Is there any sight more poignant than a Holocaust survivor surrounded by a roomful of his children and scampering hordes of grandchildren?
If one agrees, then the tears may flow toward the end of PBS’ “Sugihara: Conspiracy of Kindness,” which shows on Yom HaShoah, Thursday, May 5 at 10 p.m. on KQED.
The battalions of running, leaping children are, literally, the living legacy of Chiune Sugihara, the World War II-era Japanese diplomat. Simply put, they wouldn’t be running and leaping if Sugihara hadn’t belied direct orders from his government and issued transit visas to Lithuania’s Jews.
A recipient of one of Sugihara’s visas thanks the diplomat — who died in 1986 at age 86 — for the lives of his five children and 27 grandchildren. And, to put things in perspective, Sugihara wrote 2,139 of those visas.
The program is probably the definitive film account of the life and work of Sugihara, and anyone who sits through its 90-minute duration will walk away with a multitude of knowledge about much more than just the Japanese diplomat.
Japan, in fact, rose to its position as a brutally dominant world power thanks to a Jew.
When no one else would lend the Japanese a dime due to the common wisdom they didn’t stand a chance in their war against the Russians in 1904, Jewish financier Jacob Schiff loaned the rising superpower the mind-boggling sum of $200 million out of anger at Russian pogroms.
Fast-forwarding 30 years, when the Japanese government had parlayed Schiff’s loan into regional economic and military dominance, a number of Japanese industrialists hatched a plan to substitute Japanese military dominance with industrial dominance, backed by the importation of hundreds of thousands of skilled Jewish workers who were being bullied and persecuted in Europe.
Unfortunately, this plan never came to fruition. When a Japanese representative floated it to New York’s Rabbi Stephen Wise, he was bodily thrown from the rabbi’s office, and the eventual ascension of Japan’s powerful military to a virtual dictatorship of the nation rendered the point moot.
Filmmakers Diane Estelle Vicari and Robert Kirk skillfully weave the story of Sugihara into the larger tale of Japanese relations with Jews and treatment of Jews in its territories.
And while the Japanese attitude toward Jews can be summed up with the easy-to-earn “Better than the Nazis,” Sugihara was a rare specimen. He cabled Tokyo three times to request permission to write transit visas, and was denied three times. He did it anyway. When Jews showed up without passports, he had no right to issue visas. He did it anyway. After Lithuania fell, he was removed as Japan’s representative, yet kept signing visas in his hotel, on the station platform and even through the windows as the train pulled away. And, as a reward, he was forced out of Japan’s diplomatic corps at age 47.
“Conspiracy of Kindness” does a competent job explaining the byzantine morass a Jew had to go through to obtain no fewer than five visas to leave Soviet-controlled Lithuania. And it adds a little personality to its enigmatic subject via interviews with his wife, sons, grandchildren and even the survivor who, as an 11-year-old, invited Sugihara to a Chanukah party (Sugihara’s wife, treated to Jewish portions for the first time, could not finish her meal).
But, like most documentaries, “Conspiracy of Kindness” leans heavily on the same still photographs; a particular image of Sugihara and another of a crowd of Jews probably account for 10 minutes of screen-time alone. And, despite the oft-riveting subject matter, 90 minutes is, let’s face it, a long time.
Finally, the film is unable to come up with a reason for Sugihara’s incredible generosity — which curtailed his stellar diplomatic career — beyond pure altruism.
But perhaps there’s a reason for this: It might just be the truth.
As an elderly Sugihara recounted to an interviewer years after the fact, “Do what’s right because it’s right.”