Sugihara`s List

In my mind I count all the names, browse through all the faces. The children, grandchildren, now even great grandchildren and even the little grandson of a granddaughter, so a great great grandson. Cousins… a great clan. One big Israeli family. From Jerusalem to the Negev desert. They are far away, and to tell you the truth, I visit them less and less often. And as far as the great grandchildren are concerned, I can’t say I know them. But I have them, and they have themselves. They are alive. All this because their ancestor, the family sage, Warsaw lawyer Zerach Warhaftig, father, grandfather and great grandfather, was on Sugihara’s list. The now famous and at the time life-saving visas were issued by the Japanese consul to him, his wife and half-year-old son in Kaunas. Together with other immigrants they traversed Siberia and reached a welcoming Japan before traveling further on to America and, finally, once the war was over, settling down in Jerusalem. A trip around the world. And with a great sense of timing – in 1948, Zerach Warhaftig, together with thirty other founding fathers and mothers, signed Israel’s declaration of independence. He served the country for another half a century as a politician, lawyer and professor. He was the first to write the story of the Jewish refugees who emigrated from Kaunas and of the noble personage of the Japanese consul who saved people’s lives by breaking with procedures. Personally, Zerach was my uncle, the brother of my grandmother, one of the most important people in my life. In his Jerusalem apartment, I absorbed Judaism and Hebrew, we spoke about family and Jewish history. If not for him, I wouldn’t be a translator or a rabbinic literature lecturer today. And so, I too am greatly in debt to Chiune Sugihara.

Piotr Paziński