Born in Rotterdam on July 29, 1896, Zwartendijk lived the quiet life of a company man. By 1939, he had risen to become director of the Lithuanian branch of Philips, the Dutch electronics giant that made light bulbs, gramophones, and radios. He lived in Kaunas, then the capital of Lithuania, with his wife and three children. Life was comfortable. He had a secondhand Buick in the driveway and a wide circle of friends.Then the world collapsed.In September 1939, Germany invaded Poland from the west while the Soviet Union invaded from the east. Over ten thousand Polish refugees fled into neutral Lithuania. Many of them were Jewish, including some of Poland's finest rabbis, scholars, and young men fleeing conscription.In May 1940, Germany invaded the Netherlands. The Dutch ambassador to the Baltic states, L.P.J. de Decker, who resided in Riga, Latvia, immediately removed the existing Dutch consul in Kaunas because of his German wife's Nazi sympathies. A few weeks later, he asked Zwartendijk to take on the unpaid position of honorary consul.Zwartendijk accepted. He expected to help perhaps a handful of Dutch citizens.Then, on June 15, 1940, the Soviet Union invaded Lithuania.The refugees who had fled Nazi persecution now found themselves trapped again. The Soviet authorities made clear they would not tolerate religious observance. For the Orthodox Jewish community, this meant persecution under yet another totalitarian regime. For everyone, it meant imprisonment behind borders that were rapidly closing.They needed to escape. But escape required proof of a destination, and no country wanted them.Then a woman named Pessla Lewin had an idea.Lewin, a Jewish refugee from Poland, wrote to Ambassador de Decker asking if he could help her family emigrate to the Dutch West Indies. De Decker replied that visas to the Caribbean colonies were not being issued. Entry required permission from the local governor in Curaçao.Lewin wrote back. Perhaps, she suggested, the ambassador could simply write in her passport that no visa was required for Curaçao, without mentioning the governor's permission?De Decker agreed.That single omission changed everything.When word reached the yeshiva students Nathan Gutwirth and Chaim Nussbaum, they immediately understood the implications. If they could get this notation in their passports, they could use it to obtain a Soviet exit permit. And if they had an exit permit showing a destination in the Pacific, they might persuade the Japanese consul to issue a transit visa.They took their passports to Zwartendijk.At first, Zwartendijk wrote each notation by hand: "The Dutch Consulate in Kaunas, Lithuania, does not require an entry visa to enter the Dutch territories of the Americas, including Suriname and Curaçao."It was technically true. It was also completely useless for actually getting to Curaçao. But that was not the point.The word spread through the refugee community like fire.Within hours, hundreds of desperate people lined up outside Zwartendijk's office. They came with their families, their elderly parents, their children. Some kissed his shoes. One man later recalled: "Among the refugees were the elderly and women. They were so desperate that they went so far as to kiss my shoes. Yes, I actually witnessed such scenes with my own eyes."Zwartendijk had a rubber stamp made. The work went faster.Meanwhile, up the street, Japanese consul Chiune Sugihara began receiving refugees with Zwartendijk's stamps, asking for transit visas through Japan. Sugihara contacted Tokyo for permission to issue the visas. Tokyo refused. He asked again. They refused again.Sugihara issued the visas anyway.The two men worked feverishly, in an unplanned, uncoordinated partnership. They had never met. They never spoke. But together, they created an escape route that no one had imagined possible: from Lithuania, by train across the Soviet Union on the Trans-Siberian Railway, to the port of Vladivostok, then by ship to Japan, and from there to freedom.Sugihara actually phoned Zwartendijk, asking him to slow down. Zwartendijk was issuing visas faster than Sugihara could process the transit papers.By August 1, 1940, Zwartendijk had reached visa number 2,200. Sugihara was still at around 700, but he would continue after Zwartendijk was forced to stop.On August 3, the Soviets closed all foreign consulates in Kaunas.Before he left, Zwartendijk burned all official papers, removing any trace of what he had done. He knew the Nazis might come looking.In September 1940, he returned with his family to the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. For the next four years, he lived in fear that the Germans would discover his activities in Lithuania. He worked quietly at Philips headquarters in Eindhoven.He never spoke of what he had done.The refugees, meanwhile, were making their improbable journey. Between 2,100 and 2,200 arrived in Japan with Zwartendijk's visas. About half eventually reached the United States, Palestine, and other safe destinations. The remaining thousand were transferred by the Japanese to Shanghai, where they survived the war.Not a single one ever reached Curaçao.Ninety-five percent of the refugees who received Zwartendijk's visas survived the Holocaust.But Zwartendijk did not know this.For the rest of his life, he wondered what had happened to the people he had helped. He feared the worst. His son later recalled: "He must have thought that most of these people perished. He must have been worried that he sent them to their deaths."The silence around his actions was total. The Dutch government learned of his activities in 1963 when a newspaper article appeared about the mysterious "Angel of Curaçao." Instead of honoring him, they reprimanded him.In 1964, a senior Dutch official, Joseph Luns, who later became head of NATO, gave Zwartendijk a formal dressing-down for disobeying consular rules. Because of this intervention, Zwartendijk was denied the royal honors that his career at Philips should have earned him.It broke something inside him.His son recalled that after the reprimand, Zwartendijk became "a troubled figure." He had been optimistic and open-minded. Now he carried trauma. He still never spoke about what he had done.Jan Zwartendijk died on September 14, 1976, in Eindhoven. He was eighty years old.One week after his funeral, a letter arrived at his home from Rabbi Marvin Tokayer in Japan, containing detailed information about the 2,178 Jews who had reached Japan from Lithuania. The letter Zwartendijk had waited decades to receive came too late.Recognition followed slowly. In 1997, Yad Vashem honored him as Righteous Among the Nations. In 2018, after Dutch author Jan Brokken published a book about the rescue, the Dutch government finally apologized to Zwartendijk's family, calling the 1964 reprimand "completely inappropriate."In 2023, he was posthumously awarded the highest non-military honor in the Netherlands.Today, a stunning monument stands in Kaunas. More than two thousand LED rods, representing the passports he stamped, spiral upward in a tower of light in front of the old Philips office.When Zwartendijk's son was asked about his father's view of his own heroism, he recalled his father's words: "Ah, that's not very important. Everyone would have done those things if they had been in this position."But that is not true. We know it is not true. In a world that turned its back on refugees, two men, one a radio salesman and one a Japanese diplomat, chose to act.Steven Spielberg, upon learning Zwartendijk's story, told his son that had he known about it earlier, he would have filmed this story instead of Schindler's List.Jan Zwartendijk saved more lives. He never profited. He never sought recognition. He spent his final years haunted by uncertainty, punished by his own government, and honored only by the silence of a secret he took nearly to his grave.Everyone should know his name.
My Comment: I’ve written about the heroic Chiune Sugihara several times here on Quora. I had never heard of the other half of this amazing duo. Until now.
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