The Fugu Plan Page 3

  Getzel moved slightly, waking Cheya.

  "Nothing?" she said.

  "Nothing. He's not awake yet."

  "Let him sleep till noon," she said, "if only when he wakes up he will give us the permits."

  "Im yirzeh ha-Shem . . . God willing . . ."

  Getzel's voice was a whisper, scarcely louder than a fervent thought, but a few feet away, Moishe Katznelson heard the words. Scarcely fourteen years old and raised, until not quite a year ago, in a happy, religious family, Moishe had not yet lost his feeling for the power of God. Everything else, but his sister, Sophie, he had lost. The September before, his home in Kucholze had been left behind in the Polish night as he and his three sisters had fled, hidden in the hay of a borrowed milk cart. His mother pretended to be the milkman. His father, on foot, had caught up with them a few miles outside just as the sun was coming up. It had been an adventure, then. They were all together. And his father, as always, seemed in command of the situation. They had walked or ridden, bartering a few possessions brought along for the purpose, for food, but saving their money just in case, as his father had said, "we need help in finding our way over the border."

  They had reached the frontier late in the afternoon, joining several other refugees waiting in a wooded area near the open swath that formed the border. Moishe's father left the five of them and went ahead "to arrange things." It was dark and a chill rain had begun before the money changed hands and the crossing was arranged. Following the hooded light of a guard, the Katznelsons stumbled over one another, heeding the guard's warnings to stay close together. Suddenly there was a blinding burst of light and soldiers were all around, yelling, and dogs, too, barking and biting.

  His mother's voice, his father's voice screamed out of a tangle of bodies, shouts, shots and beams of light cutting wildly across the field.

  "Run, Moishe! Over the border! Fast! Run, Moishe, Sophie, Malke, Sara. Keep going! Don't stop! Cross the border! Cross the border! We'll follow."

  Moishe grabbed the hand of his nearest sister and ran across the stubble of the field. Tripping over clumps of earth, they ran and ran to the safety of the trees beyond the field. And there they waited for Father and Mother and Malke and Sara. But no one came. None of Moishe's family and none of the others that had been led into the trap. The darting lights moved away from the open field, swinging back in the direction the Katznelson family had come from. The screams and cries became fainter. Then, for a moment, the sound of the car engines. Then silence . . . and the rain.

  "Moishe?" Sophie was ten, the baby of the family. "Moishe, where are we? What happened to Mama? Where are Malke and Sara?"

  "We are across the border," Moishe heard himself saying. "The others will come later. They will meet us later."

  He almost reassured himself. The part of him that was still a boy had faith that when his father said something would be, it would be. And since he had clearly heard his father shout "We will follow," it was absolutely certain that the rest of the family would be coming. But the part of Moishe which had accepted the responsibilities of manhood at his bar mitzvah only a few months before, refused to suppress the sounds of the shots which had been followed so incontrovertibly by silence. Perhaps what his father had meant was that they should keep going all the way to their original destination, to Vilna. Perhaps he had meant that they would all meet in Vilna. But where was Vilna?

  "I'm cold, Moishe," said Sophie, and then beginning to cry, "I want to go inside someplace and get warm."

  Moishe looked at her, shivering in the rainy night. Suppose they didn't go on but crept back instead - back across the open field, back to find the others. Then they could all be together again.

  But suppose the family wasn't there, he thought. Suppose they had escaped somehow? Then he and Sophie would be on the wrong side of the border, holding everybody up. His father had said: go over the border, keep going, don't stop. All right then they had crossed the border. Now they would keep going until they reached Vilna.

  Moishe took Sophie's hand. "We'll warm up if we walk," he said.

  "Where are we going, Moishe?" she asked again.

  "Vilna," he said firmly. And in too soft a voice for her to hear, "To Vilna and to Father, im yirzeh ha-Shem."

  With the will of God - and, more tangibly, with the help of other refugees who were never so tired or destitute that they couldn't share something with the two children - Moishe and Sophie Katznelson finally reached Vilna. There, the well of support that was fed by streams of money from Jews all over the world relieved them from the daily pressures of finding food, and shelter from the increasing cold. But as a result, there was absolutely nothing for Moishe to do . . . but wait. A steady, sad line of refugees continued to enter Vilna, so no doubt his father would come soon. But suppose his father and the rest came, even tomorrow? Where would they go from Vilna? Moishe sat around the International Joint Distribution Committee's relief kitchen with men older than he, but he soon realized that they had no better idea than he where to go from here.

  Moishe wracked his brain, mentally exploring all the countries in the world he had ever heard about, then, finding a world map in the library attached to the Great Synagogue of Vilna, discovered a great many more. He had never imagined there were so many countries! Pink, yellow, blue, green - it was such a beautiful world. After studying the map carefully, Moishe suggested half a dozen possible destinations for the Katznelson family to the secretary of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the main organization in charge of relocating Jewish refugees. At first, the overworked woman, exhausted from the frustrations of trying to find places for Jews in a world that simply did not want them, explained to him why each of his proffered destinations was impossible. But when Moishe returned with another list of countries, she angrily told him to leave her alone - then put her head down on the stacks of paper on her desk and burst into tears for no reason he could see. After that, all Moishe could do was keep his ears open for any possibility while his eyes were watching out for his family.

  Yesterday he had been rewarded. Killing time, sitting on a bench in the courtyard of the Great Synagogue, he had overheard one yeshiva student telling another about getting a permit to go to a place called "Kurasow." The funny thing, the student said, was the permit - a "visa" they called it - wasn't any good. They wouldn't really let you into "Kurasow." But, if you had one of those "visas" - or even if you said you were going to get one - you could get a real "visa" to Japan. You couldn't stay for long in Japan - Moishe tried unsuccessfully to remember just where Japan was on the map - but from Japan, some people were going to . . . America!

  America: the rich, the free, the place where nobody starved and no one was ever rejected. America: the good life for everybody students, laborers, shop keepers, geniuses, cripples and fools alike. Like the end of the rainbow, America was almost impossible to reach. But once you were there, once you were in. . . . The irreligious believed in America more than in God. Even the yeshiva students couldn't say the name without pausing an instant.

  Moishe had listened, had heard where the Japanese Consulate was and how to get there. That night, leaving Sophie in the free boardinghouse run by one of the Jewish relief agencies, he had crept onto a train for Kovno.

  Now he watched the huge crowd expand visibly as the warm light of the sun spread out from the horizon. Maybe Japan was a big country. Maybe the man inside that white cement house could give everybody "visas." He alone needed six. Where was Japan, anyway? But it didn't matter. If you could get from Japan to America, it didn't matter where Japan was. "America. If we could really get to America. Im yirzeh ha-Shem. . . ."

  A rustle of whispers ran through the crowd when a figure appeared briefly at the second-story window of the house. Then everyone became instantly and completely still. This was a way out. If only, if only. . . . There was no sound but the shallow breathing of four hundred people and the early morning chirruping of birds in the eaves of the Japanese Consulate.

  Away from the sight of
the motionless crowd, Consul Sugihara sat on his bed and reflected on what had led up to this. Three days ago, there had been one person, and he not literally a refugee. A young Dutch student in one of the Jewish yeshiva schools - one shy, respectful young man - had come to ask for a transit visa for Japan so that he might stop off en route to the Dutch colonial island of Curacao in the Caribbean Sea. It had all been very proper: the student, Nathan Gutwirth, had a Dutch passport and in it the honorary Dutch consul in Kovno had stamped and signed an affirmation of the fact that Curacao did not require an entry visa. That was strange, Sugihara had thought at the time, because, to the best of his knowledge, all the countries of the world now required entrance visas. Even Shanghai, the one place traditionally open to everyone under any circumstance, no questions asked, had, under Japanese occupation, instituted visa requirements the year before. However, what Curacao required was the business of the Dutch, not the Japanese. So Sugihara stamped the multi-lingual transit visa into Gutwirth's passport, filling in the date of issue and duration of validity. Then he signed his name and legalized the whole thing with the bright orangered official stamp of the Imperial Japanese Consulate.

  Actually it had been a pleasant change of pace. In the eleven months he had been in Kovno, Sugihara had not been asked to do a single thing concerning trade or diplomacy. Of course, he hadn't really been sent to do the work of a consul. He'd been sent out to spy. Tokyo did not trust its German allies. Sugihara's mission was to keep track of German troop movements, to be the extended ears and eyes of the Japanese military attache in Berlin who was, Tokyo believed, purposely kept in the dark as to Germany's military plans. However, Sugihara, in his early thirties and too young to have risen high in the ranks of the Foreign Ministry, still considered himself to be a diplomat, not a spy; so for once he was pleased to be doing something in his normal line of business.

  Within twelve hours of Gutwirth's polite departure from the house three more young men had appeared. Two had passports containing the phrase, "No visa to Curacao is required." One of them did not have even that - though with heartfelt conviction, he assured the consul that he would soon get it. Beginning to see a trend, though one he did not understand, Sugihara pleaded that he needed time to do the paperwork: the three young men should return the following day.

  Sugihara had never been involved with the apparently universal problems of those people called "Jews." He had read about them once, in high school, in a Shakespearean play. During the several months he'd lived in Manchuria, he had met some people who, he'd been told, were Jews. And of course he was well aware that Hitler blamed Jews for all of Germany's problems and that Russia also found them useful as political scapegoats. But until this moment, the "Jewish problem" had never been in any way his problem.

  Until this point it had seemed to Sugihara that "the Jewish problem" had always been simply a question of politics. In political matters, he was quite content to follow the directions of his superiors in the Foreign Ministry. But seeing actual people rather than words, and finding these people standing not in some far-off place but right under his nose, put the "Jewish problem" into a moral and human perspective. While he thought about it, Sugihara began drafting a cable to the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo: did he have permission to issue a number of transit visas for people reportedly bound for Curacao?

  Until Tokyo replied to his cable, there was nothing Sugihara could do. Outwardly unperturbed, he politely fended off the refugees who appeared in his office with that strange notation, "No visa to Curacao is required," stamped on their papers. But as their numbers increased, so did his inner bewilderment: what had the student Gutwirth done, or what had the honorary Dutch consul done, to start this train of events?

  It had been early July 1940 when Nathan Gutwirth had at last faced up to the fact that he had to do something. Born in Belgium twentyfour years before and raised in Holland, Gutwirth had been studying for nearly four years at the renowned Tels Yeshiva in central Lithuania. But clearly, that intellectually exciting and extremely satisfying part of his life was rapidly coming to a close. The previous May, Hitler's soldiers had marched through Holland with the speed, and resulting devastation, of lightning. The last letter from his mother had a terrified, almost indecipherable plea for him to save himself from the brutality of the German war machine. Nathan Gutwirth had spoken to his teachers and to the principal of the school. His problem was not, after all, unique: the Tels Yeshiva drew its students from all over Europe and now all of them equally were caught in the noose that was slowly tightening around Lithuania. Sympathetic as the rabbis were, and fearful of the worsening situation, they counseled against even attempting to do anything. "We can only hope and pray that we live through these times," they advised. "In the meantime, we should make no trouble, ask no questions, and by all means not call attention to ourselves. To go unnoticed is the best way of surviving."

  So while Germany tightened its hold on Holland and Belgium, while Britain was driven back to the Channel and Dunkirk, Nathan Gutwirth did nothing. By the end of June, the Germans were in Paris, but, more important to the Tels Yeshiva, the U.S.S.R. had formally annexed Lithuania. It had all been arranged on paper no invasion, no bloodshed. But the Jews were, once and for all, trapped.

  In early July, Gutwirth began a correspondence with the nearest Dutch ambassador, L. P.J. de Dekker, in Riga, Latvia. As a Dutch citizen, he asked, would it be possible for him to get a visa to the Dutch colony of Curacao? (Since that island was only some nine hundred miles from America, Gutwirth hoped that once he got there it would not be too difficult to get a visa to the United States.) De Dekker's response came promptly. Gutwirth would need no visa to go to Curacao. But Holland had no diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. It was theoretically impossible for him to try to pass through that country, and extremely dangerous for him to try.

  But Nathan Gutwirth had another problem to confront before dealing with Russia. "I am not in this predicament alone," he wrote back. "Is there some way my fellow students and teachers who are not Dutch citizens - could also get visas to Curacao?"

  "Visas to Curacao are not based on Dutch citizenship," de Dekker replied. "The official regulation concerning entry into Curacao is that no visa is required for anyone. What is required is a landing permit issued by the governor of the island. Definitely, the governor will not issue your friends any such permit. However, according to the letter of the law, Curacao does not require a visa. And there is no reason why this fact should not be stamped into the passport of any traveler who should desire it."

  Nathan Gutwirth caught the ambassador's drift, and he responded to the letter the same day he received it: "Would it be possible for you to inform your consuls here in Lithuania that they are permitted to do this?"

  De Dekker's reply came equally fast. "Not only is it possible," he said, "but I have already instructed every Dutch consul in the area to do exactly that - in passports, on identity papers, in fact, on any clean sheet of paper bearing the refugee's name. I fear the Russian problem is insurmountable. And I have no idea how you will get anywhere else even if you do manage to cross Russia. But I wish you all of you - the best of luck."

  De Dekker had been as good as his word. When Nathan Gutwirth went to see the honorary Dutch consul, Mr. Zwartendyk, who was actually the manager of the Philips Company's office in Kovno, Zwartendyk was waiting for him with a rubber stamp already made up: "No visa to Curacao is required." As he stamped Gutwirth's passport he assured the young man he would do the same for any Jew trying to escape from Europe.

  The background to that diplomatic stamp had never been explained to Consul Sugihara, but it wouldn't have mattered. Now, as he sat on the edge of his bed listening to the muffled sounds of four hundred anxious people just below his window, Sugihara realized that the time for contemplating the past, no matter how it had happened, was over. The Foreign Ministry's reply to his request to issue transit visas had come last night - an unequivocal "no." Transit visas could be issued only to people hold
ing firm declared destination visas. There was no change in this policy of several months standing and there were to be no exceptions.

  From the kitchen, Sugihara heard his youngest child, still upset by his frightening awakening, begin to whimper, only to be hushed by his mother. If the Jews couldn't guarantee that they could leave Russia for Japan, Sugihara knew, they would never be allowed into Russia in the first place. Other than Russia, there was no way for them to leave Lithuania. And there was not the slightest doubt in his mind that if they stayed in Lithuania, many, if not all, would be killed in the war that was bound to come. Politically, the Jews were not his problem. Still, when he had considered the political implications of Japan assisting the Jews, he wondered if Germany might not actually be pleased to see the back of some of this "problem."

  Morally, ethically, from the standpoint of basic humanity, Sugihara had no doubts. These people were not enemies. They weren't soldiers. They weren't revolutionaries. They weren't even common criminals. They were innocent, desperate refugees. In their helplessness, they were asking merely the simplest form of aid from Japan. How could Japan - imperial Japan which even now was championing the right of all wrongly oppressed peoples in Asia deny her help to these people?

  Consul Sugihara was an officer in the Foreign Ministry. But beyond his allegiance to his bureaucratic superiors, even beyond his allegiance to Foreign Minister Matsuoka, Sugihara, like all Japanese, believed his primary allegiance was to the one man who embodied all that was noble, strong and pure in Japan: the emperor. Certainly the emperor, Sugihara thought, would not hesitate to deal sympathetically and benevolently with these poor unfortunates. And just as surely, the emperor would expect his subordinates to do as he himself would do.

  Sugihara reworded his cable, this time to be sent to Foreign Minister Matsuoka himself. Then he confronted the even harder task of trying to determine what he could say to all those people standing just outside his window.