THE JUST

'How Six Unlikely Heroes Saved Thousands of Jews from the Holocaust'. In May 1940, desperate Jewish refugees in Kaunas, the capital of Lithuania, faced annihilation until an ordinary Dutch man became their saviour. Over a period of 10 feverish days, Jan Zwartendijk, the newly appointed Dutch consul, wrote thousands of visas that would ostensibly allow Jews to travel to the Dutch colony of Curaçao on the other side of the world. With the help of Chiune Sugihara, the consul for Japan, while taking great personal and professional risks, Jan enabled up to 10,000 men, women and children to escape the country on the Trans-Siberian Express train, through Soviet Russia to Japan and then on to China, saving them from the Nazis and the concentration camps. Most of the Jews he helped escape survived the war and they and their descendants settled in America, Canada, Australia and other countries. Zwartendijk and Sugihara were true heroes, and yet they were both shunned by their own countries after the war, and their courageous, unstinting actions have remained relatively unknown. Dutch author Jan Brokken wrests this heroic story from oblivion and traces the journeys of a number of the rescued Jews. This remarkable story is reconstructed with the help of Zwartendijk's children, documents and personal testimonies. It is also the story of the three other consuls and two ambassadors, all equally unknown, who together set up one of the greatest rescue operations of the 20th century. This should have been a Spielberg film. 478pp, well illus.