Chiune Sugihara (1900-1986) was the Japanese Vice Consul to Lithuania in Kaunas for a brief period between 1939 and 1940. Together with the acting Dutch Consul Jan Zwartendijk (1896-1976) he saved thousands of Jews over a short three-week period in 1940 by issuing visas against orders to get them out of what was at the time Soviet-occupied Lithuania and away to safety and a new life. Many of the saved Jews later settled in Israel and the United States and have since championed both his and the Dutchman’s cause. This small museum in the house where the Japanese consulate was located is where Sugihara, who along with Zwartendijk is now honoured as a Righteous Among the Nations, lived with his family. Inside are a recreation of Sugihara’s office and several displays relating to the extraordinary events that took place. Near the beginning of Michael Chabon’s extraordinary Pulitzer Prize-winning novel
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, protagonist Josef Kavalier escapes to New York from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia via Lithuania hidden in a coffin containing the Golem of Prague. Arriving in Vilnius on a train from Warsaw, Kavalier uses the services of Sugihara and Zwartendijk to get him out of the country.
Admission 10/5Lt.
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A very interesting house and an amazing character known as the Japanese Schindler by some. Sugihara was partly descended from the samurai was a Christian and deliberately flunked his medical exams which his father required him to sit as he really wanted to be a teacher.Most of the people he saved were not Lithuanian but Polish Jews who had fled to Kaunas and having already uprooted themselves once were more ready to flee further. In common with some other parts of occupied Europe during WW2 many of the local Jews did not take the opportunity to flee believing that the situation would settle down.