By Matthew Carland,
A concert was held Wednesday to honor a Japanese diplomat who saved Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany during World War II, featuring a cellist with a personal connection to the events.
Japanese American cellist Kristina Reiko Cooper and the New York City Opera Orchestra played a symphony composed by Lera Auerbach, an artist whose grandparents survived persecution in Nazi Germany, at Carnegie Hall in New York.
Chiune Sugihara, also known as "Japan's Schindler" after Oskar Schindler, the German who provided Jews with a safe haven, disregarded the orders of his superiors and issued visas in 1940 to help Jewish refugees escape Nazi persecution as the acting consul in Kaunas, Lithuania.
Cooper first conceived the idea in 2018 to spread the story of Sugihara with an orchestral work after finding out her father-in-law was a recipient of a visa issued by Sugihara.
"Without him, I wouldn't have my husband or my children or my wonderful life," Cooper said in an interview with Kyodo News.
Despite knowing her father-in-law could speak Japanese and Chinese and that he lived in both countries, she did not know who Sugihara was until her husband, Leonard Rosen, received a Righteous Among the Nations coin showing that Sugihara has been recognized by Israel as a person who saved Jews.
"I had to do something to help with the story abroad because although perhaps in Japan the story is fairly well known now, I think around most of the world, it's not."
Her father-in-law, Irving Rosen, and his brother Henry traveled from Kaunas to Moscow, then rode the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok, where they sailed to Tsuruga in Fukui Prefecture on the Sea of Japan coast.
They lived briefly in Kobe before being transferred to Shanghai. They eventually settled in New York after failing to get a visa for Israel.
The orchestra performed Symphony No. 6 "Vessels of Light" in November in Kaunas and last month in Prague. The piece was commissioned by Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, and the American Society for Yad Vashem.
"I have great admiration for a man like this who risked his life to save thousands of Jews," said David Halpern, a 73-year-old real estate agent from New Jersey.
"His name should be spread out more because you have so many bad people in the world. It's nice to have someone who is so good to counteract all this darkness," Halpern said.
Nobuki Sugihara, the diplomat's 74-year-old son, said, "I am thankful that this concert has been held."
The orchestra had earlier planned to perform in Moscow and St. Petersburg, which lie on the route used by Jewish refugees to flee the Nazis, but the concerts were canceled because of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Sugihara ramped up the approval of transit visas for Jewish refugees who needed to flee from Europe via Japan. The number of people saved by Sugihara likely amounted to a few thousand, according to recent research, though previous estimates had long put the figure at around 6,000.
Related coverage:
Jerusalem square dedicated to WWII Japan diplomat who saved Jews from Nazis
Lithuania confab marks 80th anniv. of visas saving Jews from Nazis
Document shows role of another Japan envoy in helping Jews flee Nazis
