Jewish man who fled Nazis during WWII speaks of Kobe people's warmth

KOBE -- During World War II, some 5,000 Jews who fled persecution by Nazi Germany stayed in this western Japan port city for several months before moving on to third countries. Berl Schor, now 95, was one of them, and he recently spoke to the Mainichi Shimbun of those tumultuous days.

One morning in September 1939, when Schor was 11 years old, two loud explosions rocked Krakow in southern Poland. With the German Army rolling over Poland's borders, his elder sister and her husband decided to flee with their children and relatives to Lublin in the country's east, and Schor went with them. Along the way, the family of seven ran into invading Soviet troops pushing west. His home country had been sliced in two and occupied by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

A split-second decision sent them heading north to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, where it was rumored that the Japanese consulate in the central city of Kaunas was issuing visas. When they arrived at the consulate, the building was crowded with people seeking Japanese transit visas. Schor's sister's husband spotted a small door to the right of the main entrance. Going through, they found a Japanese diplomat sitting there.

He was Chiune Sugihara (1900-86), the vice-consul at the Japanese Consulate in Lithuania. Sugihara issued transit visas to Jewish refugees fleeing Poland in the summer of 1940, in defiance of the Japanese foreign ministry's policy of limiting refugee admissions. He is believed to have saved about 6,000 Jews. Schor, who was issued a visa covering his entire family, was registered as "number 77" on the list.

Schor and his family took the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok in the Soviet Union, and boarded a ship bound for Japan. In March of 1941, they landed at Tsuruga Port in Fukui Prefecture, and headed for Kobe, where they would be supported by the largest Jewish organization in Japan. In Kobe, Schor was greeted by many Japanese smiling and waving. He recalled the scene, saying that for the first time, he felt that he was free from any danger to his life.

A house was arranged in the Ijinkan quarter of the city's Kitano neighborhood by the Jewish Community of Kobe (Kobe Jewcom), which helped the refugees coming from Europe. Schor became friends with local boys, helped with milk delivery, and lived a "free" life for the first time in about a year and a half. He also frequented a nearby public bathhouse.

After staying in Kobe for about four months, they moved on to New Zealand via Shanghai, Hong Kong, Manila, Java, and Sydney, and it was there that they saw out the war. After graduating from a local university, Schor moved to Switzerland, and then to Israel in 1955. He now has more than 10 grandchildren and lives a happy life.

It is estimated that about 6 million Jews were massacred at Auschwitz in Poland and other Nazi concentration camps, including Schor's parents, who were murdered in June 1943. While many of his fellow Jews died, Schor stressed that one of the reasons he was able to survive was the warmth of the people in Kobe, who welcomed him and his family. Since it was a port town with many foreigners, there was probably less discrimination against them.

Kobe Jewcom provided housing to Jews like Schor and others who came to the city to escape Nazi persecution, and provided support such as advice on where to seek asylum. Since it opened its port to foreign trade in 1868, many Jews have come across the sea to Kobe. The organization is said to have been founded around 1937 by Anatole Ponevejsky and others who arrived from a Jewish community in Harbin, China.

The Kobe Jewcom building was destroyed by U.S. air raids in 1945, but a stone wall, about 2 meters high and 25 meters wide, survived. The location is now the site of the Kobe Institute of Computing's College of Computing and in November 2020, an information board was installed near the wall. In English and Hebrew as well as Japanese, it explains the history of exchange between Kobe citizens and Jewish refugees.

On Oct. 7, 2022, about 40 students from Kagawa Prefectural Takamatsu High School, the alma mater of Sugihara's wife, Yukiko, visited the site to learn about that history and the Holocaust.

Koharu Kimura, 16, a first-year student, said, "I learned that regardless of race, we should try to help people in difficult situations. I want to take action so that this history will not fade away."

(Japanese original by Atsuko Nakata, Kobe Bureau)