After talks with Lithuanian president Valdas Adamkus, Queen Beatrix visited Sugihara House in Kaunas, the second largest city in this young European Union and NATO member state.
The site is dedicated to the memory of the war-era Japanese consul in Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara, with a special section devoted to Jan Zwartendijk, a temporary Dutch consul in Lithuania in 1940.
It is estimated that the pair saved some 6,000 Jews.
"DUTCH WALLENBERG"
wartendijk became known as the "Dutch Wallenberg," a reference to Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who rescued thousands of Hungarian Jews from being transported to death camps, by issuing them with protective passports from the Swedish embassy.
In Lithuania, Zwartendijk saved Jews from the Holocaust by granting visas for the Dutch Caribbean island of Curacao to ethnic Jews, while Sugihara distributed visas for Japan. This allowed the Lithuanian Jews to apply for visas of the Soviet Union and to leave Lithuania, occupied by Nazi Germany.
Zwartendijk’s son, Rob, told Radio Netherlands Worldwide (RNW) this week that, "In fact, a visa wasn’t necessary because you only needed permission from the governor to enter Curacao." However, "you needed some kind of visa in order to apply for a transit visa for Russia and Japan," Rob Zwartendijk recalled. “So my father made him a fake visa, and just kept quiet about the governor’s permission. The next day, hundreds of Jews turned up at my father’s door."
LATE RECOGNITION
Jan Zwartendijk’s son was born in Kaunas in 1939, but only heard about what his father had done during the war in 1973. He said he later learned how, in less than two weeks, his father issued about 2,700 visas, all of them written out by hand. “He spent around 18 hours a day getting them ready,” RNW quoted Rob Zwartendijk as saying. Time was pressing because the Soviet authorities were demanding the closure of all foreign consulates.
Both Sugihara and Zwartendijk were awarded Yad Vashem medals, the most important Jewish honour for war heroes who saved Jews from Nazi German genocide in the Holocaust. Lithuania’s capital Vilnius hosts monuments for to both men.
Around 5,000 Jews live today in Lithuania whose capital, Vilnius, used to be known as the "Jerusalem of the North". Jews started to live in the city during the middle of the 16th century and it became prominent a prominent centre for rabbinical studies, according to experts.
Queen Beatrix visit to the country came after rabbis in Budapest expressed concerns however this week that the ideology of Nazi-leader Adolf Hitler can count on a growing number of followers in especially former Communist Europe. Western European countries, including France, have also reported antisemitism. On Thursday, June 26, a 17-year-old Jewish boy was believed to be still in an intensive-care unit fighting for his life after over an attack left him in a coma.
Assailants, possibly as many as 15, attacked the boy last Saturday night, June 21, in eastern Paris in part because he was wearing a Jewish skullcap, the Union of Jewish Students of France said. President Nicolas Sarkozy said in a statement that France is "renewing total determination to fighting all forms of racism and anti-Semitism." The name of the boy was not released under French regulations, because he is a minor.
