Fleeing the Holocaust: From Poland to Japan via Stalin’s Russia

Howard Spier Why did Japan help Jews fleeing Nazi occupation? Why did Stalin allow Polish Jewish refugees to travel through the Soviet Union on their way to Japan? These were among a number of intriguing questions which arose in a screening of a film about Dr Zorach Warhaftig (1906-2002), the man who was behind the extraordinary rescue of some 7,000 Jews from Nazi-occupied Poland to Japan and Shanghai. The moving one-hour film, shown under the auspices of the Jewish Genealogical Society, was presented by Dr Pamela Shatzkes, author of the recent book Holocaust and Rescue: Impotent or Indifferent? Anglo-Jewry 1938-1945. The film describes the extraordinary escape of thousands of Polish Jewish refugees, including the entire Mir Yeshiva, from Soviet-occupied Lithuania in 1940-41, using the so-called Dutch ‘Curacao visas’ which enabled them to leave for Japan. During the year prior to Hitler’s invasion of the USSR in June 1941, Warhaftig found, in Kovno, Lithuania, 17,000 to 18,000 Polish Jewish refugees. As head of the Palestine Committee for Polish Refugees, he tried every way to get them out. He came up with a plan, which he brought to Sempo Sugihara, the Japanese consul-general in Kovno: give the Jewish refugees transit visas to go to the Dutch-controlled island of Curacao in the Caribbean, where no entry permit is necessary. Russia, in turn, would grant trans-Russia transit visas to those holding the Curacao visas. Warhaftig’s scheme worked: Sugihara saved several thousand Jewish refugees. In 1984 he was named a ‘Righteous Gentile’ by Yad Vashem. We will most likely never know for certain the motives of the Japanese authorities and Stalin. In the case of Japan, it is possibly easier to speculate: they were under no obligation to please their Nazi allies and may have had an inflated impression of the Jews’ international contacts and commercial skills. As for Stalin’s motivation, this remains a complete puzzle to historians