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)1 -Cite-01:C1 1-

10/6
2000

88

The Rescuers

Control high
blood pressure

An exhibit at Janice Charach Epstein Gallery
recalls two Asian diplomats who issued visas
to freedom for victims of the Holocaust.

SUZANNE CHESSLER

Special to the Jewish News

T

wo Asian diplomats have shown how the pen
can be mightier than the sword, even through
the horrors of the Holocaust, and their work
and lives come to light in a photo and docu-
ment exhibit coming to the Janice Charach Epstein Gallery
in West Bloomfield.
"Visas for Life: The Stories of Chiune Sugihara and Dr.
Feng Shan Ho" recalls the two men who helped Jews escape
the Nazis by providing the paperwork to get them out of
dangerous countries.
When the exhibit opens Oct. 12, firsthand accounts of the
men will be given by two of their children as they introduce
the materials and give the intimate stories behind them.
Hiroki Sugihara will talk about his late father, the
Japanese consul in Lithuania who wrote thousands of exit
visas for Jews against the orders of his government. Manli
Ho will speak about her late father, the Chinese consul
general in Vienna who wrote thousands of visas for Jews
seeking a haven in Shanghai and is credited with being one
of the most successful rescuers of Jews in terms of the
number of lives saved.
"Hiroki Sugihara was there when his father made his
decisions about the visas," says Anne Akabori, executive
director of the Visas for Life Foundation, which is loaning
the photographs to be on display. "Mrs. Sugihara's sister
took the pictures."
Akabori, who translated Mrs. Sugihara's memoirs into
English, believes that an important part of the drama of this
story has to do with the diplomat's departure from Japanese
tradition. Instead of strictly responding to authority, he
took it upon himself to issue as many visas as possible.

Sugihara's courageous acts reach directly into Michigan.
Tamy Chelst's father, the late Rabbi Isaac Simon, received a
Sugihara visa, as did Rabbi Leib Bakst, who married his
wife, Esther, in Shanghai. The rabbis' visas were two of 400
that saved the entire faculty and student body of Mir
Yeshiva of Warsaw, Poland.
When Hitler's army invaded Poland in 1939, many Polish
Jews escaped occupied territory by fleeing into Lithuania.
"My father always felt gratitude toward the Japanese and
found them quite welcoming in Japan," says Chelst, of
Southfield, who got to know the Baksts through her father.
"As the child of someone who had [moved on to] Shanghai,
I understood that they had a positive experience there."
Chelst, who traveled to the area to see the places her
father had lived, does not have the visa that saved her
dad, but she does have the memories of what he told her

Above: Refitgee.s
line up for visas.

1>onif E jpm A

Left: A visa
handwritten
in Japanese.
With the help
of his wife,
Chiune Sugihara
spent 10 hours
a day writing
visas to help
Jews flee the
Nazis in
Lithuania.