I don't consider myself well-read, and yet, if there's something I don't know about that I think is significant, I have the vanity to be shocked. I'm also not entirely versed in WWII stories. I know a fair few, but apparently not enough.
I heard on the radio the other day about a man named Chiune Sugihara and I was absolutely furious. I. Simply. Could. Not. Control. My. Anger.
There was a Jewish Rabbi that unearthed a WWII Jewish Survivor in Japan, who was cleaning the cemetery. The man told of being stranded in Lithuania. Not being able to stay there any longer and not being able to obtain a Visa for any other country he had come, finally, in desperation to the Japanese Embassy in the hopes of saving at least one member of his family. He met with Chiune Sugihara. Sugihara-sama looked at him frankly and told him there was no way his country would authorize him to issue a visa. The man replied that he had to try. Sugihara-sama asked him to return the next day. So the next day the man returned. He told him that his country denied him the authority to issue a visa. He asked the Jewish man what would happen to him if he could not obtain a visa. The man replied that he and his family would be loaded onto trains, hauled away and killed. Sugihara-sama stared at him and then stared at a box at the back of the room. He wrote the visas and gave to the man. Then he continued to write them. He wrote on into the night... And told the Jewish man to come back the next day. He did so, and continued to write them 18-20 hours a day. He finally started to use blank paper and the embassy seal and flung them out of the train he was forced to take to go back to his nation. He reportedly told the man that he was so sorry and that he could not write anymore. He issued THOUSANDS of visas, many to heads of families who were permitted to take their families with them under the conditions of the visas. He wrote six thousand visas. The little Jewish man cleaning the cemetery was cleaning Sugihara-sama's grave.
The estimate of Jewish descendants from survivors are forty-thousand. Forty-thousand lives were saved by the action of a little Japanese man in an embassy. Not to mention that that figure is merely an investment that will continue to compound. That is truly staggering...and yet the only thing I could think, with fury, is that I had never even heard this man's name. The Kardasians and the Biebers and the parasites that dangle from the ass-end of what we call a culture to the forefront of every camera, will not be ignored...but not this humble man.
Tell everyone about this man. Print out his picture. Get a tattoo of his name in Japanese.
Contrast this to what we call heroes or Idols. How does our society justify any surrogate to heroes. We have heroes talked about in whispers like they're legends. But we talk about celebrities in real-time and on magazine covers. How many more supermen never even made a decent story to tell?
-Sin
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