The Fugu Plan Read online

  Orliansky had his own problems, though, and Avram knew the man hadn't sought him out to listen to his.

  "So you can't even apply?" he asked.

  "Oh yes! Can and did! Fortunately, we could safely assume that Mr. Bailey, the visa officer at the Embassy was not familiar with the personal signature of a police captain in such a tiny town as Kuczbork. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society managed to get copies of all our birth certificates from Warsaw just before their office there was shut down. And I have an uncle and a cousin in America who guaranteed our support so we would not become what they call 'a public charge.' So, Mr. Chesno, you are looking at the proud holder of a bonafide place on the waiting list for an immigration visa to the United States of America!"

  Orliansky raised his tea glass in a toast to his own good fortune: but there was no triumph of joy in his eyes. "If all goes as planned, the whole family will be permitted into America in six years time."

  There was nothing to say. America was as good as closed to immigration. Britain was closed. Australia had actually suggested that the refugees were cowardly to want to come to their country at all rather than stand and fight, presumably with only their bare hands, against German tanks and artillery. The entire batch of fifteen thousand Palestine certificates that Britain promised to give out for the year had been issued by March. And as for the places you once thought you could buy your way into, well, the refugee centers were full of stories, experiences like that of the St. Louis. In 1939, nearly a thousand Jewish refugees with all their visas in order were refused permission to land by the Cubans and forced to return to Europe on what was called the "voyage of the damned." No matter what you paid, once the money changed hands there was absolutely no guarantee of getting anything in return.

  Orliansky stared into his tea without seeing. Avram stared at the table. "What is going on at the Japanese Consulate?" he asked before they both suffocated from gloom.

  "The consul there issued a transit visa to one fellow who had less than iron-clad permission to land in some Dutch colony on the other side of the world that would never in a million years let you in. There's some diplomatic quirk that lets the Dutch stamp in your passport that you can go to this place without a visa. And on the basis of that you can get a transit visa that will let you stay a few weeks in Japan. And from Japan. . . ." Orliansky shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe from way over there things look better."

  Avram's interest was aroused instantly, but so were his suspicions. "How are you going to get across Russia even to get to Japan?" he asked.

  "That is another problem. But anyway, I don't really think that it is a problem I'll ever have to face. The Japanese consul, whose name I don't even know, has already been turned down once by his government when he asked permission to give out these visas. He said he was asking again, but I really don't see that anything can come of it." Orliansky shook his head slowly. He was willing to dream but reality was defeating him at every turn.

  "Too bad, though," he went on. "Too bad it's all phony. I could really enjoy a life in some nice place just now."

  Avram had given up dreaming entirely. But he had not given up his desire to escape this tiny piece of Europe before it, too, was crushed completely between fascism and communism. For a Jew, doomed to destruction by either equally, giving up on escape would be tantamount to suicide. That he could actually get to Japan, and be allowed entry to a country that was, after all, Germany's Axis ally, and that he could then go from Japan to any free country whatsoever, seemed to Avram almost impossibly unlikely. But only "almost." At any rate, this Dutch colony scheme was the first possibility of any sort that had opened up in five months.

  "Tell me, Orliansky," he asked, "where is this Japanese consul whose name you don't know?"

  Consul Sugihara sat at his desk, gazing out on a bright August morning. If he looked through the opposite window, he knew from the experience of the past five days that he would see a scattering of refugees still waiting for word of the visas. The view over the beginnings of his small Japanese rock garden he found more restful.

  Sugihara himself did not understand a word of Yiddish, but he'd heard stories - horror stories about what was happening to the Jewish refugees. The more he heard, the more untenable Sugihara felt his position was. The refugees had nowhere to go. Their native land had already lost a war in which they themselves were considcred one of the stakes: their very lives were merely the rightful spoils of war as far as the Nazis were concerned. Going home would be suicide - a suicide with no meaning and no purpose. Yet if they stayed here and the Russians annexed the Baltic states, which the consul had no doubt they would soon do, they would at best merely have put off the evil day. The Russian government said it accepted Jews on an equal footing with everyone else. But Sugihara had heard other opinions and other stories about how the Russians felt . . . and acted.

  There were half a dozen of them still sitting on a bench across from his house; bearded old men in broad-brimmed black hats with locks of long, gray hair dangling in front of their ears. They were waiting, just waiting patiently, determined to be successful even if only a few visas were handed out. Ones like these would not have an easy time under Stalin either.

  Clearly, the rest of the world had turned its back on the refugees. Grand international refugee conferences had been held in comfortable resort spots like Bermuda and southern France, but no country had done anything other than suggest that some other country take care of the problem. Well, the West had never had much sympathy for non-Westerners. It had been raping China and Indo-China for a century. It had tried to do the same to Japan, but Japan had been clever enough to maintain her independence. But were the Jews Westerners? If they had originally come from Palestine, Sugihara could see why England and France and America would not consider them so. And he himself had seen characteristics of his own grandmother in the faces of the old Jewish women.

  What would happen to the refugees if Japan did not take them? Sugihara could see no answer but their destruction. But what would happen if Japan did open her doors to them? And what would happen to the professional diplomat Sugihara if he were to be the doorman?

  For the ninetieth time in a day and a half, Sugihara read over the second cable he had received on the subject: concerning transit VISAS REQUESTED PREVIOUSLY STOP ADVISE ABSOLUTELY NOT TO BE ISSUED ANY TRAVELER NOT HOLDING FIRM END VISA WITH GUARANTEED DEPARTURE EX JAPAN STOP NO EXCEPTIONS STOP NO FURTHER INQUIRIES EXPECTED STOP [SIGNED] K. TANAKA FOREIGN MINISTRY TOKYO. The Foreign Ministry had been true to its word: Sugihara's third and final cable had simply not been answered.

  What would they do to him for acting on a humanitarian impulse? Traditionally, Japanese who objected to unjust governmental decrees were very highly praised for their courage . . . and very speedily executed. On the other hand, Japan had been a democracy for several decades now, and the militaristic bent of Japanese society did not prevent a civilian government from maintaining control. If it were only a question of an official rebuke, a demotion, possibly even a temporary suspension from the Foreign Service Corps, how could that balance out the lives of all those people? How could he, Senpo Sugihara, carry out his responsibility to the Emperor and maintain his honor as a Japanese if he turned his back on these unfortunates? Ever since he had first received a hint of the refugees' problems, he'd been haunted by the words of an old samurai maxim: "Even a hunter cannot kill a bird which flies to him for refuge."

  The more Sugihara thought of the plight of the refugees, and of his capacity to alleviate that plight, the fewer options he seemed to have. Not reading them again, Sugihara took the two telegrams and filed them under "Cables Received." He combed his hair, straightened his tie and started for the front door, the official visa officer for the imperial Japanese government.

  3

  IN AUGUST I940, Japan was at the center of an unstable spider's web of international relationships. In Asia, she was officially at war - though for the time being only with China. It was a war Japan had purposely re
newed in I937, and it lasted much longer than its instigators had anticipated - a no-win, no-retreat situation that was costing far more than it was worth. Farther from home, with the changing balance of power in Europe, Japan was shifting gradually into the German camp. In I936 she signed an anti-Communist treaty with the German foreign minister, von Ribbentrop. In I938, she made a cultural agreement with Hitler. Political relations with Britain and the United States, on the other hand, were deteriorating rapidly. And the effects of these diplomatic problems were beginning to slip into the economic sphere, especially after America declared a "moral embargo" on the export of certain strategic goods. Finally, with the U.S.S.R., Japan was continuing in her centuries-old state of suspicious watchfulness. There were even some among the Tokyo leaders who felt that Japan should unilaterally attack Russia before the Russians had a chance to attack first.

  These were the publicly recognized ties that bound Japan to the rest of the world. Unknown to the public - in fact unknown to all but a handful of Japanese officials - the country had one more line out, a line which she hoped and believed could strengthen all the others. That was her tie with world Jewry.

  Japan's recognition of Jews as a distinct group in the world of "foreigners" dated back less than forty years. Cut off from Europe first by geography and then, after a brief but burning experience with politically active Catholic missionaries, by law, for the two hundred and fifty years of the seventeenth, eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries, Japan historically maintained an unyielding aloofness. She forbade any foreigner to enter the country and refused reentry to any Japanese who managed to leave. This self-imposed isolation left Japan no insight into the ways of the changing Western world. Knowing little of Christianity, Japan knew nothing of its religious forebearer. Having no contact with Europeans, she learned nothing of the actuality of Jewish life or of the Jewish people. By I853, when the American naval commodore, Matthew Perry, steamed into Tokyo Bay, demanding that Japan open her doors to intercourse with the world, so many Jews had become assimilated into the mainstream of secular Western life that the differences between Jew and Gentile were not readily apparent to the Japanese.

  After a few years of domestic turbulence, Japan responded to Perry's demands with total energy and unique agility. By the turn of the century, she had adapted to her own national life many of the most significant elements of Western culture - and a good deal of its nonsense: telephones and tall silk hats; universal compulsory education and the drinking of whisky; local elections; a large, standing army; a steam-driven navy. ... By the twentieth century, Japan felt so "modern," so much on an equal footing with the leading countries of the West, that she felt she too could improve her lot by military conquest. Her chosen victim was that perennial threat to her northern borders, Russia.

  By waging war on Russia, Japan hoped to seize the tsar's vast, empty northeast region, Manchuria. This would, she hoped, become a sure source of raw materials for her ever-expanding industries. Simply being able to take and control such a large slice of territory beyond her borders would give Japan increased respect throughout the world. With an explosion of nationalistic fervor, Japan entered into battle in February I904.

  Almost immediately, she realized she had bitten off too much. Russia was an immense country with a huge army and virtually unlimited financial resources. By April, the vice-governor of the government-owned Bank of Japan, Baron Korekiyo Takahashi, was in London trying desperately to borrow money on the international market. But it was a miserable excursion. Even under the most humiliatingly restrictive terms, he could find no more than half the absolute minimum Japan needed to continue the war. With only a few days remaining before he was due to sail back to Japan, Baron Takahashi went to a formal dinner given by a fellow banker. Over dessert, Takahashi found himself explaining his sense of disappointment to a man who happened to be seated next to him. Japan will surely be defeated, he said bitterly- Tsar Nicholas II will have another success under his imperial belt. Takahashi's dinner partner, a Mr. Jacob Schiff, seemed more interested than mere courtesy would call for. Schiff too, Takahasi learned, also hated Tsar Nicholas II, holding him personally responsible for a recent pogrom against the Jews of the Russian town of Kishinev. The conversation between the two men continued until the party broke up for brandy and coffee. Then Schiff wandered off and Takahashi forgot about him.

  The next morning Baron Takahashi's aide awoke him with the news that a Mr. Schiff wanted to see him - to discuss a five million pound loan! Takahashi was dumbfounded. "Who is this Schiff?" he asked.

  "A partner in the American investment bank of Kuhn-Loeb," the aide had learned, "a powerful force in the world money market, a major factor in international capital. Also, a Jew."

  Intrigued, Takahashi met with Schiff immediately and began what would become a deep and life-long friendship with him. (Ultimately, the Japanese banker sent his daughter to New York to live with the Schiffs for three years.)

  Over the next several months, Schiff arranged four further international loans, and cash in hand, Japan continued the war until she was in a position to sue for a victorious peace. In Japan, Jacob Schiff became a hero. National newspapers devoted page after page to his role in the victory. History books added whole chapters about him. Emperor Meiji, in an absolutely unprecedented act, invited Schiff, a commoner, to luncheon in the Imperial Palace. Without SchifFs help, there would have been no victory over the Russians. With SchifFs help, Japan had earned for herself new territories, new resources and greatly improved status in the eyes of the world. No honor was too great for this man.

  Jacob Schiff was an American, but it wasn't as an American that he had undertaken to help the Japanese. And the nearly two hundred million dollars that he'd raised wasn't even predominantly American money. In this instance, Schiff had acted as a Jew. The fact was not lost on the Japanese. For the entire victorious populace of Japan, "Jew" became synonomous with access to, and control of, vast sums of money.

  It was not until 1919, when Japanese soldiers were sent to Siberia to fight alongside White Russian soldiers in a losing battle against the Communists, that Japan was introduced to a less positive view of the Jews.

  Few White Russians had any affection for "zhids." But the strongest anti-Semite of all was one of the leaders of the counterrevolutionary forces, General Gregorii Semonov. Along with the rifles and canteens, Semonov issued to each soldier a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion - a virulently anti-Jewish book which was purported to be the minutes of a secret meeting held by Jewish leaders to plot the takeover of the entire world. In fact the book was fiction spun out of the imagination of the Russian secret police. But to the Russian soldiers, who blamed the Jews for the Bolshevik Revolution, and to the seventy-five thousand Japanese soldiers who were for the first time living and learning in a completely Western situation, The Protocols were to be taken literally, word for word.

  Among the Japanese soldiers were two young officers impressionable enough to allow The Protocols to become a major influence in their lives - and ultimately in the lives of several thousand European Jews. One of the officers was Captain Norihiro Yasue, a thirty-three-year-old Russian-language specialist who was posted to General Semonov's own staff. Yasue was a clear-sighted positivist from a samurai family of northern Japan. He would have much preferred to teach history in a good Japanese university than be a career officer in the Imperial Japanese Army. The other was Koreshige Inuzuka, a naval officer from Tokyo who had spent World War I in the Mediterranean and who was stationed during the Siberian Expedition on a battleship just off Vladivostok. Ambitious, not yet thirty years old, Inuzuka was still seeking a particular area to dominate.

  These two - and to a lesser extent a few dozen other Japanese accepted the premise of The Protocols: the Jews, having no land of their own, had been conspiring for years to make the entire world theirs. To this end, they had disrupted the stability of society by "inducing immorality into the young" and creating general dissatisfaction amo
ng all classes. They had cornered the wheat market in order to starve the world. They had seized control of the capital of the world and insidiously persuaded the innocent industrialists, bankers and "millionaires" the world over to join cause with them. Having successfully completed the preliminaries, the Jews stood now "on the threshold of sovereignty over all the world."

  Men like Yasue and Inuzuka had only to look at the world around them to see that something strange was going on. After generations in power, the governments of Austro-Hungary, China and even Russia had fallen within a decade. Youth, certainly in Japan and reportedly in many other countries, had definitely turned away from the traditional values of their fathers. The bankers, industrialists and millionaires were indeed dominating society with their crass, economically oriented values as never before. And one had to look no farther than Schiff to see what power Jews had over world capital!

  "But is it really so serious? Is the Jewish takeover really imminent?" Yasue would ask of the Russians.

  "Imminent? Look at what they are doing in our country now! You can see what chaos that Jew Karl Marx caused with his idiotic Communist Manifesto. That evil pamphlet was just one more step in their plot to take over the world. Don't you realize, can't you see it coming? You are next in line!"

  "But what can we do?" Inuzuka might ask. "Japan has never heard about the Jewish conspiracy. How can we possibly stop it?"

  "You have no choice. You must stop them, or you will lose your country and your national soul. Educate Japan about the Jews; educate yourselves about the Jews. Learn their tricks and protect yourselves from them!"

  By 1922, the Japanese Siberian Expedition had returned home. For most of the soldiers, The Protocols - book and concepts - were forgotten. But Inuzuka, at the Tokyo naval headquarters, began collecting around him a coterie of sympathetic officers with whom he would discuss and examine the "Jewish conspiracy." And Yasue, in the Army Intelligence Bureau, began a Japanese translation of The Protocols.