Chiune Sugihara

Go see Courage Now

Left to right, Katherine Matlashewski (as Shayna Schneider), Advah Soudack (as Margaret Grant) and Amitai Marmorstein (as Jankl Schneider) in Courage Now, playing at the Firehall Arts Centre until Dec. 4. (photo by Youn Park)

One does not often get a chance to see a world première of a play in Vancouver. After writing my preview article on Courage Now in the last edition of the Independent, I was looking forward with great anticipation to seeing the final product. I was not disappointed.

It is a difficult story to tell but it is done with such sensitivity and style that I highly recommend seeing it. As a child of a Holocaust survivor, any story of courage and heroism arising out of that era resonates with me – this one in particular had me in tears.

From the moment you walk into the intimate Firehall Arts Centre theatre, you know you are about to see something special. The set is austere – a desk, a bench, a lattice-like trellis, an empty wall-mounted picture frame – with a pagoda-style roof and an archway backlit with vibrant colours. (Kudos to set designer Kimira Reddy and lighting designer Itai Erdal.)

To summarize the backstory, Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul in Kaunas, Lithuania, in 1940, against the instructions of his government, issued more than 2,300 handwritten visas in a 30-day period to save Jews trying to leave Poland and Lithuania. He was supported in his decision by his wife, Yukiko, who knew the price the family would pay for going against the government edicts. And a price was paid: career loss, humiliation and Sugihara’s self-imposed postwar exile to Russia for 16 years.

The play follows what appear to be two separate narratives that intersect in an unexpected way in the final scene. In 1986, Yukiko (playwright Manami Hara) is forced to revisit wartime when a visitor from Vancouver, Margaret Grant, born Shayna Schneider (Advah Soudack), comes for answers from Sugihara as to what happened to her father after he put her on a train out of Kaunas when she was 13 years old. She has resented her father through the years, feeling abandoned and betrayed by his sending her off alone; she is also coping with a difficult divorce and her own daughter’s hatred. Sugihara has recently died, however, and Margaret must turn to Yukiko for answers instead.

The play opens with Yukiko waking from a dream where she is visited by the ghost of her husband. Then Margaret enters her garden. She tells Yukiko, “I am a Sugihara Jew, Sempo saved my life.” The play then moves through a series of memory flashbacks, as the audience is transported back and forth between 1940 Kaunas and 1986 Japan.

Katherine Matlashewski plays the teenage Shayna and Amitai Marmorstein plays her father, Jankl. Jankl visits Sugihara (Ryota Kaneko) to plead for visas on behalf of the thousands of Jews who have been lining up every day outside the consul’s office. In a touching and poignant scene, something as simple as a shared cup of coffee gives you a sense of the integrity and honour of these two men as they strive to do the right thing. Kaneko plays Sugihara with a quiet intensity and Marmorstein portrays Jankl with dignity. The scene where he sees Shayna off at the train station is heartbreaking – he watches his only child (his “little mouse,” as he calls her) walk away from him, tattered suitcase in hand, in a fog of smoke and the eerie sound of a train whistle in the distance.

photo - Ryota Kaneko plays Chiune Sugihara and Courage Now playwright Manami Hara takes on the role of Yukiko Sugihara — Ryota Kaneko plays Chiune Sugihara and Courage Now playwright Manami Hara takes on the role of Yukiko Sugihara. (photo by Youn Park)

In many ways, the journeys of the two women are love stories. Yukiko grapples with the grief of losing her husband, moving through the stages towards acceptance, and Margaret comes to the realization that it was her father’s love that put her on that train in 1940. Both characters become conduits for the other’s catharsis. When Yukiko shares her husband’s journal from that time, Margaret says, “My father lives in that journal.”

All five of the actors do credit to their roles in this ensemble piece but Hara and Soudack’s performances are sublime. The play is particularly effective when all five actors are on stage at the same time in the memory flashback vignettes.

My one criticism is that there is quite a bit of Japanese dialogue between Kaneko and Hara and it would have been helpful to have either a reader board translating or a program insert with translations.

Hara has penned a lovely tribute to Sugihara and I, for one, am grateful to her for her work.

Courage Now is at the Firehall until Dec. 4. For tickets, visit firehallartscentre.ca.

Tova Kornfeld is a Vancouver freelance writer and lawyer.

New play honours Sugihara

Yukiko and Chiune Sugihara (photo from Firehall Arts Centre)

It is written in the Mishnah that, “If you save the life of one person, it is as if you save the entire world.” Chiune Sugihara saved 6,000 Jewish lives – 6,000 worlds – in the summer of 1940, despite the dangers of doing so to himself and his family.

A new play about Sugihara sees its world première at the Firehall Arts Centre this month. Written by Japanese-Canadian actor and playwright Manami Hara, Courage Now opens Nov. 19.

Contrary to his government’s strict instructions to not issue visas to Jewish refugees, Sugihara, the Japanese consul in Kaunas (Kovno), Lithuania, handwrote in a 30-day period more than 2,300 visas for Jews trying to escape from Europe via the Soviet Union to Japan. Sugihara was a husband, a father, a career diplomat, a linguist, but, above all, with his strict Samurai upbringing, he believed in respect for, and sanctity of, human life. As he said, “They were human beings and they needed help.”

Sugihara’s actions are responsible for more than 40,000 Jews being alive today. Yet, after the war, the Japanese government dismissed him from diplomatic service and treated him as a persona non grata. However, Israel has honoured his courage and his memory on three occasions – in 1985, by recognizing him as one of the Righteous Among the Nations at Yad Vashem; in 2016, by naming a street in Netanya after him; and, in October 2021, by dedicating Sugihara Square in Jerusalem.

In an interview with the Independent, playwright and actor Hara talked about the journey that led her to write Courage Now.

“About 12 years ago, my mentor from Studio 58, Jane Heyman, approached me and asked if I knew about Sugihara and I said that I did not. She told me his story, that her parents and uncle had been saved by him and that she would not be here if not for his actions. We talked about collaborating on a play. Her story and my being Japanese made it very personal for me, as I was very embarrassed by how the Japanese government treated him after 1945.”

Getting a play from conception to the stage is a long process.

“I heard that a Japanese playwright, Hiraishi Koichi, had written about Sugihara. I got a hold of his play, translated it into English and worked with Jane on it but it just did not seem dramatic enough,” said Hara. “I talked to Koichi and asked if I could adapt the play and he gave me permission. So, I researched the Jewish families who were Sugihara survivors and created more scenes. But it still did not seem to have the theatrical weight it needed to be a success so I put it away for a couple years, as I felt I had lost my vision.

“About five years ago, I traveled to Japan and had a chance to speak to Sugihara’s daughter-in-law and two of his grandchildren, which gave me a firsthand intimate look into his life and that of Yukiko, his wife. Then it dawned on me that the way to tell the story was from two female points of view, that of Yukiko and of a child survivor, Margaret. So, I went back to the story and after many years of writing drafts and workshopping, here we are.”

There are five characters in the play: Sugihara, Yukiko, a young Margaret, an adult Margaret (Jewish community member Advah Soudak) and young Margaret’s father (community member Amitai Marmorstein). Margaret is a fictional character, created from the stories of many survivors. Scenes are set up to move between the Lithuanian summer of 1940 and mid-1980s Vancouver, where an adult Margaret now lives.

Hara does double duty in this production, as the playwright and performing as Yukiko. “It is difficult to switch, wearing both hats, you feel like you have a split personality,” she acknowledged. “However, I take off my playwright hat and then I concentrate on my character in terms of what are her needs, where should I be focused and what is happening with the other characters. So, when I am on stage, I am the actor and I let the director take over from there. If he or the other actors see anything that needs tweaking or fixing, they will let me know. It is a very collaborative process. We are three weeks from opening and still finalizing many of the details.”

Hara sees her character as a spirited, stubborn, strong woman, not as stereotypically subservient, but rather as someone who also was idealistic and who was supportive of her husband in all that he did. “She knew the risk to her family and the sacrifice that would have to be made in carrying out her husband’s plan to save the Jewish refugees,” said Hara. “It is an amazing role and I am so honoured to be able to bring this story to Vancouver audiences. I hope the audience takes away that there is always hope, that there is always a way to find courage to walk towards that hope and one should never give up.”

Director Amiel Gladstone got involved in the project, having worked with Hara before.

“She was looking for the right kind of collaborative director for the show and she reached out to me because I work so much with new plays,” said Gladstone in a telephone interview with the Independent. “She told me that she had been hoping for a Jewish director…. I told her that my father was Jewish.”

As to the play, he said, “It is a memory play dealing with two women trying to piece together what happened to them years ago during those dark times. We had to create a space that includes both 1940 and present-day locations: a Japanese home and garden, a Jewish refugee apartment, the Kaunas consul office, a park, the train station, with all the locations in view at the same time. It becomes a dream world, where the actors move from set to set as they go back and forth in time. Itai Erdal’s lighting design will inform the audience as to the change in time and place.” (Erdal is also a member of the Jewish community.)

Soudack’s character, in her 50s, is going through a difficult separation and divorce. In an interview with the Independent, Soudack explained, “She realizes that she has a big hole in life, as she does not know what happened to her parents. She travels to Japan to seek out Sugihara and to ask about her father but learns that Sugihara is dead (he died in 1986) so she looks to Yukiko for answers. At the same time, Yukiko is also going back and remembering that time through her interaction with Margaret.”

Soudack had to grapple with capturing the essence of Margaret’s psychological issues, including post-traumatic stress disorder.

“She has broken pieces of memory that she wants to fit together. She has had a difficult life,” said Soudack. “It must have been terrifying to be leaving your family, everything you know and being put on a train and sent off on your own. She has a lot of anger, sadness and abandonment and betrayal issues. She does not form close loving relationships very easily, as she learned that people closest to her disappear. She has to work through all this as she seeks the truth.”

Working with Hara has been a treat, said Soudack. “It is fabulous with the playwright right there so, when a question comes up, she can give us the explanation. It is a beautiful sense of collaboration, respect, joy and appreciation of what she wrote and it is a gift to be right there with her working through this project.”

As to being a Jewish actor in this role, she said, “As a Jewish person, you grow up with the Holocaust and the plight of the Jews – it is so part of our DNA that, when you come across a story and people that you never heard of, it makes you have such gratitude and respect for these non-Jewish heroes who, in the face of so much antisemitism, still found the courage to do the right thing. If I could meet Mr. Sugihara, I would hug him, look him in his eyes and thank him for his bravery and courage.”

Courage Now runs to Dec. 4. For tickets, visit firehallartscentre.ca or call the box office, 604-689-0926.

Tova Kornfeld is a Vancouver freelance writer and lawyer.

Health workers’ courage

Judith Anderson speaks at the Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society’s Raoul Wallenberg Day event last month. (photo by Masumi Kikuchi)

This year’s commemoration of Raoul Wallenberg Day took place April 10 at Congregation Beth Israel because COVID-19 restrictions prevented the gathering in January. The event honoured the courage of B.C. frontline healthcare providers during the pandemic.

Hosted by the Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society, Judith Anderson welcomed attendees. She asked them to take a moment of silence to think about Ukraine and “all the victims of this humanitarian crisis, and to thank the countries welcoming refugees, especially Ukraine’s closest neighbours – Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Moldova and Hungary. In addition, let’s remember the many organizations and volunteers who are stepping forward to help.”

Anderson spoke about gratitude. “We are blessed to live in a peaceful society, where threads of various cultures are woven together to make a fabric that is stronger and warmer than any of the threads would be alone. Let’s recognize two special qualities of that fortunate fabric that we are thankful for today.

“First, we appreciate our shared land. Here in Vancouver, we are meeting on the unceded territories of Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh people. We thank them for sharing, and for having cared for these lands and waters for thousands of years.

“Second, we are thankful for our health care. Modern medicine has developed from diverse cultural threads, including science, people skills, systems management and the professional commitment of thousands of healthcare providers. Our routine expectations of health and longevity could scarcely have been imagined, just 100 years ago.

“And today,” she continued, “we are thankful, in particular, for the civil courage of those who have provided health care to British Columbians during the COVID-19 pandemic. They have faced a new, deadly, communicable disease with unknown risks to their own and their families’ health. They have worked to exhaustion under the most stressful conditions, saving lives and comforting families. Then, when vaccines became available, healthcare workers extended themselves yet more to immunize us all. Unfortunately, as some people have tired of public health restrictions, medical workers have been subjected to harassment and threats. And still they are there for us when we need health care, whatever the problem might be.”

Deputy Mayor Christine Boyle read the Raoul Wallenberg Day proclamation from the City of Vancouver, recognizing Jan. 17 as the day of its commemoration.

The Civil Courage Society’s Alan Le Fevre introduced the three speakers: Barb Nederpel, president of the Hospital Employees Union of British Columbia; Sherri Kensall, board chair of the Nurses and Nurse Practitioners of British Columbia; and Dr. Ramneek Dosanjh, president of the Doctors of British Columbia. They described the challenges and courageous responses of hospital workers, nursing professionals and doctors during the COVID pandemic.

The one-hour documentary Zero to Zero was screened at the event. Filmed over 15 months, it offers an unfiltered look at what it’s like to be a healthcare worker during the COVID-19 pandemic. It follows the staff of a hospital from the moment they admit their first patient in June 2020, till after the third wave. Filmed by a healthcare worker with unprecedented access to the hospital frontline, it deals with patients during life-and-death situations, but the focus remains on the indomitable strength of the human spirit.

After the screening, the guest speakers fielded questions from the audience about what they thought of the documentary, about long-COVID in healthcare workers and about the harassment they faced and how they responded to it.

The annual commemoration is held in memory of Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish architect, businessman, diplomat and humanitarian, who became Sweden’s special envoy to Hungary in summer 1944 and, at great personal risk, saved tens of thousands of Jews from deportation and death. He disappeared into Soviet captivity on Jan. 17, 1945, and his fate remains unknown.

Wallenberg has been made an honorary citizen of Canada, the United States, Hungary, Australia and Israel. In 2000, the Canadian government proclaimed Jan. 17 as Raoul Wallenberg Day.

The event is also in memory of Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat who served as vice-consul in Lithuania during the Second World War. He chose to act, at clear professional and personal risk to himself and his family, issuing transit visas that allowed about 2,000 Jews, more than 90% from Poland, to escape almost certain death.

Both Wallenberg and Sugihara have been designated by Israel as Righteous Among the Nations.

The Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society, said Anderson, defines “civil courage as an act entailing personal risk or sacrifice, intended to improve or save the lives of others who endure misfortunes attributable to social context. In even the best-managed societies, some people may suffer from conflict, injustice or threats to health and well-being – such as the COVID pandemic – that are intimately tied to our social structures. And those who help despite personal risk, show the same inner strength as wartime role models like Wallenberg and Sugihara.

“In 2006,” she continued, “the former honorary Swedish consul to Vancouver, Anders Neumuller, began Vancouver’s annual commemoration of Wallenberg Day. He later envisaged a nonprofit society dedicated to honouring acts of civil courage. And so the Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society was formed in 2013 by members of the Swedish and Jewish communities in Vancouver.”

The Civil Courage Society honours the legacy of Wallenberg and Sugihara by acknowledging British Columbians who have demonstrated civil courage and by promoting civil courage.

“To that end, each year, we formally recognize a person or group of people who have displayed civil courage in British Columbia,” said Anderson. “We also screen a film intended to get the audience thinking about the importance of civil courage and how to encourage it.”

For more information, including photos and video of the commemoration, visit wsccs.ca.

– Courtesy Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society

Courage of journalists

Journalists in Canada do not face the sorts of threats – sometimes life-endangering ones – that colleagues in many other countries do. But other factors impinge on the right of Canadians to diverse and thorough reporting of contentious issues, says an academic on the subject.

Robert Hackett, professor emeritus of communication at Simon Fraser University, spoke on the civil courage of journalists as part of the annual Raoul Wallenberg Day in Vancouver. The virtual commemoration, sponsored by the Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society Jan. 17, featured a number of recorded events, including the screening of two films.

In recent decades, there has been a return to “partisan media,” said Hackett.

“Media, going back a couple of hundred years, were initially partisan media, reflecting the viewpoint of particular factions or parties,” he said. “We see that returning with a vengeance since the 1980s, with Fox News and so on.”

The internet has lowered attention spans and the “growing entertainment orientation” of the news media has changed the way reporting is done. Contradictory forces have upset the journalism sector in recent decades, he said. On the one hand, concentration and monopoly have placed control of “legacy media” – daily news, for instance – in fewer and fewer hands, reflecting a narrowing of perspectives. On the other hand, digital media and journalism startups have led to a fragmentation of public attention.

As the revenue structures of journalism have become strained due to competition for advertising avenues, resources for newsroom staff have declined, with commensurate impacts on the quality of reporting. Journalists who are expected to pump out several stories a day are unable to do the sort of investigative work common a generation or two ago and so rely on media releases. General reporters have replaced beat reporters with deep contacts and extensive background knowledge in an area of expertise. These structural changes have been accompanied by growing cultural skepticism toward expertise and even the definition of truth, said Hackett.

“It’s a different cognitive world,” he said. “We no longer seem to even have a shared reality.”

Some of Hackett’s recent research, in conjunction with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, has focused on fossil fuel industries and their influence on Canada’s press. He sees Canada’s largest print media company, Postmedia, as a booster of fossil fuels.

While Canadian journalists are fortunate not to face some of the life-threatening risks of reporters in many other places, there remain serious challenges to the ideal of a free media.

“There is still a certain degree of legal harassment and risk, especially for freelancers who don’t have a big organization behind them,” said Hackett. “The cost of a lawsuit for defamation, even if it’s a spurious lawsuit, is prohibitive. It’s intimidating. I know for a fact that freelancers have said they aren’t proceeding with stories because of fears of being sued.”

In addition, he added: “We don’t have effective shield or whistleblower laws, by and large, that would allow journalists to protect their sources.”

The online event, marking the 16th annual commemoration of Raoul Wallenberg Day in Vancouver, also featured two documentaries.

A Dark Place was produced by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Representative on Freedom of the Media. It follows female journalists around the world and the threats they receive online in reaction to their reporting on contentious stories. Threats of rape and murder, as well as other forms of intimidation, are almost ubiquitous. One study said that 60% of female journalists have experienced some form of online harassment or threats, according to the film. A panel discussion featured the film’s director, Javier Luque, and Arzu Geybulla, an Azerbaijani journalist who endured harrowing harassment and accusations of being a “traitor” for coverage of conflicts in the Caucasus.

The other documentary, Mohamed Fahmy: Half Free, by filmmaker David Paperny, follows Egyptian-Canadian journalist Mohamed Fahmy, who was jailed in Egypt for his reporting on the Arab Spring uprising in Cairo. Fahmy’s experience is one of many that journalists face daily in conflict zones and under repressive regimes, risking their freedom and their lives to report on events. Fahmy spent 438 days in an Egyptian prison before being pardoned by the country’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Fahmy is now an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia.

Alan Le Fevre, a director of the Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society, welcomed participants to the annual event, which highlights the Second World War heroism of Raoul Wallenberg and Chiune Sugihara.

Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat in Hungary, issued “protective passports” that identified bearers as Swedish subjects awaiting repatriation, thereby preventing their deportation from Hungary to death camps in Poland. Wallenberg disappeared in 1945 after the Soviets invaded Hungary. In 1957, the Soviet Union released a statement dated 1947, saying that Wallenberg had died of natural causes that year. Reports that Wallenberg was seen alive after 1947 have added to confusion and controversy around his fate.

Sugihara was vice-consul of the Imperial Japanese legation in Lithuania. At risk to his career and his life, Sugihara issued thousands of transit visas permitting Jews to travel through the Soviet Union to Japan and across the Pacific. Ostensibly, because a destination was required for a transit visa, the holders were destined for Curaçao. Many of those who escaped ended up on the West Coast of North America and there are several Vancouver families who owe their lives to “Sugihara visas.”

Learning his family’s history

George Heyman, ninth from the right, with family members in Poland last year. (photo from George Heyman)

Like scores of other British Columbians, George Heyman owes his life to Chiune Sugihara.

Heyman, who was reelected Saturday as MLA for Vancouver-Fairview, was born after the Second World War. But his parents escaped Poland via Japan thanks to the assistance of Sugihara, who was the vice-consul for the Japanese Empire in Kaunas, Lithuania. At risk to his career and probably his life, Sugihara betrayed orders of the Imperial Japanese government and issued transit visas that are credited with saving the lives of at least 6,000 European Jews.

Heyman, who was minister of environment and climate change strategy in the last government, was sketchy on some of this family history. So, at the urging of a distant cousin who is “a ferocious researcher,” Heyman, his sister and other family members from around the world convened in Poland last year.

“[The cousin] found others as well and he started communicating with us and sending us snapshots of things that he’d found in archives and going back a couple of hundred years,” Heyman said of the cousin, who is a retired professor in Denmark. “He found information about the village that our ancestors had once lived before they migrated to Warsaw.”

The diverse group of family members spent about 10 days together in the summer of 2019.

“We met in Warsaw, we had an initial family dinner of 20 people, three generations,” he recalled. “Everybody said a little bit about what it meant to them to be back, as well as where their lives had taken them.”

The cousin had prepared a family tree and presented each guest with a scroll outlining their genealogy. They then traveled as a group to Praszka, the village where the family had originated but left for Warsaw, probably in the late 1700s or early 1800s.

Both of his parents, Stefan Heyman and Marta Eliasberg Heyman, were born in Warsaw and they were family friends with the noted pedagogue and child advocate Dr. Janusz Korczak.

“My grandmother had been a volunteer working with him and my grandfather, who was a doctor, had also worked with him,” said Heyman. “We visited the site of the orphanage, which is now a commemorative museum. We went to the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw.… I was so pleased to see that so much had been done to rehabilitate much of the cemetery. People had been working on it since the end of the Second World War, but work continues. We wandered, we found gravestones of relatives and people we thought might be relatives. We talked to people we met there.”

They also visited the remnants of the Warsaw Ghetto, where Heyman’s maternal grandmother had been confined but from which she was rescued before the ghetto was liquidated, in 1943.

His maternal grandfather had died before the war and his grandmother, Stella Bernstein Eliasberg, had remained behind when Heyman’s parents fled. She was incarcerated in the ghetto, but was rescued in a scenario of which Heyman knows only the barest details. The ghetto wall abutted the side of a church and someone – friends of his grandparents, he thinks – brought clothing as a disguise and smuggled her out through the church and into hiding for the rest of the war. Heyman does not know whether there was any communication during this time between his mother and his grandmother. But, shortly after the war, Heyman’s parents were able to bring his grandmother to Vancouver, where she lived with them and played an important role in his life, until she passed away just before Heyman’s bar mitzvah.

Nothing is known of the fate of Heyman’s paternal grandparents.

“I often wonder what it must have been like for my father,” he said. “It’s hard enough when we remember a loved one who has died and we know the circumstances of their death. It’s horrific, as it has been for so many, many, many people … they are left only to imagine what their loved ones went through in their final days and hours. That was my father.”

The trip refashioned Heyman’s conception of his family.

“I always thought of my family as being very small,” he said. “In fairness, I didn’t know that some of these people even existed…. It gives me a sense of continuity and history.”

The trip also helped emphasize for him the lessons of the past for the politics of the present.

“We see right-wing violence, we see the beginnings of fascism appearing in many countries,” he said. “We don’t have to look far to see what happens if we take things for granted.”

He brings that experience back into his current work.

“That’s one of the reasons that our government, after 16 years of its elimination, reinstated the B.C. Human Rights Commission,” he said, “because it’s not enough to just deal with racist behaviour, hate behaviour, after it happens, we need a commission that will be responsible for educating people and recommending programs to raise people in an atmosphere of tolerance and love, not suspicion and hate. So that is also a very significant and often unnoticed achievement of our government, and we did it very early.”

He reflected: “The trip was meeting a family that I never knew I had and having more of a sense of being grounded in my family history, as well as the terrible recent history of what happened to our and so many other families, just dispersed, another diaspora all over the world.”

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.