c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.)

UNDATED _ During the wartime summer of 1940, two men _ an American editor in Marseilles, France, and a Japanese diplomat in Kaunaus, Lithuania _ performed extraordinary acts of individual courage only now being fully recognized.

Varian Fry and Chiune Sugihara proved that the ancient Jewish teaching,”To save one life is to save an entire world, and to destroy one life is to destroy the world,”is not merely an adage to be learned in school but a way of living in the real world.

A current exhibit at New York City’s Jewish Museum describes the 13-month rescue effort undertaken in France by Fry on behalf of the U.S.-based Emergency Rescue Committee.

Fry, a bespectacled 32-year-old Harvard-educated classicist who spoke several European languages, was a mild-mannered Clark Kent who became a super rescuer of Jews and other anti-Nazis.

Fry arrived in Marseilles in August 1940 with $3,000 in cash and a list of prominent refugees who had fled to the French port city for safety. But operating without the cover of a government title posed difficulties for Fry, and he sadly discovered many American consulate officials in Marseilles were actively preventing refugees from entering the United States. Fry called this cruel policy”incomprehensible.” Additionally, the French authorities refused to grant exit visas. Indeed, one of the terms of the French surrender to Hitler was that the pro-German Vichy government had to turn over to the Gestapo any refugee the dreaded German secret police demanded. As a result, Fry’s efforts became a secret mission involving false documents, black market currency exchange, and clandestine escape routes to Spain and Portugal.

Fry and his staff were under constant surveillance by both the French and American authorities. He later wrote:”… As we were always afraid the police might put a microphone in the other room, we used to discuss secret subjects only in the bathroom, with all the taps turned on.” Despite the opposition of the Americans, French, and Germans, Fry saved more than 2,000 politicians, writers, artists, scientists, and musicians, including Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Jacques Lipchitz, Heinrich Mann, and Franz Werfel, author of”The Song of Bernadette.”Fry died in obscurity in 1967.

Several books and a recent play have focused attention on Sugihara, a Japanese consul in Lithuania nearly 60 years ago.

Although Japan was neutral in 1940, his government instructed Sugihara not to issue exit visas to the desperate Jewish refugees who had fled Germany’s invasion of Poland nearly a year earlier. But Sugihara defied Tokyo’s orders and unilaterally issued permits allowing 6,000 Jews to leave Lithuania.

Without Sugihara’s visas, the 6,000 would surely have died in German death camps.”Sugihara’s Jews”constitute only .001 per cent of the 6 million who were murdered during the Holocaust. But that lonely figure”one”sitting three places to the right of the decimal point represents real people whose descendants today could number 40,000.

My friend, Masha Bernstein Leon, is one of them. She was 8 years old when she and her mother received a lifesaving visa from Sugihara. They escaped the German invaders by crossing the Soviet Union on the Trans-Siberian railway. Then a fishing boat took them to Japan. Masha and her mother finally made their way to the United States.

Rabbi Marvin Tokayer, co-author of a book about the Japanese and the Jews during World War II, describes Sugihara’s courageous activities and quotes the modest diplomat as saying,”I acted according to my sense of human justice, out of love for mankind.” In 1985, a year before his death, Sugihara was recognized by Israel as one of the Righteous of the Nations, the Jewish people’s greatest honor only awarded to those who saved Jews during the Holocaust. Fry posthumously received the same honor two years ago.

The singular heroism of Fry and Sugihara takes on added significance today when measured against the almost daily revelations of the evil actions carried out by individuals, institutions, and nations during the Holocaust.

DEA END RUDIN