By Hermie Climaco
I was reading the book, “Going on Faith,” which featured nine authors and their works of writing as a spiritual quest and I was deeply touched by the article on Hillel Levine, a Jewish writer, whose many questions about life led him to discover the story of Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat who had saved thousands of Jews during the World War II.
Hillel was born when the ashes of Auschwitz were still warm. However, he only experienced a life that was safe and stable in the golden age of security of the 1950s in America. In spite of all that security, however, Levine was aware of the existence of a secret world, a forbidden world that his parents’ generation was eager to get over with – the world of the death camps.
In the 1990s, Levine found the collapse of the Soviet Union a blessing, but, he regretted the fact that acts of brutality and ethnic cleansing followed the breakdown of communism in the Soviet world, as what happened in Yugoslavia, and as the massacres that happened in Rwanda, and in many other countries. These cruel realities depressed Levine so deeply. He lamented the fact that even the holocaust hadn’t pushed the outer limits of violence that people can perpetrate on each other.
Levine determined to make it his life work to do everything he can to make sure that nothing like the Holocaust could ever happen again. He wondered about the powers that God had bestowed on man for good or bad; to help others, or to destroy them. It occurred to him that there were realities that he had to discover – the compelling mystery between good and evil. As he embarked on searching the literature on the subject of “goodness,” he found very little about it. Instead, he found many books on mass murderers and almost nothing on mass rescuers.
It was during this period of inner turmoil triggered by man’s tendency to become cruel with his fellowman that Levine set out to travel to beleaguered places, determined this time to be not just an observer.
While in Lithuania, Levine remembered a story that he heard from a religious leader during one of his travels to Asia - the story of Sugihara.
In his book, “In Search of Sugihara,” Levine narrated that Chiune Sugihara was a Japanese diplomat in Lithuania who saved around ten thousand Jews by giving them exit visas on the eve of World War II. He issued transit visas to anyone who applied for it, whatever documents they presented or whatever explanation they gave for not having the right documents, or for not having any documents at all. The more visas Sugihara issued, the more Jews lined up at the consulate. When his hand got tired from all the writing and signing he authorized his assistants to use rubber stamps. He kept the consulate open longer than he should have, and even when he and his family were ordered to leave Kovno he continued to issue visas from the window of his moving train.
Hillel Levine wondered why Sugihara did all these. He talked about seeing Sugihara at the center of conspiracy of goodness; that had he only issued Japanese visas, without also securing the escape route to his own country, half a world away, not a single Jew would have been saved. Levine wrote that, at a certain point, Sugihara looked at the crowds of Jewish men and women and children who lined up outside his consulate in Kovno everyday and felt that he just couldn’t let them be killed. He knew better than they what awaited them, and he took enormous risks to save them. Not only did he issue all those transit visas to Japan; he persuaded diplomats and officials in other nations to authorize the passage of those Jewish refugees through their own countries. The result was one of the largest mass rescues in World War II.
In his essay in “Going On Faith,” Hillel Levine discussed part of his life and part of his book “In Search of Sugihara.” He claimed to be searching for a hero in this man, but, found that what was heroic about Sugihara was his ordinariness. Everything about Sugihara, according to him, was ordinary except for that few months in the summer of 1940. He also found the power of Sugihara’s moral leadership to be so great that he was able to evoke goodness in other people; mysteriously enlisting those people in his conspiracy so as to prevent life from being wasted.
In the end, the story of Sugihara told Levine that “ordinary people can rise to extraordinary acts and can precipitate extraordinary acts in other people.”
That was Sugihara’s story. Like Hillel Levine, I felt the urge to talk about this man trusting that anyone who hears about him will see that they too can do “goodness” for others – right where they are. Whether a janitor, a domestic helper, a restaurant server, a clerk, a manager, or a CEO of a big corporation, we can always go a little more out of our way in the exercise of our daily duties and responsibilities to help someone out. Whatever little we can do for someone may be life or death for that person.
We may not be Hillel Levine who vowed to make it his life work to make sure nothing like the holocaust could happen again; We may not be Sugihara who actually saved ten thousand Jewish people from going to concentration camps, or to the Nazi killing fields; But, whoever we are, wherever we may stand in life right now, and however ordinary we may be, we can always rise to extraordinary acts – and to greatness – as we endeavor to serve and help in the best way we can those who cross into our life everyday.
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