Visas for Life · Episode 2 · 47 min
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In September 1939, as Europe dissolved into war, refugees flooded across borders by foot and train, carrying sacks of belongings and layers of fear. Lithuania—a tiny republic under impossible pressure—did not close its gates.
This episode uncovers Lithuania’s crucial, often forgotten role in the story of wartime rescue. Not just a backdrop, it was an active player: a fragile, sovereign state that made quiet but resolute choices to open its borders, granting refugees time, space, and breathing room amid global inaction. Drawing on historian Timothy Snyder’s insights, we examine how the loss of Lithuanian sovereignty in June 1940 unraveled protections and opened the door to industrial-scale horror.
But Lithuania’s story is a reminder that even small nations can hold the line—until the clock runs out.
✍️ Companion essay: The forgotten country in the Sugihara story
Transcript
Welcome to History Shadows, Episode 2: The Lost Republic.
Let’s rewind not to Berlin, not to Vienna, but to Kaunas, small capital of a small republic. A dot on the map, forgotten by most. Lithuania, 1939. This is where the story begins. Not just Sugihara’s story, not just the famous visas, but the part we almost never tell.
The story of a state, fragile, sovereign, independent, that for a fleeting moment held the line. Because before the ink on those visas ever touched paper, before Curaçao became a loophole, before the Great Escape Route opened, there was something else. A decision.
Lithuania barely gets a footnote in most versions of this saga. The Sugihara narrative?
We know it by heart. The Japanese consul in Kaunas, the crowds, the desperate pleas. But Lithuania itself, it drifts in the background like a ghost.
Here is the uncomfortable truth.
Without the Lithuanian Republic, there is no Sugihara story. No refugees in Kaunas. No desperate families banging on the consular door. No one to hand those life-saving visas to. Because somebody had to let them in first.
This is what we need to understand.
Lithuania wasn’t just a backdrop. It was an actor, a government that set policy, a society with its own press and politics. It made choices, some timid, some bold. And those choices mattered. When the war erupted in September 1939, the flood began.
Refugees stumbling over the border on foot, holding everything they owned in sacks, clinging to trains, packed into carriages thick with coal dust and fear. And Lithuania, this tiny republic, under impossible pressure, didn’t close the gates.
It gave them something priceless.
Time. Space. Breathing room.
And for some, life itself.
Think for a moment about how this story usually gets told.
Sugihara, the lone hero.
Zwartendijk, the clever Dutch consul with his Curaçao workaround. The mad rush to the train station, the frantic lines outside the consulate. All true. All essential.
But every one of those moments depended on something larger. A state still functioning.
That’s why in this story we must talk about Lithuania. Because when Lithuania vanished, occupied by the Soviets in June 1940, the clock ran out. Everyone knew it: the refugees, the diplomats, Sugihara himself. That loss of sovereignty wasn’t just the erasure of a country.
It was the erasure of law, the unraveling of protection, the moment when the gate to hell began to crack open. As historian Timothy Snyder has put it: “It is possible for Germany to massively kill Jews only when it destroys other states and announces that their legal system is no longer valid.”
When law collapsed, murder rushed in. When courts vanished, when property rights disintegrated, when sovereignty was stripped away, that was the moment killing could begin on an industrial scale.
Sugihara’s fame, his moral courage, rests on an overlooked truth. He operated in a state that for a brief moment still existed.
And that mattered. He didn’t write visas in the ruins of a battlefield. He did it in a functioning consulate. Let’s call this what it is. The desert phenomenon.
An oasis of moral clarity in a vast landscape of inaction. We zoom in on that single tree in the sand, Sugihara’s desk, the ink, the desperate names, but we forget to turn around, to see the desert, to ask: why was this even possible? Why were the refugees in Lithuania at all?
Because, and no one likes to remember this, Lithuania let them in, even as other nations slammed their doors shut.
At the Évian Conference in 1938, thirty-two nations gathered to wrestle with the Jewish question. They sympathized, they debated, and then they did nothing. But one year later, as Europe dissolved into war, Lithuania acted. Not loudly, not with proclamations. Quietly, resolutely, it opened its border.
And here is something almost no one recalls. Before Sugihara ever filled out a single visa, Lithuanian diplomats were already writing them. In Vilnius, a city about to be returned to Lithuanian control, the diplomatic mission issued more than a thousand transit visas in the span of one week, September 11 to 19, 1939. Refugees from Poland, civilians, people of no Lithuanian descent at all, fleeing German bombs and later the Soviet advance. And the man behind the desk?
Consul Antanas Trimakas, a name that almost never gets mentioned today, but it should. Because before the legends there was policy. Before the lone heroes there were state officials, quietly doing their job. In the months that followed, this fragile republic became a transit hub, a holding zone, a last refuge.
For some, only a pause before exile; for others, the stage for the final chapter. But for all, it was a chance, a fragile, fleeting chance to live.
Carl von Clausewitz once wrote that war is the continuation of politics by other means.
A neat phrase: clean, almost elegant. But in the 20th century war was never that neat. It was total. It swept up everyone: soldiers, yes, but also the families behind them. The civilians trampled in retreat.
The children shoved onto trains in the dead of night.
When we picture war, we imagine tanks slogging through mud, planes roaring overhead, maps covered with arrows. But that’s only one part of it. War creates movement. It shatters borders. It makes refugees.
And in 1939, Lithuania, neutral, small, fragile, suddenly found itself at the edge of that storm. Not as a combatant, but as a country flooded by the human overflow of war. There is a legal word worth pausing on here: “alien”.
Not a little green man, but anyone who doesn’t belong to your state, a non-citizen, a foreigner.
Lithuanian law was clear. The 1933 Alien Settlement Act spelled it out. If a person wasn’t a Lithuanian citizen, this person was an alien.
That included refugees. Even those fleeing bombs. Even those with nothing left but the clothes they wore. And when war broke out six years later, Lithuania didn’t invent brand new refugee law. It simply extended the alien laws, twisting them to fit the case.
By definition, a war refugee was nothing more than an alien who entered or was forced into Lithuania because of war.
Cynical, cold, bureaucratic. But it was an attempt, however limited, to impose order on chaos. Refugees had to register. They had to carry papers. They had no right to work, no right to own businesses, no right to politics.
Tolerated, managed, but never embraced.
And here is a twist almost no one remembers.
Do you know where the very first trial of Nazis took place?
Not Nuremberg, not some grand Allied tribunal after the war, but in Lithuania. Tiny Lithuania. Watching the unrest in Klaipėda, or Memel in German, the agitation, the rallies, the whispers of revolt, this little state dared to act.
It hauled Nazi activists into court, legal action against the Reich’s agents, and the shock rippled across Europe.
In early 1934, Lithuanian police arrested the leaders of local Nazi organizations. They raided offices, seized files, dragged evidence into daylight. The press went wild. But notice this. In those years, the menace wasn’t described as Nazism as we think of it today. Not antisemitism, not ideology.
No, the threat was seen as plain German imperialism. In March 1934, the Lithuanian newspaper Lietuvos žinios ran a series called “Germany’s Imperial Plans”. Its take? Hitler wasn’t a genius revolutionary. He was a puppet, a creature of big industry: coal, steel, heavy machinery.
The Nazis’ rise? A revolution of industrialists. And Hitler himself? Just their hired hand. The names at the center: Ernst Neumann and Theodor von Sass. The trial ran from December 1934 to March 1935, under international scrutiny.
More than a hundred defendants. And when the verdict finally came, March 26, 1935, the hammer dropped. Four sentenced to death, two to life in prison, dozens to years behind bars.
But justice in Lithuania was one thing. Justice in Hitler’s Europe was something else entirely. Under relentless pressure from Berlin, the prisoners were gradually freed. The sentences dissolved in the acid of intimidation and diplomacy. And four years later, in March 1939, the Wehrmacht marched into Klaipėda.
What had once looked like Lithuania’s act of defiance, its bold stand against the Reich, ended up as a forgotten prelude on the road to annexation.
In 1939, after Vilnius was handed back to Lithuania under the Soviet-Lithuanian Mutual Assistance Treaty, a question exploded into politics.
Who counted as Lithuanian and who didn’t? And what did that mean for the thousands now pouring across the border? Most were Polish citizens, many were stateless, and countless were Jews. But the law didn’t care about their tragedies. Under Lithuanian law, they were just foreigners, aliens. And even sheltering one of them could be dangerous.
A Lithuanian citizen caught hiding a refugee without a permit? That meant a fine of 5,000 litas or six months under arrest. Now let’s be clear. Lithuania wasn’t cruel. It didn’t push people back into the jaws of the war. But it wasn’t generous either.
Refugees couldn’t work without a special permit, and those permits were rare. They had no voice in politics, no stake in the state that had suddenly become their protector. Still, for many it was the only place left to breathe, to wait, to cling to time itself.
Think about the absurdity. War itself had made these people illegal.
Their citizenship dissolved, their rights erased, their very existence reclassified as a problem. And the irony? Most of them still had papers: Polish passports, Jewish identity cards, birth certificates. All stamped, notarized, official, and suddenly meaningless.
So Lithuania issued war refugee certificates. A thin protection, a piece of paper against chaos. But something. And it wasn’t just civilians who came stumbling across the borders. Soldiers came too. Interned Polish troops, disarmed, still in uniform, streaming into Lithuania in September and October 1939.
By international law, they weren’t refugees. But they weren’t prisoners of war either. Not in a neutral state. So what were they?
A legal grey zone. Men without weapons, stuck in a country clinging to neutrality, desperately trying not to collapse. Lithuania had only just ratified the Geneva Convention. Technically, these men had to be treated with respect: held in camps, not punished, fed, but not freed.
While law tried to keep up, reality sprinted ahead. The Polish army collapsed. The Soviets stormed in from the east. And thousands more soldiers stumbled into Lithuania. And the only thing the state could do, the only tool left in its kit, was to intern them all.
This was Lithuania. Still standing, still functioning, but barely, surrounded by collapsing neighbors, flooded with desperate humanity, trying against all odds to hold the line. And in the face of it, Lithuania did something most other states would not.
It tried to keep law alive, to maintain order, to give something, even a scrap of paper, to people who had nothing.
“Who are you really? And what were you before? What did you do and what did you think, huh?” That line from Casablanca in 1942 echoes strangely when we step back into Lithuania in autumn 1939.
Thousands of human beings poured over the border, ordinary people, complex, broken, contradictory. And behind each set of eyes, a story denied, a past erased, a future uncertain. By the end of October, Vilnius, the historical capital, was once again Lithuanian.
But it wasn’t just a city that had been returned. It was its people. 150,000 of them suddenly added to the population. Suddenly in need of papers, housing, food.
Lithuania had never seen anything like that. Out of the chaos, a new organ of government emerged: the Commissariat for War Refugees. A new department, a new bureaucracy, a desperate attempt to manage the unmanageable.
Adalbertas Staneika, a forgotten name today, headed the War Refugee Department inside the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He understood almost immediately that this crisis was too big to treat as an afterthought. So in December, the Lithuanian parliament passed the Refugee Management Act. The Commissariat was given sweeping powers: registration, housing, aid, repatriation.
On paper, it was a lifeline. In practice, it was a race to build order out of smoke. But the Commissariat couldn’t do it alone. That’s why the Lithuanian Red Cross stepped in, part of an international umbrella organization with deeper experience and stronger networks. If the Commissariat was the architect of the policy, the Red Cross was the bricklayer.
They found housing. They handed out food and clothing. They coordinated with donors abroad. It wasn’t just about logistics. It was about dignity.
From late 1939 into the spring of 1940, the tide of refugees never stopped. Some went home, or what remained of it. Others were transferred back to territory swallowed by Germany or the USSR. But new faces always replaced them. And when Polish internees began trickling out of the camps, soldiers, officers, border guards, the numbers swelled again.
Most had no chance at Lithuanian citizenship, which meant that on paper they too became refugees.
Lithuanian Secretary of State for Internal Affairs, April 9, 1940, quote: “30,000 people are now considered war refugees.” The number was rising daily. The Commissariat would soon be responsible for over 100,000 aliens and refugees combined.
Vilnius was the magnet. It was familiar, linguistically, culturally. Most of the refugees spoke Polish. But the city was breaking under the weight. The infrastructure buckled. So the government made a decision, a hard one: relocation, camps, barracks.
But most refugees refused. They clung to Vilnius, to family ties, to what little trust they had left. The camps stayed nearly empty. Vilnius stayed overwhelmed. Then came June 1940. The Soviets marched in and Lithuania began to disappear, and with it the refugee system began to dissolve. At first it looked the same. Refugees still needed shelter, food, clothing.
But the categories blurred. The Soviets didn’t care who was a refugee, who was a Polish citizen, who was stateless. They had their own categories, their own lists. By September the machinery of the Republic was being dismantled. Decree 53, Article 27, Clause 11.
Dry words. But here is what they meant. The Commissariat for Refugees was to be liquidated, erased, gone by March 31, 1941.
In the space of months, Lithuania had gone from a sovereign state straining to manage a refugee crisis to a Soviet province, where crises were managed by silence or deportation.
And the people, tens of thousands who had fled bombs, who had waited in endless lines for papers, who had clung to fragile safety in Vilnius or Kaunas, found themselves once again adrift.
By late 1939, the Lithuanian Red Cross was no longer just an aid group. It had become the spine of survival.
From its modest headquarters, it tried something extraordinary: to build order out of desperation, shelter out of collapse. The numbers were staggering. The needs immediate.
The Red Cross operated under the international flag. In Lithuania, it had to become functional immediately.
And refugees, they needed food, they needed clothing, they needed fuel for a Lithuanian winter that often sank to minus 25.
And above all, they needed money. The funding was a diplomatic dance. Two main streams kept it alive: international donors across the Atlantic and beyond, and the Lithuanian state itself, strapped, fragile, but still able to shoulder part of the load. In December 1939, a gentlemen’s agreement was struck. The International Red Cross, the Hoover Committee and the Joint Committee would send $100,000 each month.
And Lithuania’s Ministry of Finance promised to add one-third of that. But as Europe’s war deepened, foreign donations shrank. Lithuania’s share rose to almost half the burden. For a country so small, this wasn’t just policy, it was a gamble on humanity. The money passed through layers of hands: British envoys, American committees, Jewish relief groups.
Eventually it reached the Lithuanian Red Cross, the hub at the center. Protocols, approvals, signatures: everything had to be accounted for. The math of compassion was never fair. Pooling quickly gave way to a fracture. Jews raised money for Jews. Poles for Poles. Lithuanians for their own.
By early 1940, 75% of the donations went to Jewish refugees and 25% to Poles. Everyone else, Belarusians, Russians, the stateless, survived in the margins. So why did Lithuania tolerate this system? Why encourage it? Well, because, in its way, it worked. It had structure.
This wasn’t improvisation. It was rule-bound.
“The refugees are provided fully or partially with food, underwear, and clothing. … Refugees receive the necessary medical assistance. When relocated, they are reimbursed for travel expenses.” That’s a quote from a Lithuanian archive. Dry words, but behind every line was life made just slightly less unbearable.
Oversight mattered. The Red Cross Board approved expenses, rationed meals, arranged housing, audited the funds. And to ensure honesty, a coordination committee was formed, Lithuania’s first real international coalition: Lithuanian Red Cross officials, women’s committee leaders, US and British Red Cross delegates, members of the Hoover and Joint Committees, even a representative from the International Red Cross itself.
They tracked budgets, reviewed aid, tried to enforce fairness. But fairness in war was always complicated. Who got the aid?
The answer depended on ethnicity, on documentation, and often on luck. To soften the decisions, an advisory committee was created. One representative for each group: Lithuanians, Poles, Jews, Belarusians. Refugee care by committee. Now back to the numbers.
By the end of 1939, Lithuania sheltered nearly 35,000 refugees, not counting soldiers in internment camps. The breakdown looked like this: 4,175 Lithuanians, over 17,000 Belarusians, Russians and Poles, and almost 13,500 Jews.
Most were in and around Vilnius, not just because it was familiar, but because they were already there when the Soviets returned the city to Lithuania in October. As winter bit deep, the numbers climbed. The Red Cross distributed warm coats, coal, bread; it kept people alive through the Lithuanian freeze. But not everyone stayed.
By July 1940, as Lithuania itself was being swallowed by the Soviets, the refugee count had fallen to just over 27,000. The drop didn’t mean things had improved. It meant desperation. Some Poles risked going home, back into Nazi-occupied or Soviet-controlled territory. But Jews?
Without relatives in Lithuania, they had nowhere to go. At least, not yet. Lithuania held the line. Month after month, the government matched foreign donations. Half the bill for refugee support came out of its own thin treasury. For a state about to lose itself, that was an act of willpower almost beyond belief.
And yet most of the so-called Sugihara story narrators today skip this part. They talk about Sugihara, about the visas, about the miracle. But before the visas there were the ledgers, the bunk beds, the food queues. Lithuania didn’t just give refuge. It gave something more precious. It gave time.
And in 1940, time meant everything. Between September 1939 and the summer of 1940, Lithuania spent more than 8 million litas on refugees. This wasn’t just money. It was priority, survival and pressure, pressure from all directions. Here is the breakdown. Of the more than 8 million litas spent, 5.5 million came from abroad: 3 million from the American Joint Distribution Committee, 800,000 from the Hoover Committee, 1.2 million from Britain, half a million from other donors.
Lithuania itself covered another 2.5 million.
Camps sprang up in small Lithuanian towns. Temporary shelters, barracks. For some, a pause before moving on. For others, the end of the road. And then came the next question, because not everyone wanted to stay. Young Polish men tried to slip westward to France, to Britain, to keep fighting. Lithuania didn’t stop them. In fact, sometimes it helped. With the right papers, an exit visa could be had, sometimes discounted, sometimes free.
On paper it was humane, but in Berlin and Moscow it looked like sabotage. Germany protested. The Soviets raged, especially after the Winter War began in Finland, because some of those Poles weren’t just fleeing. They were heading north to fight the Red Army, and Moscow was furious. In January 1940, Soviet envoy Pozdnyakov confronted Lithuania directly: Moscow wanted Polish refugees who left Lithuania directed through Germany, not Stockholm, and the internees watched more closely, so that none of them reached Finland.
Lithuania tried to walk the razor’s edge. Foreign Minister Juozas Urbšys sent secret instructions to Stockholm on December 27, 1939: say nothing about what the Poles could bring to other lands; argue only that more of them needed to leave Lithuania. It was diplomacy in shadows. Do not provoke. Do not resist. Just quietly reduce the numbers. But it wasn’t enough. Even neutral Sweden began to balk. In late November 1939, a Swedish diplomat warned Lithuania that it was granting visas to Polish citizens too willingly, and asked for a certificate with each visa proving its holder had not escaped from an internment camp.
So Lithuania tightened controls. Any male Polish refugee applying for a visa had to prove he hadn’t fled a camp. No certificate, no ticket. Every departure was a liability. Every refugee left behind was an expense, and caught in the middle, human lives hanging by paper threads. This wasn’t just Lithuania’s dilemma, it was Europe’s. Everyone, Germany, Sweden, even neutral states, wanted fewer refugees, not more.
Myron C. Taylor, the man who presided over the Évian Conference, hinted to Lithuanian officials that the government should rid itself of a greater share of its refugees. Let that sink in. The man who once oversaw the world’s great debate on refugees now telling a small country to quietly offload them. This wasn’t cynicism, it was consensus.
So Lithuania manoeuvred in silence, pleading with Sweden, negotiating with Germany, whispering with Britain, always with the one goal: let them leave, quietly, without headlines.
But as the war ground on, the world stopped listening. In February 1940, one Lithuanian diplomat, exasperated at Germany’s refusal to let Jews out, confronted a Nazi official: it would be ugly and wrong not to let a hundred or two Jews pass, when the Germans themselves had pushed a much larger number of these Polish Jews onto Lithuania.
That single sentence captures it all. The refugee burden was real, but it wasn’t shared. Lithuania, like the refugees themselves, was increasingly alone. The Red Cross, the Commissariat, the donors, the volunteers, they did the impossible for as long as they could.
But even miracles have limits. Every tragedy breeds a shadow economy. In the fall and winter of 1939, amid exile and despair, opportunity whispered: “Not just mercy, profit!” Refugees desperate for a way out began offering bribes. And there were always takers. A Lithuanian adviser recalled a conversation with a Jewish representative.
He had spoken with another leader among the refugees, and their plan was simple: offer the Germans 20 pounds for every Jew allowed through. That was the currency of survival.
Jaffe, the Jewish representative mentioned, admitted he hoped to profit too. Even Consul Wolff, Berlin’s man on the ground, seemed to be in on it.
So much for ideological purity. Put enough money on the table and even Nazi officials could look the other way. Pecunia non olet, as the Romans used to say. Money doesn’t smell.
Meanwhile, Lithuanian diplomats tried the front door. Legal channels, moral arguments, humanitarian pleas. They wrote to the world.
Denmark, can you take a thousand? No. Argentina, 10,000, temporarily, for the duration of the war? Also no. Buenos Aires, by the way, put it in writing: case by case only, and only if they were trained farmers with funds to settle. A polite way of saying: “We do not want poor Jews.” In person it was even blunter.
When the Lithuanian ambassador floated 10,000 Polish refugees, Foreign Minister Cantilo interrupted: “They are probably Jews.”
The ambassador tried to reframe it: decent people, victims of both the Nazis and the Bolsheviks. That’s the part we conveniently forget. In the shorthand of memory, Jews fled the Germans. But in the autumn of 1939, terror came from two directions, Germany and the Soviet Union, both occupying Poland, both persecuting Jews, both driving people toward Lithuania.
So when crowds formed in Kaunas and Vilnius, they weren’t escaping a single monster. They were trapped in the land between two totalitarian regimes. That’s what makes Sugihara and Zwartendijk so extraordinary.
They weren’t just throwing lifelines. They were defying the dominant logic of the age: realpolitik. By spring 1940, roughly 30,000 refugees were registered in Lithuania, more arriving, few leaving. New strategies surfaced: work programs, road crews, construction gangs.
In April, about a thousand former internees were slated to start on Lithuanian roads. But the truth was brutal. Every exit narrowed. Every foreign capital said no. Lithuania petitioned Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Argentina, Britain, again and again, and got the same polite form letters back.
The gist never changed: your request has been carefully reviewed; unfortunately, current economic conditions, security concerns, the war, the ethnic composition of the refugees… Blah, blah, blah. The translation was simple: nobody wanted them, especially not the Jews.
So they waited.
In crowded Vilnius flats, in Red Cross dormitories that smelled of coal dust, potatoes and cabbage. They waited for someone to let them through. They waited for a visa, for a ticket, for a miracle. Some would find one, most would not.
You’ve been listening to History Shadows, Episode 2: The Lost Republic. Stay with us and don’t forget to subscribe. Because next time, as the Soviets tighten their grip and Lithuania’s independence flickers, two men, one Dutch, one Japanese, begin writing names by hand. Each signature a chance, a promise, a lifeline. See you soon.
Corrections
Several statements in the audio are corrected here. The chairman of the Évian Conference, who later hinted that Lithuania should reduce its refugee numbers, was Myron C. Taylor. Lithuania’s diplomatic mission in Vilnius issued its transit visas on 11–19 September 1939, before the city passed to Lithuanian jurisdiction on 27 October. The trial of Neumann and Sass ran from December 1934 to March 1935; the figures for defendants and witnesses given in the audio are withdrawn. Several statements quoted in the audio were paraphrases; they are given here as reported speech or in the wording of the archival documents, and the Swedish warning is dated to late November 1939. One unsourced comparison has been removed.
📚 Next episode: Visas for Life, Episode 3: The Underground Republic · All episodes