Flight and Rescue

In an extraordinary new volume, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum reveals details of the famous "Sugihara rescue" during the summer of 1940, when foreign policy and human compassion converged for a fleeting moment. While the world's political landscape was in turmoil, foreign envoys of Japan and the Netherlands forged an unlikely alliance in Kaunas, Lithuania, that saved the lives of 2,100 Polish Jews.

Survival depended on the actions of two diplomats who never met. Dutch consul Jan Zwartendijk and Chiune Sugihara, Japan's acting consul to Lithuania, worked in concert to provide Jews with the travel papers needed to escape. Men, women, and children crossed Soviet Russia aboard the Trans-Siberian Railroad and then sailed in cargo boats to Kobe, Japan, and finally to China. Many of them survived the war years in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. Among the refugees were Menachem Begin, future prime minister of Israel, and Rabbi Eliezar Finkel and his students from Mir, Poland, the only Eastern European yeshiva to survive the Holocaust intact.

Suddenly thrust into Asian society, treated alternately as tourists and displaced persons, the refugees adapted to Japanese and Chinese cultures while retaining a vibrant Jewish spiritual life. Through historic photographs, artifacts, documents, diaries, letters, and testimonies, this riveting volume unveils little-known facets of a remarkable humanitarian effort.