Sugihara House

Where a Japanese diplomat saved 6,000 Jews by issuing visas against government orders

In the summer of 1940, Chiune Sugihara was a Japanese consul in Kaunas facing an impossible decision. Thousands of Polish Jews had fled to Lithuania ahead of the Soviet and German advances, and they were desperately seeking transit visas to Japan — the only route to possible safety. Sugihara requested permission from Tokyo to issue the visas three times; three times he was refused. He issued them anyway.

Working eighteen hours a day for weeks, Sugihara hand-wrote approximately 6,000 visas before being ordered to leave. The building where he lived and worked is now a small but moving museum, with original furnishings, documents, and a permanent exhibition about Sugihara's life and the refugees he saved. It is one of the most important sites related to the Holocaust in the Baltics, and one of the most overlooked.

things to do museum
A story
Chiune Sugihara wrote thousands of visas by hand in the summer of 1940, continuing to sign them through the window of his departing train after he had been recalled to Japan. He was later dismissed from the diplomatic service for his disobedience. The Japanese government did not formally rehabilitate him until 1991, three years after his death.