CGIS South Building, ROOM S354, 1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
Seminar on Russian and Eurasian Jewry
David Wolff | Sugihara Chiune and the Soviet Union: New Documents, New Perspectives
Co-sponsored by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Center for Jewish Studies
In 1940 with Europe already at war, Japanese diplomat-spy Sugihara Chiune (often called the “Japanese Schindler”) ignored direct orders from Foreign Minister Matsuoka and issued over 2000 Japanese transit visas to Jews stranded in Lithuania after the invasion of Poland. But these visas would have been worthless without Soviet transit visas to cross from Kaunas/Kovno to Vladivostok. Why did Stalin approve this transit, supervised by Molotov, Mikoyan and Beria? How did nearly 4000 Jews travel on 2000 visas? Documents from Soviet and Japanese archives collected, edited and published by Japan’s Slavic-Eurasian Research Center and the Holocaust Research Center in Moscow, provide answers to these questions and more. Sugihara remains the only Japanese citizen designated as a Righteous among the Nations by Yad Vashem.
David Wolff is Professor at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center (SRC), Hokkaido University