The Japanese diplomat who saved countless Jews

When Nobuki Sugihara visited Hong Kong in September, local busi­ness­man Glen Steinman finally met the son of the man who had tried to save his mother’s family from extermination in Lithuania, during the second world war.

The meeting, at the University of Hong Kong, was “a very special experience”, says Steinman, an American who has lived in Hong Kong for 25 years and who sits on the board of the Hong Kong Holocaust and Tolerance Centre, which had invited Sugihara to open the “Asian Righteous Among the Nations” exhibition at HKU. “His father met my grandfather and great uncle – who I never met – and did so under the most extreme circumstances, and took an action without knowing them, to save their lives.”

Nobuki’s father, Chiune Sugihara, was a Japanese diplomat who issued thousands of visas to Jews, to help them escape from the advancing Nazis. Steinman’s grandfather and great uncle received visas from Sugihara in 1940, when other consulates and countries had closed their doors to Jews.

BORN IN 1927 IN LODZ, Poland, a city not far from the German border, Steinman’s mother, Irene Dynenson Steinman, was the daughter of Benjamin Dynenson, the manager of one of Poland’s biggest textile companies. The family lived a comfortable life before the war but, on August 31, 1939, the day before the Nazis invaded Poland, they fled northwards along with tens of thousands of other Jews. They arrived as refugees in Vilnius, now the capital of Lithuania but, at the time, a Polish city.

With the Soviet Union’s plans for Poland and Lithuania unclear and Germany’s intentions towards Russia uncertain, it was a precarious place to be. Like other refugees, the Dynenson family wanted to leave Europe, to be out of Hitler’s reach, but they were not ready to go – they were waiting for other family members to join them before finalising their plans, and they had to procure forged passports.