Volume 49, Number 12 · July 18, 2002
Help for Jews
By Stanley Karnow
In response to There Were Worse Places
(May 23, 2002)
To the Editors:
In his excellent piece on Marcia Reynders Ristaino's book Port of Last Resort: The Diaspora of Communities in Shanghai ["There Were Worse Places," NYR, May 23], Jonathan Mirsky justly pays tribute to Sugihara Chiune, the Japanese consul in Lithuania at the start of World War II, who by issuing visas to Jews in the city of Kaunus enabled them to flee and thus escape the Nazis and the anti-Semitic Lithuanians. Sugihara's story has been widely publicized, but less known is the indispensable role played by Jan Zartendijk, then the Dutch consul in Kaunus. Zartendijk provided the Jews with visas to Curaçao, a Dutch colony in the West Indies, while Sugihara supplied them with the transit documents necessary to travel through the Soviet Union to Asia. Though they were devoted to the same cause, the two diplomats operated separately and evidently never met.
Stanley Karnow
Potomac, Maryland