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Chiune Sugihara
Consul General • Japan • 1900–1986
Saved approximately 6,000 Jewish refugees by issuing transit visas against the orders of his own government -- the Japanese Schindler.
Chiune Sugihara served as Japanese consul in Kaunas, Lithuania in 1940. When hundreds of Jewish refugees arrived at his consulate begging for transit visas, Tokyo ordered him to issue none. Instead, for weeks, he wrote visas by hand -- up to 300 per day. He threw completed visas out train windows to the refugees who followed him to the station. He saved approximately 6,000 lives. After the war, he was dismissed from the Japanese Foreign Service and lived in obscurity and poverty for decades.