Volume 44, Number 19 · December 4, 1997
Sugihara's List
By Murray Sayle
In Search of Sugihara
by Hillel Levine
Free Press, 323 pp., $25.00
For our appalling century, the scene outside the Japanese consulate in a leafy suburb of Kaunas, the capital of Lithuania, in the early weeks of August 1940, was not an unusual one. Pressed against the consulate's iron-barred gates, a line of refugees two hundred yards long wound round the block. Some had been there for days, sleeping in tents or in the open; others, whole families, were newly arrived. A surviving photograph shows them adequately dressed and fed, but unsmiling and apprehensive. As one small group is being admitted, documents in hand, the rest shuffle patiently forward. There are no onlookers, no guards, no police; only a buzz of excited talk, in Polish and Yiddish. All but a handful are Jews from neighboring Poland, a country which, months before, had ceased to exist.
Review, 5253 words
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