PA Japanese Instructor Teruyo Shimazu Goes in Search of…
The Japanese Schindler
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he doesn’t remember just when it began— this intense, avid fascination with German culture and the Holocaust. Fathoming the curiosity about the second World War was not difficult. Her beloved grandfather had returned from the Burmese front with a long, ragged scar she called “the zipper” and a quagmire of anguish about war that consumed him. But that was long before her birth, or even her mother’s. Teruyo Shimazu does remember, vividly, being asked in the first grade what she would like to do as an adult. “I want to go to the Soviet Union,” she replied, “to see why they wanted to kill me.” Her answer earned the 6-year-old a certificate naming her “A Dangerous Element to Society.” But nothing could have been further from the truth. The young student began to read everything she could about the war, unraveling the painful truth of Japan’s complicity with the Germans and, by association, the Holocaust. She began to discern a mission for her own life: how to avoid war. Her passion took her to the Soviet Union, to Germany, to Warsaw, to Auschwitz to pay her respects to all those who died. “I felt responsibility as a Japanese,” Shimazu says. Leaving the site of the camp, her cab driver told her something that stunned her. A Japanese man had been imprisoned there with the Jews and the gypsies during the war. The Japanese– Holocaust connection ramped up her research and led her to a reference to Chiune “Senpo” Sugihara, Japan’s wartime consul to Lithuania. His amazing story began to unfold.
Teruyo Shimazu
“I love my country, but before I am a diplomat, I am a human being. I must save these people to obey God.”
Last winter Shimazu, in her 10th year as an instructor of Japanese at Andover, applied for and received a PA Kenan Grant to pursue that story. The grant allowed her to travel to Lithuania, where Sugihara’s heroic actions took place. In August 1940, she learned, the city of Kaunas was in turmoil as Jewish refugees jammed the courtyard in front of the Japanese consulate each morning begging for transit visas that
would allow them to escape the Nazis. Sugihara asked his government, still officially neutral, for permission but was denied. Shimazu repeats his silent reasoning: “I love my country, but before I am a diplomat, I am a human being. I must save these people to obey God.” Risking his family and himself, he began issuing visas through Japan to Curacao, Shanghai, South America, Israel, and the United States. In all, roughly 6,000 doomed souls escaped in the month before the young diplomat’s efforts were discovered and he was removed from his post. Forced to resign from the diplomatic corps, Sugihara spent the rest of his life in business and died in 1986. His heroic efforts, Shimazu reflects, can’t help but bring to mind those of German industrialist Oskar Schindler, who saved hundreds of Jews in Poland during WWII. In her travels last summer, Shimazu visited the museum honoring Sugihara, housed in the old consulate in Kaunas. Researching the story with the museum’s director, she found the names of some who had escaped and went to work to locate those who might still be alive. She found three survivors living in the United States and several in Israel. Her goal, for which she is seeking another Kenan Grant, is to travel to California and Israel to meet with these survivors, giving them an opportunity, she says, “to speak up for the forgotten.” The emotional dividend for Shimazu is also important. “I feel a personal relief of my burden by working on this project,” she explains, “because of my grandfather’s tremendous influence on me to spend my life as a promoter of peace.” Sugihara’s humanitarianism has been recognized around the world, but is not widely known. Shimazu would like to change that. She plans to write a book based on her research, made possible by the William F. Kenan Jr. Fund for faculty research and scholarship, and the deep moral sensibility learned at her grandfather’s knee. —Sally V. Holm
Chiune Sugihara Andover | Winter 2010
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