAS REQUESTED PREVIOUSLY. ADVISE ABSOLUTELY NOT TO BE ISSUED TO ANY TRAVELER NOT HOLDING FIRM END VISA WITH GUARANTEED DEPARTURE EX JAPAN. NO EXCEPTIONS.
Sugihara set the cable down. Out the window, the green scarfed woman was at the rail of the fence in her usual place, fourth from the gate, her hands folded on the carriage.
He woke at three in the morning and went down to the office without a lamp. He lit the desk lamp and the paraffin caught in a candle and the cable lay on his desk. He read it again.
He took a sheet of consulate paper from the drawer and wrote the date and the salutation of a letter of resignation, and looked at it a long time. He had written one of these before, in Manchuria, a younger man’s letter, and that one had cost him a posting. The people he had written it for were dead—dead the way the people at the fence would be dead. But this time he would be lucky if he only lost his posting. There might be a special place, just for him and his family, on the trains this time.
He took a blank visa form from the second drawer and laid it beside the letter and sat with the two pages in front of him while the lamp hissed and burned down its wick. He fed the cable to the lamp flame and held it by the corner over the ashtray until it was gone, and the smell of the burnt paper hung in the room. The visa form he left lying on the blotter, blank, and went up the dark stairs and lay down beside his wife and did not sleep. He lay in the dark with his eyes open until the window grayed.
That night his family ate together, rice stretched with potatoes the cook had bought from a farmer who came to the kitchen door. Steam came up off the potatoes and the lamp burned paraffin-sweet and the boys argued about a kite. Yukiko’s sister carried the dishes out and the boys were sent to bed. The house was then quiet and Sugihara sat at the table with the teapot between his hands.
“They refused again,” Yukiko said to his wife.
Yukiko took the pot from him and poured for them both. Steam, the small sound of it, the lamp hissing.
“If I do it anyway, the ministry will recall me,” he said. “Maybe not now. There’s no one to replace me, but later. Or they could come for us. You understand. The boys —”
“The boys are asleep,” Yukiko said. “Sixty people stood at the fence all day in the rain on Thursday. I counted children.”
He didn’t answer. She drank her tea and set the cup down and looked at him across the table the way she had looked at him in Harbin, twelve years ago.
But then he was a different man’s age and certain of everything.
“You’ve already decided,” she said, and laid her hand on top of his on the Formica table.
He turned his cup on its saucer. “I’ll need you to help with the registers.”
She gathered the cups and stood. At the door to the kitchen she stopped. “Eat something at midday,” she said. “I mean it. You forget.”
In the morning he had Gudze open the gate and he went out and stood on the step, and the air off the crowd came up at him warm and close, wool and bodies and the river behind it all. The crowd stood up off their suitcases and all down the street the silence roared. He said that he would issue transit visas to all who asked. He said it in German and a man near the front turned and said it in Yiddish, and the sentence went down the street like wind through a field, turning heads as it went.
He went inside and sat down at the desk and uncapped the pen.
The first visa took him four minutes. Name, route, the formula of permission, seal, signature. The second took three and a half.
By the end of the first week he had it under two minutes and his right hand was a tool that performed sixteen strokes and a flourish. The cramp ran from the web of the thumb up the inside of the forearm to the elbow like a wire pulled tight, and at night Yukiko held the hand in both of hers and worked the thumb joint and the muscle below it while he sat with his eyes shut. They worked out the system without discussing it: she kept the register and called the names and checked the passports against the line, Gudze typed the entry numbers, and Sugihara wrote. He wrote from the first light until the gate closed and then by lamp.
Each visa was a family.
“Thank you,” they said. “Thank you. God keep you.” In Yiddish, Polish, German, once in halting Japanese a student had gotten from somewhere, the syllables careful as a man crossing ice. Sugihara nodded at each.
“Next,” he said.
Some mornings he stood a moment at the window upstairs before going down, and once at the very end of August he saw the dawn come up over the whole length of the line and could not make himself look away. Below him the green scarf had gone from the fence — she had her visa with no child listed — and the place where she had stood for three days was filled. The line was no shorter than the day he had opened the gate.
His arm ached from the elbow down. He flexed the hand twice and went downstairs and sat and uncapped the pen.
The order to close the consulate came in the last days of August and he answered that he was complying and went on writing. He gained a week that way. When the Soviets sent a man to stand in the foyer and watch the packing, Yukiko served the man tea and apologized for the disorder, and behind the office door the pen kept moving. They moved to the Hotel Metropolis on the first of September and the line re-formed in the street below the hotel within the hour. Yukiko packed around him. The boys carried suitcases down and were sent back up for more.
On the morning of the fourth the train for Berlin stood at the platform and the platform was full.
Hands.
He took the nearest and wrote on his knee, the train hissing. Yukiko called the spellings from the open pages and he wrote and signed and handed each one into the hands that took it, and behind those hands more hands, and down the platform a railway official was shouting about departure and nobody on the platform turned to look at him. The whistle.
He called out that he could not write any more, asked their forgiveness, and stayed at the window until the line of the platform was gone. Yukiko took the writing case from his knees and latched it. Across the aisle the boys knelt backward on the seat, watching out the window. His right hand lay in his lap, curled around the shape of the pen, and when he opened the fingers they opened slowly, and stiff, like something that had been gripped too long.
The man from the embassy came on a Tuesday in August, twenty-eight years later, to the small house in Fujisawa. By then Sugihara had been many things — a dismissed official, a translator, a manager of inventories, sixteen years in Moscow for a trading firm. He was sixty-eight. His sons knew only that their father had once been a diplomat and then had not been one, and that he did not discuss it, and they had stopped asking the way sons do.
The visitor’s name was Nishri. He was from the Israeli embassy and he was not young either, and when Yukiko showed him in he did not sit. He stood in the middle of the room holding a flat package wrapped in brown paper, holding it with both hands, and he looked at Sugihara for a long moment without speaking. Sugihara stood and waited, because the man’s hands were trembling and there is nothing polite to say about that.
“You won’t remember me,” Nishri said.
“I’m sorry. No.”
“There’s no reason you should. There were so many of us.” He worked the string off the package and folded back the paper, and the paper crackled in the quiet room. Inside was a sheet gone the color of weak tea, soft at the folds from being folded, carried, unfolded, shown at borders, shown at gangways, shown at desks on the far side of the world, and folded again. He held it out flat across both palms.
Sugihara took out his reading glasses.
The stamp first, the worn corner he remembered. Then the date, in his own figures: August 1940. Then the name, and below the name the smaller names, four of them, and below that the signature — fast, the terminal stroke dragged, a signature written in under two minutes by a hand that had eleven hours of names still ahead of it that day.
The ink had gone brown. Every word of it could still be read.
Yukiko had come to the doorway with the tea and she did not bring it in. She stood there with the tray, looking at the paper in her husband’s hands. Nishri looked at her, and nobody in the room said anything, and outside a neighbor’s radio played something with strings in it. The paper lay open on Sugihara’s palms with its four small names, light as anything, light as paper.
Chiune Sugihara (1900–1986), Japanese vice-consul in Kaunas, Lithuania, defied three direct orders from Tokyo in the summer of 1940 and issued transit visas to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi-occupied Poland — writing by hand for nearly a month, by some accounts more than two thousand visas covering entire families, and still writing from the window of his departing train. The "Curaçao visas" were the invention of Dutch consul Jan Zwartendijk, who marked passports with a destination no one would ever reach. Dismissed from the foreign service after the war, Sugihara worked in obscurity for decades. In 1985, the year before he died, Israel named him Righteous Among the Nations. An estimated 40,000 people are alive today because of those weeks.