The Consulate in Kovno
Gathering intelligence about Soviet and German military movements and plans brought Sugihara into contact with anti-German and anti-Soviet elements, including the Polish underground, whose operations extended into Lithuania. Then, in the summer of 1940, the Soviet Union marched into and occupied Lithuania, along with Estonia and Latvia, as a preliminary to annexing them into the USSR. The inhabitants were subjected to brutal repression by the NKVD – the Soviet secret police – and waves of arrests, torture, and executions, swept the Baltic states.
That was when Sugihara began making creative use of his consular authority to help those at risk. He recognized that, with most of Europe engulfed by war, the most practical escape route for refugees in Lithuania was not westwards, but eastwards through the Soviet Union, and thence to Japan. So he started granting visas in ever greater numbers to those seeking to flee impending doom.
When members of the Polish underground approached Sugihara with bogus visas to Curacao and other Dutch possessions in the Americas, he agreed to facilitate their escape by granting them 10-day transit visas through Japan to their destinations. That entitled the bearers of such visas to traverse the Soviet Union, en route to Japan or Japanese-controlled territory, and from there, theoretically, to their final destination in Curacao and Dutch territories in the New World.
Sugihara started discreetly at first, issuing the transit visas, and eventually visas to Japan as a final destination, to those who had fed him intelligence. He then expanded that to members of the underground in general. Eventually, he abandoned any pretense. Setting aside the fiction that he was granting transit visas to facilitate the travel of those already in possession of final destination visas, Sugihara began stamping visas for all and sundry, even those who lacked any travel papers, whatsoever. By the time it was over, he had stamped thousands of visas, which were most likely the difference between life and death for those lucky enough to get them.
Most of those visas went to Jewish refugees, mostly from Poland and Lithuania, who queued outside the Japanese consulate in Kovno, desperate to flee the approaching Nazi menace. The Nazis, who had conquered Poland and divided it with the Soviets in 1939, had already begun the process of ridding their part of Poland of its Jewish inhabitants and taken the first steps towards outright genocide. Within months, discriminatory laws had closed most professions to Jews, they were expelled from the parts of Poland annexed to Germany and herded into ghettos in what was left of the country, and tens of thousands had been murdered. Life in Poland was becoming literally unlivable for Jews. Against that backdrop, Chiune Sugihara’s consulate in neighboring Lithuania became a literal lifesaver for those fortunate enough to get there.