Name Jan Zwartendijk | Role Diplomat | |
 | ||
Died 1976, Eindhoven, Netherlands | ||
The Netherlands' Unsung Schindler
Jan Zwartendijk (29 July 1896 in Rotterdam – 1976, Eindhoven) was a Dutch businessman and diplomat who helped Jews escape Lithuania during World War II.
Contents
World War II activities
Zwartendijk directed the Philips plants in Lithuania. On 19 June 1940, he was also a part-time an acting consul of the Netherlands - or, to be exact, of the Dutch government-in-exile. His superior was the Dutch ambassador to Latvia, De Decker.
When the Soviet Union took over Lithuania in 1940, some Jewish Dutch residents in Lithuania approached Zwartendijk to get a visa to the Dutch Indies. With De Decker's permission, Zwartendijk agreed to help them. The word spread and Jews who had fled from German-occupied Poland also sought his assistance.
Ambassador de Dekker had been encouraged by a Jewish applicant to write a declaration on her visa stating that entering Curaçao in the West Indies did not require a visa, while omitting the part about the Governor's permission being required. Told of this, Zwartenijk followed suit and in a few days, with the help of aides, produced over 2,200 visas for Jews to Curaçao.
Then refugees approached Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese consul, who gave them a transit visa through Japan, also against official diplomatic rules. This gave many refugees an opportunity to leave Lithuania for the Far East via the Trans-Siberian railway.
In the three weeks after 16 July, Zwartendijk wrote up over 2400 de facto visas to Curaçao and some of the Jews copied more. Many who helped only knew him as "Mr Philips Radio". When the Soviet Union annexed Lithuania, they closed down his Philips office and the embassies and consulates in Kaunas on 3 August 1940. He returned to the occupied Netherlands to work in the Philips headquarters in Eindhoven until his retirement. He did not talk about the matter.
Zwartendijk died in 1976.
Awards
In 1996 Boys Town Jerusalem, an orphanage and vocational training school in Jerusalem, Israel, honored Zwartendijk at a tribute dinner in New York City and announced the establishment of the Jan Zwartendijk Award for Humanitarian Ethics and Values. The award has since been bestowed on other Holocaust-era saviors, including President Manuel Luis Quezon and the people of the Republic of the Philippines.
In 1997 Yad Vashem bestowed the title "Righteous Among the Nations" on Zwartendijk.
On 10 September 2012 Zwartendijk was awarded with The Life Saving Cross of the Republic of Lithuania, a decoration to award the persons who, despite danger to their lives, attempted to save life.
In the novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon, it is implied that the protagonist Josef Kavalier receives visas from Zwartendijk and his ally Chiune Sugihara. Though the novel does not mention these men by name, it describes a "Dutch consul in Kovno who was madly issuing visas to Curaçao, in league with a Japanese official who would grant rights of transit" (p. 65).