DENNIS ODA / DODA@STARBULLETIN.COM Ani and Misha Fox gave Yukiko Sugihara flowers last night during a service at Temple Emanu-El in honor of Sugihara's late husband, Chiune Sugihara, who issued thousands of life-saving visas to Lithuanian Jews during the Holocaust.

Diplomat who
saved Jews honored

The consul general from Japan
helped thousands to escape the Holocaust

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By Mary Adamski
madamski@starbulletin.com

The story of more than 6,000 Jews saved from slaughter by the bravery of a Japanese diplomat held an overflow crowd of 300 people at Temple Emanu-El enraptured last night.

It was an evening of tears in the audience as Yukiko Sugihara, 89, told of helping her husband, Chiune, consul general to Lithuania in 1940, prepare handwritten visas that allowed Jews to escape the Nazi campaign of genocide.

But it was beyond pure history for the Hawaii crowd.

Hawaii nisei veterans, who lit candles in the memorial service for Holocaust victims, recalled their personal brushes with Holocaust survivors.

Fred Hirayama and Harry Urada, veterans of the 522nd Field Artillery Unit, 442nd Regimental Combat Team, remembered when their unit helped open the gates of Dachau in April 1945.

The Hawaii soldiers shared field rations and clothing with the tattered and starving survivors of the German camp where 30,000 Jews were put to death.

"It was Sosho Kajioka who shot off the lock; he's gone now," said Urada.

"A lot of guys had their reasons not to talk," said Hirayama. Their orders were to push for Berlin and the young soldiers felt they had disobeyed orders by pausing to help. They came home, and not for years did they share their stories of World War II.

"He never, never talked about it," said Urada's wife, Grace.

The people who surrounded Sugihara for a shared story last night included 13-year-old Michaela Markrich, about to celebrate her coming-of-age bat mitzvah at the temple. Her great-grandmother held a Sugihara visa.

Temple Emanu-El member Seymour Kazimirski said he is one of an estimated 100,000 descendants of the 6,000 who escaped with Sugihara visas. His mother, 81, escaped, but 82 relatives died. "If there had been more Sugiharas, I might have known my grandfather, I might have had cousins."

Sugihara, 89, is in Hawaii to open a photo exhibit of "Visas for Life" at the Japanese Cultural Center. It will be shown through April. Her book by the same title is on sale in several languages.

Not until 1968 did the Sugiharas learn about the many survivors and descendants to whom they were heroes. The Japanese government stripped Sugihara of his rank and he lived in obscurity for years.

In 1985, Israel honored Sugihara. In 2001, thanks to efforts by Hawaii Nisei veterans Harry Fukuhara and Nobu Yoshimura, the government of Japan honored its heroic diplomat posthumously with a plaque in the foreign service ministry in Tokyo.

"You are what Jews call a mensch," Kazimirski told Mrs. Sugihara last night. "You are the people who value life over death, right over wrong, courage over ambivalence."

Holocaust is remembered every year on the Yom Hashoah holy day, established by Israel in 1951.