Passage to Freedom: The Sugihara Story

Mochizuki and Lee's (Baseball Saved Us) skillful volume pays tribute to Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat posted to Lithuania who in 1940 saved the lives of thousands of Polish Jews. Defying orders from his government, Sugihara handwrote visas for weeks to grant refugees passage through the Soviet Union to Japan. Told in the voice of his then-five-year-old son, the narrative centers upon the boy's impressions: the creaking of the bedsprings as his sleepless father tossed and turned, the Jewish children huddled outside the consulate, his mother massaging her husband's cramped arm. Lee's precise, haunting art, created by scratching out images from beeswax applied to paper and then adding oil paint and colored pencil, has the look of sepia-toned photographs: it unites carefully balanced compositions and emotional intensity. Mochizuki and Lee's inspired treatment brings out the import of Sugihara's brave and compassionate decision. An afterword by Sugihara's son updates the account: the family spent 18 months in a Soviet internment camp, and his father was stripped of his diplomatic post. A stirring story. Ages 4-up. (May)

Gr 2-6--The story of a Japanese diplomat who saved thousands of Jewish refugees in defiance of official government orders. This little-known Schindler-like account is effectively narrated in first-person style, ostensibly by young Hiroki Sugihara, son of the man who was Japanese consul in Lithuania in 1940. As Nazi soldiers invaded Poland, many Jews crossed the border to Lithuania and hundreds besieged the Japanese consulate for travel visas. Three times, Hiroki's father requested permission from his government to issue visas and was refused. He decided to follow his conscience and obey the dictates of God, rather than his government. For the next month, until he was reassigned to Berlin, he issued and personally signed visas, from dawn to dark, while hundreds stood in line for their passage to freedom. An afterword by Hiroki Sugihara tells of the subsequent history of his family. For children, this story will be a lesson in courage and conscience and a valuable addition to Holocaust materials. For those who have some knowledge of the Japanese/German Axis pact, the remarkable actions of Consul Chiune Sugihara carry an added dimension of heroism and brotherhood above and beyond political pressures. Lee's dramatic full-page, sepia-colored illustrations focus on the faces of the Japanese consul and his family, the Jewish men and women appealing for help, and the children, whose fate lay in the hands of the adults, men and women of different races and cultures caught in a fearful time.--Shirley Wilton, Ocean County College, Toms River, NJ