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AN EPIC STORY OF COURAGE AND SURVIVAL
Author: Jan Brokken, translated by David Mckay Publisher: Scribe UK Price: £25 Released: Out now
“IT’S A TALE THAT IS SO REMARKABLE AS TO BE ALMOST UNBELIEVABLE”
In The Just: How Six Unlikely Heroes Saved Thousands of Jews from the
Holocaust, Dutch author Jan Brokken tells a tale that is so remarkable as to be almost unbelievable. That every word is true and that the story is little known even today makes it a book that needs to be read. In this sensitive, compelling translation by David Mckay, Brokken tells the story of Jan Zwartendijk, the Dutch consul in Lithuania, and a small group of friends who defied the rules and risked everything to save thousands of lives.
As desperate Jewish refugees in Kaunas, Lithuania, sought a means of escape from the Holocaust, the unassuming Zwartendijk hit upon a plan to issue visas that would allow them to travel to the Dutch colony of Curaçao. Over 10 days Zwartendijk and Japanese vice-consul Chiune Sugihara wrote out thousands of visas that allowed as many as 10,000 people to flee the Nazi regime. Zwartendijk and Sugihara worked for as many as 20 hours a day, churning out a month’s worth of visas in one shift that guaranteed the families of those who possessed them safe passage to Curaçao. They would travel on the Trans-siberian Express through Soviet Russia, through Japan, and into China, from where they could undertake the final leg of the journey to safety. To those who received them, the visas were truly a life line, but after the war Zwartendijk and Sugihara were treated as pariahs by their own nations and stories of their heroism went untold.
The Just is the book that Zwartendijk’s deeds truly deserve. It is a painstaking reconstruction of a story that should not have been forgotten and that, thanks to Brokken’s sensitivity and laser-focussed attention to detail, can now be told again. It is a story that requires an enormous cast of characters and a global canvas that might have been unwieldy in less assured hands, but which Brokken martials with ease. The narrative is all the more remarkable because Zwartendijk was simply an ordinary man. Before the war he was the director of production at the Lithuanian offices of electronic company Philips, and in peacetime he returned to this role, working for Philips in the Netherlands until his retirement. A humble man, Zwartendijk spoke little of his wartime efforts and few who knew him knew what he had achieved. Sugihara, meanwhile, had his diplomatic career terminated as a result of his actions in Lithuania.
Though they have been honoured by the Jewish community worldwide, the actions of these unassuming heroes who saved so many lives have been largely unknown. Brokker’s book should change that, and it deserves to be read by the widest audience possible. It is an inspiring story of humanity, courage and hope in the darkest hours of the war. It is profoundly moving and a story that should be told again and again, as a reminder of the remarkable and lasting impact that even a handful of people can have.