The Yiddish Book Center's

Wexler Oral History Project

A growing collection of in-depth interviews with people of all ages and backgrounds, whose stories about the legacy and changing nature of Yiddish language and culture offer a rich and complex chronicle of Jewish identity.

A Japanese Diplomat Saved My Family During WWII

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Victor Gilinsky, son of Medem Sanatorium co-founder Shloyme Gilinski, retells the story of how his family hid out in Lithuania after they fled Poland before getting a travel visa with the help of Japanese Consul Chiune-Sempo Sugihara, one of the Righteous Among the Nations who issued transit visas to Jewish refugees so they could escape to Japan.

This is an excerpt from an oral history with Victor Gilinsky.

This excerpt is in English.

Victor Gilinsky was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1934.

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This interview is part of the Beyond the Books: Yiddish writers and their descendants series.

Other video highlights from this oral history

"The End of Poland": Boyhood Memories of the German Invasion

3 min 39 sec

The Yeshiva Was My Father's Gateway to the Secular World

2 min 44 sec

The Evolution of the Medem Sanatorium

3 min 43 sec

It Wasn’t Clear Which Side Was Better: A Family of Bundists Escapes Poland at the Beginning of WWII

3 min 57 sec

Afraid to Speak Yiddish in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast

2 min 14 sec

A Shared Cigarette: Siblings Secret Goodbye During World War Two

1 min 25 sec

More information about this oral history excerpt

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