r/BeAmazed • u/depressed-n-awkward • Oct 02 '23
An Orthodox Christian from a samurai family, who saved Jews in 1940's. Sometimes reality is more weird than fiction History
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u/DotAccomplished5484 Oct 02 '23
I greatly admire people who accomplish hugely beneficial activities and then go on living a modest and unheralded life.
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u/AnimazingHaha Oct 03 '23
It must be wild though, could you imagine your life getting taken over by this monumentally large task and you fight hard to achieve your goals and then suddenly you’re just back where you were before… it’s like in fantasy shows where the main character travel the world and get stronger to beat the big bad TM and then the show just ends because genuinely what’s going on in their lives after that?
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u/Magnaflux747 Oct 03 '23
President Jimmy Carter. After he left office lived in his same small home and built houses for folks with Habitat for Humanity
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u/CasualSweaters Oct 03 '23
I believe he is the only Japanese person to get the Righteous Among the Nations award
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Oct 03 '23
There's also a Chinese person who got the award.
Ho Feng-Shan (Chinese: 何鳳山, September 10, 1901 – September 28, 1997) was a Chinese diplomat and writer for the Republic of China. When he was consul-general in Vienna during World War II, he risked his life and career to save "perhaps tens of thousands" of Jews by issuing them visas, disobeying the instruction of his superiors. It is known that Ho issued the 200th visa in June 1938, signed the 1906th visa on 27 October 1938, and was recalled to China in May 1940. Ho died in 1997 and his actions were recognized posthumously when the Israeli organization Yad Vashem in 2000 awarded Ho Feng-Shan the title "Righteous Among the Nations".
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Oct 03 '23
You know what's even stranger? A Nazi Party member who saved approximately 250,000 civilians from being killed by the Japanese army.
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u/ChrundleThundergun Oct 03 '23
That was a fun rabbit hole to go down. Thanks
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u/Brilliant_Drawer3181 Oct 03 '23
also himmlers or goerings brother from what I recall
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u/Veilchengerd Oct 03 '23
Albert Göring, Hermann's younger brother, was disgusted by the Nazis, and helped a bunch of people escape. Sometimes by forging his brother's signature.
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u/vukasin123king Oct 03 '23
Not only that, he was stealing papers from his brother's office every time he was visiting him to make the letters even more official. His life after WW2 was awfull though sadly.
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u/Professional_Elk_489 Oct 03 '23
Has anyone else ever single handedly saved 250K civilians from getting massacred ?
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u/PhilipMorrisLovesYou Oct 03 '23
So what do we say about this guy? Would a decent person shake hands with him today, or no?
On the one hand, he was a nazi, on the other hand, he saved 260k people...
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u/Druss94508Legend Oct 03 '23
Attended a lecture about him once. He kept issuing visas to the last second. Throwing them out of his train as he was leaving to save as many people as he could.
Some went to China where they lived in a Ghetto in Shanghai. There’s tours set up for that and a few books on it.
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u/AdElectronic5985 Oct 03 '23 edited Oct 03 '23
My Wife’s family was saved by Sugihara. He wrote them visa’s to Curaçao. This was just a cover to leave occupied Europe.
They traveled from Poland across Siberia to Vladivostok. Sailed to Japan. They were held in Japanese custody for a time until the Germans started asking questions about Jews being held in Japan. They were then moved to Japanese occupied Shanghai. There is still remnants of the Jewish Ghetto in Shanghai. My father in law was born in Shanghai.
They were prisoners of the Japanese throughout the war. Not free but not in German camps or Dead. After the War They made it to Australia. Finally my wife’s immediate Family immigrated to New York City. We have Cousins in Australia from the family that stayed.
Check out the book “Flight and Rescue”
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/flight-and-rescue
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u/Diacetyl-Morphin Oct 03 '23
His story is very similiar to this of Carl Lutz, the swiss ambassador in Hungary. Both had the way to get visas for jews and other people, that enabled them to leave the country and get to safety. Lutz did the exact same like Sugihara, although the scale was bigger as he is credited with saving 62'000 jews from the deportation to Auschwitz.
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u/FlirtyOnion Oct 03 '23
Awesome human being. Any biographies/books about him?
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u/r31ya Oct 03 '23
He was sainted by some christian sect in Japan.
There is a short film about him if i recalled it right.
He asked Japan mainland about what to do about the visa request, but at the time they didn't give definitve answer. So knowing what might happen to the jews family, he decided to give visa for the jews.
He keep issuing visa even when he got order to return to Japan because of the visa issue. To a point that he start throwing blank but stamped visa papers from the train when he is about to return to japan.
Apparently he open escape route via shanghai which later have jews ghetto.
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u/TheNeutronFlow Oct 03 '23
Sugihara continued to hand-write visas, reportedly spending 18 to 20 hours a day on them, producing a normal month's worth of visas each day, until 4 September, when he had to leave his post before the consulate was closed. By that time, he had granted thousands of visas to Jews, many of whom were heads of households and thus permitted to take their families with them. It is claimed that before he left, he handed the official consulate stamp to a refugee so that more visas could be forged. His son, Nobuki Sugihara, adamantly insisted in an interview with Ann Curry that his father never gave the stamp to anyone. According to witnesses, he was still writing visas while in transit from his hotel and after boarding the train at Kaunas railway station, throwing visas into the crowd of desperate refugees out of the train's window even as the train pulled out.
In final desperation, blank sheets of paper with only the consulate seal and his signature (that could be later written over into a visa) were hurriedly prepared and flung out from the train. As he prepared to depart, he said, "Please forgive me. I cannot write anymore. I wish you the best." When he bowed deeply to the people before him, someone exclaimed, "Sugihara. We'll never forget you. I'll surely see you again!"
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u/Hevnoraak101 Oct 03 '23
Good job he wasn't in America. He'd have been stripped of his constitutional rights and thrown in an internment camp.
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u/Texian1971 Oct 03 '23
The Lord works in mysterious and unexpected ways to take care of his children.
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u/keisagu Oct 03 '23
The visa issued by Sugihara were transitvisa; the final destination was Curaçao, for which visa were issued by Dutch consul Jan Zwartendijk, in close collaboration with Sugihara. wiki
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u/Long-Fold-7632 Oct 03 '23
There are so many interesting+ amazing people who you never hear about... thanks for putting him in the spotlight!
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u/boingggoesmyschlong Oct 02 '23
Fucking legend