Chiune Sugihara – Jewish Independent

War heroism recalled

Prof. George Bluman speaks at the 15th annual Raoul Wallenberg Day commemoration, Jan. 19. (photo by Masumi Kikuchi)

Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara was honoured in Vancouver this month with a lecture on his wartime heroism – by a man who owes his life to the actions of Sugihara when the diplomat served as consul for the Imperial Japanese government in Lithuania, near the start of the Second World War.

George Bluman, a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of British Columbia, spoke at the 15th annual Raoul Wallenberg Day commemoration Jan. 19, which was held at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre. The annual event is presented by the Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society and took place 75 years and two days after Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat in Hungary whose actions saved the lives of tens of thousands of Jews, was last seen alive. The actions of Sugihara, vice-consul of the Japanese embassy in Kaunas, Lithuania, paralleled those of Wallenberg in that he issued visas and took extraordinary actions to save the lives of the threatened Jews of Europe.

Bluman’s parents, Nathan and Susan Bluman, fled to Lithuania after Germany invaded Poland in 1939. There, they received transit visas from Sugihara, which enabled them to travel through the Soviet Union to Japan. They then obtained temporary permits to enter Canada and they were aboard the last ship sailing from Japan to Vancouver prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor.

An estimated 15% of Sugihara survivors became Canadians, many of them remaining in Vancouver, including the Bluman family, which has come to number 23, now including great-grandchildren of Susan and Nathan. It is estimated that Sugihara’s actions facilitated the escape of thousands of Jewish refugees.

In addition to the Sugihara descendants living in Vancouver, Bluman noted an additional local connection. On his way to Europe for the series of diplomatic postings that would lead to his heroic acts, Sugihara and his wife Yukiko arrived by ship in Vancouver in 1937, then took a transcontinental train to the East Coast to board another ship, which would take them to Europe.

A 2017 poll in a Tokyo publication rated Sugihara as the most important Japanese person ever. “Why?” Bluman asked. “Against advice from his superiors in Tokyo, he issued transit visas to Japan that ended up saving about 2,100 Jewish refugees who otherwise would have been likely murdered. Those saved included my parents as well as one of my uncles and his wife.… Perhaps as many as 40,000 people owe their lives due to the extraordinary heroic deeds of Sugihara.”

Two diplomats from the Netherlands played crucial roles in Sugihara’s heroics, Bluman said. After the Nazi occupation of that country, in May 1940, an anti-Nazi Dutch government-in-exile was established in London and remained in charge of all Dutch embassies. The anti-Nazi Dutch ambassador in Latvia, L.P.J. de Decker, dismissed his pro-Nazi Lithuanian honorary consul, replacing him with Jan Zwartendijk, a Dutch engineer heading Philips electronics in Kaunas.

“Two young Dutch rabbinical students approached Zwartendijk, requesting documentation to go to Curaçao, a Dutch colony in the West Indies, with the aim of traveling east through the Soviet Union, Japan, the Pacific Ocean and the Panama Canal to tiny Curaçao, an island off the coast of Venezuela, about one-sixth the size of Metro Vancouver. They also sought permits for their mostly Polish classmates.

“Why Curaçao?” asked Bluman. “Because no visa was required to enter Curaçao. The local governor had sole authority to permit entry. But this was rarely granted. Zwartendijk was given permission by de Decker, the Dutch ambassador in Riga [Latvia], to issue permits to Curaçao to their fellow rabbinical students that stated, in French, ‘A visa for entry is not required,’ leaving out the condition of the governor’s permission. Moreover, Zwartendijk courageously agreed to issue such permits to all Jewish refugees who applied for them.”

A delegation of Jewish refugees approached Sugihara about obtaining Japanese transit visas, a necessary step for the scheme’s success.

“Without permission from Tokyo, and after getting Soviet approval, signed by Stalin, for refugee transit through the Soviet Union, Sugihara issued transit visas valid for a stay of 10 days in Japan, based on the seemingly sufficient Zwartendijk Curaçao permits,” said Bluman. “Zwartendijk signed 2,300 such permits, until his office was forced to close on the day Lithuania was annexed by the Soviet Union.… The scam worked.”

With the annexation of the Baltic states to the Soviet Union, all foreign embassies were ordered closed. Though Zwartendijk left, Sugihara managed to stay on for a further four weeks to continue writing transit visas – even for Jews who had not obtained a visa from Zwartendijk.

“These Jews included my parents, who approached Sugihara’s office six days after Zwartendijk had left,” Bluman said.

Ultimately, about 80% of the Jewish refugees issued Sugihara visas survived and about three-quarters made it to Japan. Almost half carried on to Shanghai, China, to wait out the war.

Sugihara’s diplomatic career effectively ended in Romania, where he was posted at the end of the war. When the Soviets occupied Bucharest, Sugihara and his family were imprisoned in a prisoner-of-war camp for 18 months.

Back in Japan in 1946, Sugihara was dismissed from diplomatic service and spent the next several decades in low-key positions in Japan and Moscow. His retirement from service was ostensibly a matter of downsizing, but some have speculated that his heroic insubordination was a cause.

Only in 1968 did Sugihara learn that most of the Jews he had helped had survived. In 1985, he was recognized by the state of Israel, receiving the Righteous Among the Nations award from Yad Vashem, as well as perpetual Israeli citizenship for himself and his family. Zwartendijk was posthumously honoured in 1997. Sugihara died in 1986, at the age of 86. Bluman retains close contact with the family in Japan.

“In my family,” Bluman concluded, “there is one great hero we always carry in our hearts and to whom we will be forever grateful: Chiune Sugihara.”

After Bluman’s presentation, attendees watched the film Persona Non Grata: The Story of Chiune Sugihara. Earlier, Alan La Fevre, president of the Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society, welcomed guests, including the deputy mayor of the city of Vancouver, Christine Boyle, who read a proclamation declaring Raoul Wallenberg Day. Diplomats from Japan and Ukraine were in attendance.

The Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society was formed in 2013 by members of the Swedish and Jewish communities. The society continues the legacy of the annual Wallenberg Day events in Vancouver, recognizing and honouring individuals who, at great personal risk, have helped others by acting against unjust laws, norms or conventions.

Annual civil courage tribute

Chiune Sugihara, 1941. This year’s Raoul Wallenberg Day event includes the screening of Persona Non Grata: The Story of Chiune Sugihara. (photo from Vilnius-Green House exhibit)

On Sunday, Jan. 19, the 15th annual Raoul Wallenberg Day event pays tribute to courageous actions by diplomats Raoul Wallenberg of Sweden and Chiune Sugihara of Japan. During the Second World War, they engaged in selfless acts of civil courage, at grave risk to themselves and their families, to rescue many tens of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust.

This year, the Vancouver-based Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society focuses on the story of Sugihara. The event features a showing of the biographical film drama Persona Non Grata: The Story of Chiune Sugihara. As a consular official for Japan in eastern Europe during the Second World War, Sugihara saved thousands of refugees by issuing transit visas that allowed people to escape Nazi German forces. Once reviled in Japan, today Sugihara is considered a hero, with museums and a memorial site.

The keynote speaker on Jan. 19 is George Bluman, a local descendent of Sugihara visa recipients and an international expert on Sugihara’s life. Some of those saved by his visas ended up in Vancouver and other parts of Canada.

When possible, the Civil Courage Society also presents an award to an individual associated with British Columbia who, at significant personal risk, helped improve the lives of others while defying unjust laws or norms, past or present. Past recipients include Hon. Ujjal Dosanjh, Chief Robert Joseph and Mary Kitagawa. Their stories inspire Canadians to act with courage and live by their moral values.

This year’s event – sponsored by the estate of Frank and Rosie Nelson, and supported by several organizations and volunteers – is being held at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre, and it begins at 1 p.m. Admission is free; donations are appreciated. A reception follows. For more information, visit wsccs.ca. New volunteers and nominations for the Civil Courage Award are always welcomed.

On road to reconciliation

The Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society will honor Chief Dr. Robert Joseph, ambassador for Reconciliation Canada, on Jan. 17. (photo from Jack P. Blaney Awards, Simon Fraser University)

The release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada report last year was a turning point in the relationship between Canada and its aboriginal peoples. It is part of a longer and ongoing trajectory of healing, according to Chief Dr. Robert Joseph, who is being honored this weekend as a courageous civic leader.

The Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society was founded by members of the local Jewish and Swedish communities, including the honorary Swedish consul, to recognize individuals who help others at great risk to themselves. Joseph, hereditary chief of the Gwawaenuk First Nation on northern Vancouver Island, is the recipient of this year’s Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Award.

photo - Chief Dr. Robert Joseph — Chief Dr. Robert Joseph *(photo from Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society )*

Joseph is ambassador for Reconciliation Canada, an organization intended to “revitalize the relationships among indigenous peoples and all Canadians,” and a member of the National Assembly of First Nations Elders Council.

“At significant personal risk and after facing severe oppression, Chief Dr. Robert Joseph courageously stood up against social injustice to help others,” notes the award citation. “As a residential school survivor, he courageously chose to publicly share his story and the consequences of the abuse and trauma he had endured. This was at a time when the indigenous community was conflicted about bringing the experiences in the residential schools to light and when the larger community was in denial about what happened. Chief Dr. Robert Joseph chose to turn his experience into a vehicle for healing through reconciliation and a will to make sure that this would never happen again.”

In an interview with the Independent, Joseph discussed the progress toward healing his community has made in recent decades.

“Our First Nations people were absolutely in deep despair, not understanding what had happened to us over the course of all that time that residential schools existed,” he said. “But, in the last 20 years, we’ve made remarkable, remarkable progress. And one of the breakthroughs in all of that was survivors like myself began to feel confident enough to tell our stories. We had been walking around in deep shame and despair and brokenness and suddenly we found a way to begin to tell our story.”

A crucial first step, he said, was the federal government’s 1998 Statement of Reconciliation. Though the statement itself was equivocal and not universally appreciated, Joseph said, it was accompanied by funds for survivors and resources for the affected communities.

“I was part of the movement because I was executive director for the Indian Residential School Survivors Society, which was the only organization of its kind at the time,” he said. “So, we began to hold meetings and circles where circles of survivors began to tell their stories and it was deeply, deeply liberating.”

The process expanded, he said, to include representatives of the churches who were complicit in the schools system and later the government and other Canadians.

“We began to recognize that indeed there is a common humanity that exists between all of us and if we can’t harness that common humanity, we’re going to always have these atrocities going on around the world,” he said. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a culmination of that progress and Joseph is uplifted by the response of Canadians since the report’s release last year.

“We’ve had a tremendous interest and response from many Canadians about their desire to reconcile,” he said. Even so, the impact of the report was double-edged, he said.

“When the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report was submitted in June, it said that because of a whole number of initiatives and policies, Canada had created, impacted, effected a cultural genocide against the aboriginal people of this country,” he explained. “For me, even as I sat and listened to that, it was sort of a bittersweet report. On the one hand, all of our suffering had been acknowledged and identified in this report. But, on the other hand, as a country together, you and I and everyone who are Canadians were told that genocide was a part of our history.”

He added that he is humbled to receive the Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Award, which is named in honor of Raoul Wallenberg and Chiune Sugihara, diplomats who, during the Second World War, risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazis.

“I’m really moved by the idea that people who suffered huge indignities, human suffering, who have been through it all like no one else has before, are thinking that somebody as little as I am can be acknowledged by them,” Joseph said.

As he prepares to receive his award, the chief said he is optimistic that Canada is at a crossroad.

“We are so blessed in this country,” he said. “We have all of the rainbow and color of the human race here and we have a chance to engage with each other, to nurture our relationships, to embrace our differences and indeed celebrate them.… But it calls us to our highest order as Canadians to be all that we can be in treating each other with respect and dignity because there is nothing more important than respect and dignity. I think that we are on the right path.”

Joseph will receive his award at an event on Sunday, Jan. 17, at 1:30 p.m., in the Wosk Auditorium at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver. The ceremony will be followed by the screening of the film Carl Lutz: The Forgotten Hero, about a Swiss diplomat in Budapest who saved tens of thousands of Jews from the Nazis.

Consuls save thousands of lives

Consul General of Japan Seiji Okada, centre, Yasuko Okada and Dr. George Bluman. (photo from Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre)

There are Vancouverites who owe their lives to the wartime actions of the then-obscure Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara. The mid-level official, vice-consul in Lithuania for the imperial government of Japan, disobeying explicit and repeated orders, in 1940 issued Japanese transit visas to Jewish refugees fleeing the advancing Nazi onslaught.

Two of the people who received the visas were Nathan and Susan Bluman. Their son, Dr. George Bluman, delivered the keynote address Sunday at the 33rd annual Kristallnacht commemoration event, presented by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre in partnership with Congregation Beth Israel.

Bluman recounted the story of Sugihara’s life and the motivations for his actions, then addressed the magnitude of those events on his own family.

“There are thousands of stories like my parents’,” said Bluman, noting that this one family’s story is barely a footnote in the Sugihara narrative, but it means “the entire world for me and my family.”

Bluman, professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of British Columbia, said his parents were two of about 2,100 people who received life-giving visas from the Japanese consular official. Approximately another 600 individuals were aided by being included in the visas of others, mostly their parents, and perhaps 25% more were helped in their survival by forged versions of Sugihara visas.

Bluman explained that, after Germany invaded Poland and divvied the country up with the Soviet Union, many Jews fled to the Soviet-occupied portion. Unable to flee to the west, and having been denied entry by most Western countries, Jews were effectively trapped.

Nathan Bluman and his fiancée Susan lived in Warsaw, which was occupied by the Nazis. Nathan fled to the Soviet-occupied east and prevailed upon Susan to join him, which she did, though her father forbade them from marrying without his permission.

“She would never again see any of her parents or siblings,” Bluman said.

While Germany had occupied the Netherlands, Dutch embassies and consulates worldwide remained loyal to the Dutch government-in-exile, located in London. Jan Zwartendijk, the Dutch consul in Lithuania, began issuing visas to Curaçao, the Dutch colony in the Caribbean. Jewish refugees, including many Polish Jews like Nathan and Susan Bluman, made their way to Lithuania in hopes of obtaining a ticket to safety.

When the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania in 1940, all foreign embassies and consulates were ordered closed. In the short window available, the Dutch consul, with the support of his superiors in the government-in-exile, issued visas for Jewish refugees to enter Curaçao.

However, while Polish and Lithuanian Jewish refugees were free to travel in the Soviet Union, they could not go further without a visa to another country. That made a Japanese transit visa priceless.

While there is no evidence that Zwartendijk and Sugihara ever met, it was their combined actions that are credited with saving thousands of lives. While Zwartendijk acted with the authority of his superiors, Sugihara ignored explicit orders not to issue transit visas, an act of extraordinary disobedience for a mid-level Japanese bureaucrat and an action that not only put his job on the line, but threatened the lives of himself and his family.

Sugihara handwrote the visas day and night, issuing the equivalent of an average month’s worth of visas every day in the weeks before the consulate was forcibly closed by the Soviets.

The combination of a Dutch visa to Curaçao and a transit visa for Japan allowed refugees to make the arduous journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok, board a ship to a Japanese port, take a train to Kobe and, in various ways, survive the war. In many cases, the refugees became stateless people, interned first in Japan and then in Japanese-occupied Shanghai.

Bluman’s parents managed to get on one of the last two ships heading to North America before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor launched Japan and the United States into a state of war and made passage impossible.

The Bluman family’s fate was influenced by one of those fortunate flukes that occurs in history. While in Japan, Nathan Bluman ran into an old professor from school in Warsaw, who told him that a ship, the Hei Maru, was to leave for Vancouver the next day. Bluman raced to the Canadian consulate to request one of the 25 visas being offered to skilled workers and it was granted. There were no provisions for spouses but Susan Bluman, using some sort of extraordinary persuasive power, managed to get the Canadian official to include her on her husband’s visa and they boarded the ship the same day, arriving in Vancouver on July 9, 1941.

That single transit visa was responsible for 17 lives, including Nathan and Susan Bluman, their children and grandchildren and three great-grandchildren born this year.

George Bluman estimates that, in all, 30,000 people worldwide owe their lives to Sugihara. Yet, it was not until 1968, when a survivor contacted him, that Sugihara began to understand the magnitude of what he had done during the war. In 1985, he was named by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous Among the Nations.

Sugihara died in 1986, as did Nathan Bluman. But the Bluman and Sugihara families have had a long association and friendship that remains strong today to the third generation.

The event Sunday night at Beth Israel began with a solemn candlelight procession of local survivors of the Holocaust.

The annual event commemorates Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” a government-initiated pogrom across Germany and Austria on the night of Nov. 9-10, 1938. Hundreds of synagogues were burned, Jewish-owned businesses were destroyed, nearly 100 Jews were killed and 30,000 were sent to concentration camps.

Prof. Chris Friedrichs, a member of the commemoration’s organizing committee, noted that the Holocaust ended 70 years ago with the Allied defeat of the Nazi regime. But when did it begin? Kristallnacht is often cited as the moment when the increasingly repressive policies of the Hitler dictatorship turned into the violence that would culminate in the “Final Solution.”

But Friedrichs said that the Holocaust was not so much a direct result of events of that fateful night.

“It is what did not happen in the days that followed,” he said. After a day or two of headlines worldwide, said Friedrichs, there was nothing more. The world’s reaction, or lack of it, was the signal the Nazis needed to be assured that their policies of eliminating those “deemed unworthy of life” would meet with no resistance from the world community.

Referring to the procession of candle-bearing survivors that had just preceded him, Friedrichs said, “a candle may not seem very heavy to you.” But each of the survivors who mounted the bimah, said Friedrichs, belonged to a family, many of whom were almost completely destroyed, and the candles represent not just their families or hundreds or thousands of people, but millions.

Vancouver City Councillor

Andrea Reimer, deputy mayor of the city, broke down in tears while reading the mayor’s proclamation after telling the audience how the history of the Holocaust tests for faith in humanity.

Beth Israel’s Rabbi Jonathan Infeld thanked Bluman and expressed gratitude that Bluman is a member of his congregation.

“You are a key component of maintaining the history of the Holocaust in our community,” Infeld said.

Arthur Guttman, cantor emeritus of Temple Sholom, chanted El Moleh Rachamim, the memorial prayer for the martyrs. Ed Lewin, president of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, introduced the survivors. Gary Miller, president of Beth Israel, introduced Reimer. Bluman was introduced by Prof. Richard Menkis, a member of the Kristallnacht commemoration organizing committee.

A day to honor civil courage

Left to right: Andrea Reimer, Judith Guichon, Henry Grayman, Thomas Gradin, Ujjal Dosanjh and Ezra Shanken, chief executive officer of Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver. (photo by Wendy Fouks)

Ujjal Dosanjh, former premier of British Columbia and one-time federal cabinet minister, was recognized for civil courage at a ceremony at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver on Jan. 18. The event marked the annual Wallenberg Day commemoration in the city, and the award was bestowed in the name of two extraordinary individuals whose actions during the Second World War resulted in the survival of tens of thousands of European Jews.

Dosanjh is the first recipient of the Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Award. In particular, Dosanjh was recognized for speaking out about political and religious violence in Canada’s Sikh community – notably, a warning in 1985 that Sikh extremism in India could target Canadians. A few months later, 280 Canadians were among 329 people killed when Air India Flight 182 was bombed. More generally, Dosanjh was recognized for a lifetime of contributions to British Columbia and Canada. (See story in the Jan. 9, 2015, issue of the Independent.)

The first annual award was presented at the 10th anniversary commemoration of Wallenberg Day, which honors Raoul Wallenberg who, as a Swedish diplomat in Budapest, issued visas that saved thousands of Jews. The Soviet military entered Hungary in January 1945, and Wallenberg was detained on suspicion of subversive activities. He was never seen again. The commemoration, which was initiated by Anders Neumuller, a former honorary Swedish consul to Vancouver, is now presented by the Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society, which, along with Wallenberg, commemorates Chiune Sugihara, a consular representative of Imperial Japan in Lithuania who, similar to Wallenberg, issued visas that allowed thousands of Jews to escape Nazi-occupied Europe.

Henry Grayman, president of the society, explained that it was founded in 2013 by Swedes and Jews to honor and encourage acts of civil courage like those exemplified by Sugihara and Wallenberg.

The impact of acts of civil courage was made evident by Grayman’s wife, Deborah Ross-Grayman, who emceed the afternoon event. She credits her life to the war-era acts of Sugihara.

“I am the breath and the face of civil courage,” she said. “My own mother, Niuta Ramm, was the recipient of such a visa…. I live each day in gratitude for what has been given to me.”

She invited others in the audience whose survival could be credited to the acts of individuals like Sugihara or Wallenberg to stand, and close to a dozen people rose from their seats.

“As you see, one person can make a difference,” she said.

photo - Ujjal Dosanjh — Ujjal Dosanjh *(photo by Wendy Fouks)*

On stage with British Columbia’s Lt.-Gov. Judith Guichon and Sweden’s honorary consul to Vancouver, Thomas Gradin, Dosanjh received the award but deflected the accolades.

“I am absolutely humbled,” Dosanjh said. “It’s a great honor to be recognized in the names of Raoul Wallenberg and Chiune Sugihara.”

In turn, he said, he accepted the recognition in the name of victims of violence in recent days at Charlie Hebdo and the Jewish supermarket in Paris. He also gave thanks to his heroes – including his grandfather, and Mahatma Gandhi, “the father of the nation I deserted to become Canadian” – and also those who have stood by him during difficult times.

“Terrorism in the name of religion is at war with us,” Dosanjh said. “The venom that moves them leads them to not understand our common humanity. These infidels are not true to our common humanity.”

The lieutenant-governor said Dosanjh has “devoted his life to standing firm against injustice and against violence … he’s served and served.”

The viceroy added that it is more important than ever to celebrate and sing the praises of heroes with at least the vigor “as that with which the deeds of villains are reported.”

Deputy Mayor and Vancouver City Councilor Andrea Reimer brought greetings from the city and read a proclamation from the mayor. She urged people to take the opportunity in 2015 to prove that actions make a difference.

“We have a choice to act, or we have a choice to regret that we didn’t act,” she said.

In addition to Sweden’s Gradin, consular representatives were also in attendance representing Japan, Switzerland and Mongolia.

After the presentation, a feature-length film was screened. The Rescuers features diplomats and government officials from diverse places whose actions saved the lives of thousands of Europe’s imperiled Jews.

Pat Johnson is a Vancouver writer and principal in PRsuasiveMedia.com.

Mourning turns to joy

Passover is a traditional time for families to sit down together and celebrate a holiday of freedom and deliverance. It’s a time to catch up and share meaningful moments. For one family torn apart by the Second World War, this Passover held a special significance as they caught up on nearly 70 years of history.

For 65 years, Holocaust survivor Rabbi Gershon Chanowitz said Kaddish for his sister, Asna Mera, who he believed had been murdered by the Nazis in 1942. And, for more than half a century, Asna Mera thought that all of her siblings had perished in the Holocaust, leaving her a lone survivor. But thanks to an incredible turn of events, the children of these survivors have learned of each other’s existence and have been reunited. With a shot-in-the-dark Google search and an implausible email, the long-lost Chanowitz cousins began unearthing a mystery spanning six decades and three continents.

A mysterious email

“About a week ago, my son, Moishe, the Chabad emissary [to St. Maarten], received an email through his Chabad website from someone in Israel searching for any news of his relatives,” said Rabbi Ben Zion Chanowitz, a Chabad emissary in Monticello, N.Y., and the son of Gershon Chanowitz – who passed away this past summer at the age of 91.

An excerpt from the email (grammatically edited) read:

“Shalom. I don’t speak English well…. I am from Vitebsk, Belarus. My name is Sashe Bumginz. My mother’s surname was Chanowitz from the shtetl of Glubokoe in the Vitebsk region. In the war, all of my family perished. I am interested in all information on Chanowitz from Glubokoe.”

“I was skeptical at first,” admitted Chanowitz. “We know all of our relatives, after all.” But then a follow up email “shook everything I knew.” Bumginz sent another email detailing his family history with names, places and dates that matched up exactly with Chanowitz’s. He explained how his mother, who passed away in 2007, survived the war and raised a family. As far as he knew, no other close family survived, but he was always searching for any information he could find on his family history.

Suddenly, the largely American-based Chanowitz family was electrified. Could their father’s sister have survived the war? Could they have cousins they hadn’t known existed?

Bumginz grew up in Soviet Russia and eventually moved to Israel in the early ’90s, where he is currently living in Herzilyah with his wife and two children. When he first arrived in Israel he contacted the Holocaust centre and museum Yad Vashem, as well as other resources over the years, attempting to seek out any information they might have on his mother’s family, but every search reached a dead end.

In March 2014, on Purim, Bumginz was invited by a Chabad co-worker to a farbrengen, a Chassidic gathering to celebrate the holiday. At the farbrengen, Bumginz opened up about his history and mentioned that his family, Chanowitz, has been Chabad for generations. He asked around if anyone knew the name, and one participant mentioned that there were Chabad emissaries with that name and suggested that Bumginz use Google to find them. A short search led to the Chanowitz family of St. Maarten, and the email above was received and then forwarded to Ben Zion Chanowitz.

An email exchange ensued.

“Many of us are excited and emotional about this special family news,” said Rebbetzin Simie Schtrocks, Gershon’s daughter. Schtrocks resides in South Surrey, serving as co-director of the Centre for Judaism, Chabad’s branch serving the Lower Fraser Valley.

“It is mind blowing that after 65 years plus we should now find out that Asna Mera actually did survive, had two children and lived in Vitebsk of all places. How tragic it is that she was unaware that the Lubavitch world had continued to flourish and that she had brothers 6,000 miles away who would have been thrilled to help her.”

As the family digests this news, they are slowly discovering stories explaining the years of misinformation, and uncovering many painful details along the way.

Gershon’s story

In the early 1920s, Gershon Chanowitz was born in the town of Glubokoe, in what was then Poland, a border city that has belonged to Lithuania, Poland, Russia and Belarus in the previous 100 years. He was one of 10 children in a dynastic Chabad Chassidic family. His father, Ben Zion, was a shochet (ritual slaughterer), a follower of the previous Lubavitcher rebbe, and an important figure in the small town of 5,000 Jews.

Gershon was sent at a young age to learn in a yeshivah in Otwock, Poland, and he was there in 1941 after the war broke out. At the advice of the previous Lubavitcher rebbe, he escaped north to Warsaw and then Vilna. He found out about Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese ambassador to Kovno, who was signing visas that saved some 2,000 Jewish lives. He obtained visas for three of his siblings, and snuck back to Glubokoe to beg his father to allow him to add his youngest brother, Yisroel, to a forged family passport, allowing him to leave as well. Ben Zion, his wife and the other children stayed behind. Gershon procured visa #1785 for himself, #1836 for his oldest sister Fruma, #1841 for his brother Shmuel Avraham and #2027 for young Yisroel. It was just in time too – the last issued visa was #2039.

The four siblings traveled to Kobe, Japan, and then Shanghai, China, where they resided until they could obtain visas to the United States. During that time, Shmuel Avraham died of an illness in Shanghai. When the war was over, they corresponded with different services seeking any information about their remaining family and discovered that their parents and siblings had been killed. A fifth brother, Chaim, escaped the war, and moved to the newly founded state of Israel and then to America. Eventually, the other three siblings made it to the United States and started rebuilding their lives, establishing the large families that exist today.

When the surviving siblings in the West sought out information on exactly what had happened to their family, they learned that, one day, when the Nazis arrived in town seeking to fill a “death quota,” they went about town killing people. The remaining Chanowitz family barricaded themselves in their house. At one point, they heard desperate banging on the door and 16-year-old Asna Mera, anguished at the thought that it might be a Jew seeking refuge, and despite her family’s protest, answered the door. The German soldier standing there grabbed her and took her away to be killed. The rest of the family was killed a year later in another mass murder.

Gershon and his surviving siblings, Chaim, Yisroel and Fruma, marked their parents’ and siblings’ passing every year, and said Kaddish for them throughout their lives.

Asna Mera’s story

The day that Asna Mera opened the door to the Nazi, she was taken to a soccer field with about 800-900 other Jews. They were then boarded onto trucks to be taken to be executed. On the way, a German commander picked her, and 14 other young beautiful girls, to be taken to a German army base to be among the soldiers. At one point, Asna Mera was with a soldier who had a large knife on his belt. She grabbed the knife and stabbed him to death, running away into the woods.

In the woods, she eventually met up with her 12-year-old brother, Tzvi Hersh, who had also escaped. The two siblings were freezing in the brutal winter and starving. They remembered that their well-respected father had a non-Jewish farmer friend in a nearby town to whom he once gave a large down coat and an expensive ring. They decided to go ask the farmer, who their father had always trusted, for the coat so they could survive. Scared to go together, Tzvi Hersh went first and knocked on the door. The farmer opened the door and grabbed the young boy, tied him up and gave him to the police in exchange for a 10-kilogram bag of flour. Tzvi Hersh was hanged that day.

Asna Mera miraculously survived the war, thinking she was a lone survivor. In her attempts to find her siblings, she traced them to Vilna but then their trails disappeared. She never found out what happened to them. At age 39, she married and moved to Vitebsk, which at that point was a part of Soviet Russia. She had two sons, one Simeon/Ben Zion, named after her father, and another, Sashe/Sholom Ber. Despite communism’s harsh shadow, she raised them as religious Jews.

After the fall of the Iron Curtain, Sashe moved to Israel. Asna Mera once visited in the early 2000s, and went to Yad Vashem herself, where she again tried to seek out more information to no avail.

After the war, Asna Mera discovered the heartbreaking news that the day after she killed the German soldier, the Nazis returned to Glubokoe and killed 150 people in retaliation. She suffered under the shadow of this horrific event all her life.

“She had very little happiness in life,” said Sashe. “She went through so much during the war.” And, when her oldest son Ben Zion was brutally killed while serving in the Russian army (he was thrown off a train by his comrades), she was devastated anew. “She was always quiet and withdrawn and broken.”

“We all wish she at least had happiness,” said Schtroks upon learning the news. “And she still did from her surviving son, passing down the family tradition and maintaining a legacy. We are just sad that although my father and his siblings tried so hard to find missing relatives, they did not find her in time to help her and ameliorate her situation.”

A family reunited

Despite the painful history that they learned along the way, the Chanowitz and Bumginz family are overjoyed at the discovery of one another, and eagerly looked forward to an emotional meeting in person after the Passover holiday. Benson, the son of Yisroel Chanowitz, was the first one of the family to meet Sashe during the intermediate days of Passover last week.

Rabbi Ben Zion Chanowitz recalled a story of his father during his yeshivah years in Poland right before the war, when he had the unique opportunity to observe the Passover seder of the previous Lubavitcher rebbe.

“A Chassid at the table asked the rebbe how we can be celebrating the holiday of freedom while we are still in exile – suffering under the threat of communist Russia and Nazi Germany. The rebbe sagely replied that ‘The redemption in Egypt showed us that you can leave, even if you are in the deepest exile.’”

This year, as Jewish families all over the world gathered to retell the miracles of old, they had a biblical obligation to feel “like they themselves left Egypt.” As they relived their family history, both the darkest moments and the miraculous survival, the Chanowitz and Bumginz families celebrated the miracle of redemption like never before.

– This article was originally published on lubavitch.com and is reprinted with permission.