One morning in late July nineteen forty, the Japanese consul in the Lithuanian city of Kaunas looked out of an upstairs window and saw a crowd standing outside his gate.
There were a couple of hundred people. Some had been there all night. They were mostly Polish Jews who had fled east when Poland was invaded, and they were now in Lithuania, which the Soviet Union had just taken over, and which was about to stop being a country at all.
Every foreign consulate in Kaunas was closing. Theirs was one of the last still open.
The consul's name was Chiune Sugihara. He was forty, he had a wife and three small children in the house behind him, and he had no authority whatsoever to do what those people were asking.
The plan the crowd had brought with them was so improbable that it is worth going through slowly.
Europe was closed. West was Germany. So the only way out was east, and east meant crossing the entire Soviet Union by train to Vladivostok, taking a ship to Japan, and going on from there to somewhere else.
The Soviets would grant a transit visa across their territory, but only to someone who had a visa for a final destination beyond it. And there was no final destination available.
The solution had been invented by a Dutch businessman and the Dutch consul in Kaunas, and it was magnificent. They began writing a note in people's passports stating that no visa was required to enter the Dutch colony of Curacao, in the Caribbean.
This was technically true. It was true because entry to Curacao was at the discretion of the governor, who would certainly have refused, and there was no realistic way of getting there anyway.
But it was a piece of paper naming a destination. What was still missing was a transit visa through Japan, to make the chain of travel look complete. That was what the crowd at the gate wanted.
Sugihara cabled Tokyo asking for permission to issue transit visas without the usual requirements.
Tokyo said no. The rules were clear: a transit visa required a confirmed onward destination and sufficient funds, and these people had neither in any meaningful sense.
He cabled again, setting out the circumstances more fully. Tokyo said no again.
He cabled a third time. Tokyo said no, and told him to stop asking.
It is worth understanding what that meant in Japan in nineteen forty. He was not an independent official with room for judgement. He was a career diplomat in a system where the instruction of a ministry was not a suggestion, and where his father had wanted him to be a doctor and he had defied that too, and had been paying for it ever since.
He talked it over with his wife Yukiko for a night. He said afterwards that he was a diplomat, that he had been raised to obey, and that disobedience would end his career and might do worse than that.
The next morning he went out and told the crowd he would issue the visas.
From the end of July to the end of August, Sugihara wrote visas.
Each one had to be written out by hand and stamped and signed. There was no machine. He worked, by his family's account, eighteen to twenty hours a day, and he stopped taking meals at the table because it wasted time, and Yukiko brought food to the desk.
The queue outside grew. Word had spread through the refugee community, and people arrived from other towns. Some had no passport at all, and he issued documents to them on whatever paper existed.
His hand cramped so badly that Yukiko massaged it in the evenings so that he could work the following day. Toward the end, his handwriting on the visas visibly deteriorates, which you can see in surviving examples.
The consulate was ordered shut at the end of August. He kept writing in the hotel he moved to. On the day he left, at the railway station, he was still signing blank forms and handing them through the window of the carriage, and as the train began to move he threw the consular stamp itself out to somebody on the platform so that the work could go on without him.
The last thing he is recorded as saying, from the window, was that he was sorry, that he could not write any more, and that he wished them well.
The number of visas is roughly known because he kept a list, which survives. It runs to about twenty-one hundred and forty names.
A visa was often issued to a family head and covered a wife and children, so the number of people is larger, and the usual estimate is around six thousand.
They travelled across Siberia, which took a fortnight, and reached Japan. Japan was supposed to be a stop of a few days. Many of them stayed for months because there was nowhere for them to go on to, and the Japanese authorities, faced with several thousand people holding technically valid visas issued by their own consul, mostly shrugged and let them stay.
Most were eventually moved to Shanghai, which brings this story into the same city as the last one. They spent the rest of the war there, in difficult conditions, and the great majority survived.
Not everyone made it. Some were refused at the Soviet border, some ran out of time, and some chose not to go, because leaving meant abandoning elderly parents who could not travel. The list is a list of people who got a visa, and a visa was the beginning of a journey rather than the end of one.
Among them was an entire rabbinical academy from the Polish town of Mir, students and teachers together, which is thought to be the only such institution in occupied Europe to survive complete.
Sugihara was moved to other posts, and at the end of the war he and his family were interned by the Soviets for eighteen months.
When he finally got home to Japan in nineteen forty seven, he was asked to resign from the foreign ministry. The official reason given at the time was reorganisation. He and his family always understood it to be Kaunas.
He spent the rest of his working life in ordinary jobs. He sold light bulbs. He worked as a translator and as a manager for a trading company in Moscow, living apart from his family for years.
He did not tell anybody. His own son learned about it as an adult.
In nineteen sixty eight an official at the Israeli embassy in Tokyo, who had been a teenager in that queue in Kaunas, tracked him down after years of searching. He produced the visa, which he had kept, folded, for twenty-eight years.
Sugihara was named Righteous Among the Nations in nineteen eighty five, the year before he died. He was too ill to travel and his family accepted it for him. When he was asked why he had done it, his answer was short: that they were human beings, and that they needed help.
The Dutch part of the chain deserves more credit than it usually gets. Jan Zwartendijk, the Dutch consul, wrote around twenty-two hundred of those Curacao notes and had precisely the same career consequences. His own children did not know until after his death.
Nobody knows how many people are alive today because of that month in Kaunas. The descendants of the six thousand are usually estimated somewhere upward of a hundred thousand, and the figure is only ever a guess.
There is a detail from Yukiko Sugihara's account that stays with people. In the last days, when they knew the consulate was closing and that he was destroying his own career, she said that neither of them talked about the future at all. There was simply the next visa, and then the next one.
Here is something to think about tonight. Sugihara asked permission three times and was refused three times, and then did it anyway. He could have stopped after the first no and nobody, ever, would have thought worse of him. Why do you think he asked at all, if he was going to disobey?