Noble Rogues
Counterfeits & Copies
Hi, it’s me again, Leah. The last time we met, my brother Aaron persuaded our father to go to Lithuania.
We settled in Vilnius and Aaron fled to Telshe - the Telshe Yeshiva of his dreams. At first, everything went pretty well, we got a little room in a dormitory for refugees, went to eat in canteens for refugees, we thought we just need to wait until the end of the war, then we could return home, to Łódź, or maybe go to Warsaw, or finally get to America, but then the Soviets took over the government of Lithuania, and the ground began to burn under our feet again. Especially for Aaron, because he, as a student of the rabbinical school, would have been a pain for the new government, which was destroying any manifestations of religion. It was from Aaron that we learned about the Curaçao permits issued by the Dutch Consulate and about the Japanese Consul issuing transit visas. Aaron received both visas along with other Telshe Yeshiva students and, accompanied by his teacher, left by train in October. We agreed to meet in Japan, at another stopover, but things turned out not quite as expected. While Dad was trying to find money and buy train tickets for our whole family, while he was tinkering with our golden shoe buckles that had been replaced back in Łódź, scraping the paint from them and trying to exchange them for cash, time flew by. When he finally got to Kaunas with all the money and documents, he found the consulate already closed.
He didn’t tell us that for many years.
It wasn’t until much later, when we were already living abroad, when Grandma, who had finished her long and complicated earthly journey with dignity, was beautifully buried, when Aaron’s wedding was danced away, Dad, who had one or two glasses of sweet wine too many, told us the true story.
Our family names don’t feature in the famous list of visas issued by Sugihara. When Dad, collapsed and sobbing, was found by a former employee passing by the closed Japanese Consulate, he felt sincerely sorry for him. In addition to pity, one golden shoe buckle certainly helped: Dad was told to return to Vilnius and go to St. Casimir’s Church. “What, to pray?” Dad asked, surprised. “Does the Christian God help the Jews?”
In the basement of St. Casimir’s Church there was a secret factory for forging visas, passports and other documents required for departure. Document fraud. When the Polish assistant brought Sugihara a rubber stamp to speed up the work at the peak of the visa issuance, he also had a duplicate of that stamp in his pocket. In such an illegal way, Dad got a very expensive and very fake visa for our family. One transit visa on behalf of Dad was enough for the whole family.
Having such a visa was not enough - it was still necessary to get permission to leave the Soviet Union! At the NKVD headquarters, Dad was kindly offered “work” in exchange for such permission.
