Chiune Sugihara. This man saved 6000 Jews. He was a Japanese diplomat in Lithuania. When the Nazis began rounding up Jews, Sugihara risked his life to start issuing unlawful travel visas to Jews. He hand-wrote them 18 hrs a day. The day his consulate closed and he had to evacuate, witnesses claim he was STILL writing visas and throwing from the train as he pulled away. He saved 6000 lives. The world didn’t know what he’d done until Israel honored him in 1985, the year before he died.
I was ashamed to have never heard of this man until last year or the year before when I was putting together a content-based (literature and social studies) ESL unit on World War II. Amazing, important, neglected story. In my lessons, it was also kind of a nice counterpoint the Japanese internment and the racism that led to it.
(via jemappellery)
