Refugees are much in the news now, though the U.S. media commonly refers to the Syrians struggling to enter Europe as "migrants." The reason: Together with genuine refugees fleeing from slaughter are so-called economic migrants seeking a better life in the West — and a news article is not always the best place to sort them out.
But in the wake of Germany's 1939 invasion of Poland and its subsequent conquest of Europe, Jews living under Nazi rule were marked for death. The ones who fled were refugees in the starkest sense of the word.
As Cellin Gluck's World War II-era biopic "Persona Non Grata" ("Sugihara Chiune") shows us, life or death for those desperate Jews often came down to a piece of paper stamped "visa" and the policy — or whims — of the embassy or consulate that issued it. One such stamper was Chiune Sugihara — the Japanese vice-consul in Kaunas, Lithuania — who issued transit visas from July 18 to Aug. 28, 1940, that saved an estimated 6,000 Jewish lives.
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