I got an email today from my first grade classmate about three legends.
1. During WWII, Jews in Germany threw down money and bought a ship to go to America. They asked American consul to give them visas and he refused. They set off for America anyway and the consul wired US warning them of a ship heading there without proper papers. The ship was turned around and all those in the ship perished inside the concentration camps. After the war, Rabbis went to the consul and cursed him and his family for his part in the deaths of all those innocent men, women and children.
The consul’s name was Kennedy.
2. A Japanese envoy in Lithuania was actively giving visas to Jews to emigrate to Japan during WWII. Nazi Germany asked Japan to rescind their envoy. Japan obliged but they gave the envoy two more weeks in which he managed to save many more lives before finally leaving for Japan. Jewish Rabbis thanked him and blessed him for his role. The man lost his job and to survive he started a small electronics shop.
The envoy’s name was Mitsubishi
(This one is not right, the poor guy died poor and his name is Sugihara, but there is a park in Israel named in his honor.)
(This one is not right, the poor guy died poor and his name is Sugihara, but there is a park in Israel named in his honor.)
3. In Kiev Ukraine there is a statue to an important Ukrainian figure, Boghdan Khmelnitskiy. He fought against the Poles for Ukraine’s independence and his way of fighting was mostly through ethnic cleansing. Because many jobs were given to Jews by Poles, he took an especially aggressive stance on Jews. So much so that many fled to Germany or died in small towns en mass. In one town he completely exterminated all traces of the Jewish population, young and old all were killed. The synagogue was burned down and all traces of Jewish life extinguished. The town became Ukrainian and four hundred years later still existed.
The town’s name was Chernobyl and the synagogue had stood in place where reactor number 4 of the fabled nuclear power station would later explode.