The Fugu Plan

by Marvin Tokayer

  "As you are well aware," Warhaftig outlined his proposal to a small group of men at the Yokohama headquarters of the Nippon Yusen Kaisha steamship company, "there are several thousand Polish-Jewish refugees both in Lithuania and already in Moscow. Without exception, these people wish fervently to emigrate to the United States or Canada or Palestine. In these times, virtually the only way to leave Europe is to sail from Vladivostok to Japan. And from here, to go on to whatever final destination one choses."

  In a sense, this mid-March meeting was a formality: Warhaftig's assistant had already met with low-level managers of the shipping firm to ensure that both sides were in agreement. Now that they were secure in their knowledge that both sides were already in agreement, the powerful and influential Japanese businessmen before him were willing to discuss its details with Warhaftig.

  "Now, what I am proposing is simply this, that every one of those tens of thousands of refugees travel from Japan to their destinations exclusively in NYK ships. Exclusively. They will pay full fare. They will pay in cash. They will all leave from Japanese ports with destination visas in hand. Many will be crossing the Pacific to the United States or Australia; others will be going all the way to Palestine. A few perhaps will go only to Shanghai. But wherever they go, they will travel with NYK and only with NYK. We will guarantee this. We will even deposit money for the tickets in an escrow account here in Japan. Thousands of passengers, hundreds of thousands of dollars guaranteed.

  The firm's two directors were definitely interested. Warhaftig would not be here if they were not. Now, as he outlined his proposal himself, it seemed even more alluring . . . and one of them admitted as much. "However," he concluded, "I believe this is only part of the proposal?"

  "Quite right. There is one problem which must be solved before we will actually be able to provide you with these passengers. Japan stands between Vladivostok and America, and the Japanese Embassy in Moscow has stopped issuing transit visas. What we would ask you to do is to suggest to your government that it would benefit all of Japan - particularly NYK, but also Japan's image in the eyes of the Western world - if she began again to issue the visas."

  The directors nodded, and one spoke: "But let me ask you, Mr. Warhaftig. America has not been so . . . shall we say, prepared to welcome refugees during the past several months. I believe there have also been some restrictions placed on Jewish people entering Palestine. Are you sure those conditions will change?"

  That was, at the least, a polite understatement of the situation, but Warhaftig's reassurance seemed one hundred percent sincere.

  "Absolutely. I am completely certain that America will change her policy and will welcome these refugees - as she has so many times in the past welcomed refugees from world catastrophes. As for Palestine, as you know, I personally represent the Palestine Committee here in Japan."

  He said no more, trusting in the implications of the statement. The two directors looked closely at the young man seated across from them. He was so young. But most of the prime-movers among the foreigners seemed so young, NYK was well aware of the European refugee situation and well aware that there were reasons beyond the overcrowded conditions in Vladivostok that had blocked the transit visas. They had already investigated Warhaftig thoroughly enough to know that he was, indeed, the executive officer of the Palestine Committee, and that he had considerable connections to the Jewish leadership in the United States. There were, however, two points on which they would have to reassure themselves: the minor question of whether Warhaftig really could convince American Jews to deposit a sizable amount of money in an escrow account in Japan (a minor question because there seemed little doubt that he could), and the major question of whether the destination countries really would accept sizable numbers of refugees. The immigration policies of America, for one, seemed to be growing more, rather than less, strict, NYK knew well that the Japanese government thought there were already far too many hopeless refugees in Japan.

  But if this scheme could be made to work, it would be a great boon to ask. Its passenger business had come to a virtual standstill with the unsettled conditions in the world. Here was a man known to be in constant touch with the top Jewish leaders, and, by extension, with all the important people in the American government, assuring them there was absolutely no question but that the United States would be changing its immigration policy. The NYK directors also remembered another occasion when their firm had passed up a similar proposal. Twenty-one years before, in 1919 when Yokohama had been the temporary home of over seventeen hundred Jewish refugees from the Bolshevik Revolution, NYK had not had the foresight to arrange for that chunk of business, and eventually lost it to a more aggressive competitor. At that time, in spite of its apparently strict immigration policies, the United States had ultimately let in all those refugees. Jews were powerful in the United States, no question about it. NYK was powerful in Japan. Powerful enough, perhaps, to be able to secure the transit visas. And when two strong forces act in concert ... a great deal of money can often be made.

  The directors nodded and smiled; Warhaftig knew he had been successful. The details of the proposals were smoothed out; a preliminary number of two thousand refugees was decided upon for the first shipment, NYK would get back to him within a few days, confirming its belief that the Japanese government would go along with the idea. Then Warhaftig's problem would be explaining the details to the World Jewish Congress, the most likely source to guarantee the money.

  With the dignity befitting the chief executive officer of the Palestine Committee, Warhaftig left NYK and returned to the office of the Yokohama Relief Committee. Once there, he exploded with enthusiasm to the delighted committee members: "They accepted! They will speak for us to the Gaimusho ! They are sure they will be successful! I am sure they will be successful! Imagine it - hundreds of thousands of Jews rescued from the hell of Europe! They can come! Saved, for the price of a steamship ticket!"

  All the accomplishments of his thirty-odd years were as nothing compared to this. Three days later, he had confirmation from NYK: the transit visas would begin flowing again as soon as the agreed-upon amount of money had been guaranteed. Warhaftig immediately sent his cable to the World Jewish Congress.

  A week later, Warhaftig was sitting in Ponve's comfortable living room, shaking his head, still not comprehending what had gone wrong. The WJC had cabled back an astonishingly brief refusal. "This is not the way to handle matters," the reply had said. "You are putting the cart before the horse. First the refugees go to Japan. Then, of course, and without a moment's hesitation, we will provide money for their onward journey - on NYK or whichever line or lines you wish to deal with. The money is not the problem. But we cannot supply it until we know that the refugees are in a position to use it."

  At his wit's end, Warhaftig had appealed to another executive officer of the World Jewish Congress and to the Joint Distribution Committee. "It is not a backward way of handling it," he tried to explain, "for the Japanese it is the only way." But to no avail. The Americans were suspicious and simply would not consider tying up tens of thousands of dollars on what appeared to be a plan with no reality to it. The Americans were organization people: nothing was too ambitious to attempt so long as they knew exactly what they were doing. In this case they were being asked to have blind faith in another culture's modus operandi, but when they could not be certain of what their money was really going for, they simply could not bring themselves to act.

  With tears in his eyes, Warhaftig glanced through the desperate yellow cablegrams that had been coming into Jewcom ever since the issuing of Japanese transit visas had been stopped. Haifa dozen consisted only of a single word: HATZ1LU! (Save us!) But there was no way. Those who had secured their visas before March 17 would, no doubt, be permitted to leave Russia and enter Japan. Those who had not were lost.

  "Why don't you come out with us, Getzel? The weather is fine. It would be good for you to take a walk. . . . Don't you think so? Getzel?"

 
Cheya Syrkin stood near the door of their clean airy tatami-floored room in the heim. Already Dovid was in the tiny, stone-floored entryway that adjoined their room, putting on the shoes that could never be worn within the room itself - they would have wrecked the tatami straw floor in half a day. Within the room, Getzel lay on the floor, a pillow under his head, a book he had long since finished lying open on his chest.

  "I may go to Jewcom a little later," he said without spirit.

  "You were there just this morning," she reminded him. "Come with us instead to the park. It will be so pretty. Mrs. Evans said this is the week the cherry blossoms are at their very best."

  "Perhaps later." Getzel was not looking at her.

  Always the same, she sighed to herself; always a "later" that never came. All day long her husband would either lie here in their room or walk the same five blocks to Jewcom and simply sit not talking, maybe not even listening, just existing in the Yiddish environment, the last link to his memories of the shul at Alexandrov. Ever since Moscow Cheya had been the one who had to deal with all the details. Yet, "my husband would like to know my husband requested that I ask . . . my husband feels . . ." always prefaced each of her questions - an attempt (usually unsuccessful) to keep up the appearance that he was in command of his family. It was an extremely awkward situation: her husband, after all, was there in person at Jewcom every day. Why wasn't he able to ask the questions for himself? Nonetheless, they were all kind - the Evanses, the Ponves, the Hanins, all of them, so very unexpectedly understanding and sympathetic. Not only did they never give the impression they felt anything was wrong with the Syrkin family arrangement, they had gone out of their way to make everything easier right from the beginning. No sooner had the Syrkins arrived and been settled by the Ladies Committee in their heim than Mrs. Hanin herself had come. Cheya had been flustered. Mrs. Hanin was a wealthy woman! She had a house with two servants; she had a motorcar. Yet, this same Mrs. Hanin took the time to show Cheya where and how to buy food from the Japanese, and where the ritual bath, the mikveh, was located. Moreover, in Dovid, Mrs. Hanin took a special interest: buying him apples, finding him an extra sweater, introducing him to other children - taking him out for walks sometimes with little Sophie Katznelson - and to his everlasting delight, even taking him for a ride in her motorcar!

  "I'm ready, Mama," Dovid said, standing up in the little entryway down one high step from their private room. Cheya sat on the step and pulled on her own cracked black shoes.

  "We will buy a fish for dinner," she called back to Getzel who had not moved.

  "Is it Friday?" he asked with mild surprise.

  "It's Tuesday. But if we have another meal of eggs, we are going to turn into chickens!"

  Like most of the refugees who followed the strict Jewish dietary laws, the Syrkins existed on a regimen of the rationed bread plus egg, fish, fruit, and vegetables which Cheya bought daily in the little neighborhood stores and cooked in the rudimentary kitchen of the heim. Chicken had to be specially slaughtered and inspected before it could be eaten which made it hard to come by.

  Sighing once more over Getzel's state of mind, Cheya took Dovid by the hand and slid open the door. Her son, at least, would get out to the park.

  The cherry trees in the little park a few blocks from the heim were, indeed, at the peak of their brief mid-March perfection. Clouds of pale pink and white blossoms crowned every tree, shimmering in a gentle breeze or cascading down like a rain of silk to settle softly on the clusters of people sitting on the ground beneath the branches. A few men were carousing with tiny cups of sake, fulfilling the Japanese custom of toasting the fleeting beauty of the cherry blossoms. From these, Cheya kept her distance, walking instead toward a small playground in the opposite corner of the park.

  "Do you want to swing, Dovid'l" she asked, knowing what the answer would be. From the moment he had first spotted the swings in this playground so near their heim there had never been any question of where Dovid wanted to spend every waking hour.

  Smiling shyly at the Japanese mothers who were there as always, watching over their own little round-faced black-haired children, Cheya watched Dovid climb onto the swing. "I'm flying," he called out, his legs stuck out stiff in front of him, his body tense with pleasure at the wonderful sensation. Cheya took as much pleasure from his enjoyment of it as Dovid did from the swing.

  After a few moments, though, she was surprised to hear one of the Japanese women standing nearby speak in German. "He is a fine-looking boy," the lady said.

  Cheya turned. To her utter astonishment, it appeared that the woman had been speaking to her. Always, she had smiled at these other mothers, even nodded in return to their little bows of greeting. But it had never occurred to her that actually there could be any communication in words with a Japanese.

  "Do you speak German?" the woman spoke again, hesitantly, as if she feared she had made a mistake.

  Now there was no doubt that this woman, this Japanese woman dressed like all the others in a gray kimono wrapped at the middle with a long soft sash, had actually spoken to her.

  "Yes, a little," Cheya said in Yiddish. "I understand a little."

  To be precise, she understood only those German words and constructions that were the same in Yiddish - but the two languages were closely related.

  "I have seen you here before," the woman said, carefully pronouncing each word as if she had previously worked out the sentence and was now reciting it from memory. "I hoped I could speak to you. I have brought a little gift for your son. May I give it to him?"

  Dovid's swing by now had slowed to a gentle rock. Though he could catch only a word or two, "gift" was one of them. Cheya looked over to see his brown eyes, staring at the Japanese lady.

  "Yes . . . I'm . . . of course. . . ." Unaccustomed to receiving gifts at all, and especially from strangers, Cheya mumbled nervously as she watched the woman go off toward the benches alongside the swing area. From the periphery of her awareness, she heard responding giggles from half a dozen other mothers who had been watching the encounter intently - not understanding the foreign words but sensing the mood of them. Bright-eyed, they held their hands over their mouths, as if to hide their laughter. But behind their laughter, Cheya sensed not ridicule but only embarrassment like her own.

  The German-speaking woman returned, now holding a small, square, colorfully wrapped box. "May I give it to him?" she asked again.

  "I am sure he will be quite happy to receive it," Cheya replied, having recovered her dignity. "Dovid," she spoke more quickly, "get down off the swing and come here. This fine lady has something for you!"

  If anything, Dovid was even less accustomed to receiving bright colored boxes than his mother. He, however, was not at all nervous. Considering the wrapping paper an integral part of the gift, he took his time carefully folding it back. Then he opened the box to find a beautiful red and yellow rubber ball, brand new and shiny, just waiting to be bounced.

  "For me?" he whispered.

  "For you," his mother said softly, her voice catching in her throat. "Say thank you."

  "Thank you," he repeated, looking straight into the woman's gentle black eyes. Then he grabbed the ball out of the box and began bouncing it on the hard earth. It was magnificent, jumping high over his head with every bounce, a really good ball, just the right size for his hands.

  "You are very kind," Cheya said to the woman. "It is very special for him to have such a thing."

  "I wanted him to have it. I feel . . . we feel. . . ." The woman hesitated, not knowing how to say whatever it was she and the others - felt toward these foreigners who had suddenly appeared in their neighborhood. She shook her head in frustration, muttering something in Japanese. But the translation eluded her.

  "We want for you, good luck," she finally said simply.

  "I thank you, all of you, for your kindness," Cheya said softly.

  From that day on, Cheya looked forward almost as much as Dovid to their trips to the playground. There we
re so few other women among the refugees in Kobe. And even among those there were great social and religious differences. They were all either, like the Amshenover rebbe's wife, so far removed from a little shtetl tailor's wife as to be totally unapproachable, or serum, so strictly orthodox in their practice of Judaism, that they scarcely ventured out of their rooms lest they come in contact with too worldly a situation. The Japanese woman's German, Cheya eventually learned, had been taught to her in high school. Limited by the language and separated by an ocean of cultural differences the two women could never, Cheya realized, become true friends. But simply this much of a tentative contact, seeing and speaking to another woman, another mother, almost every day made Cheya feel more at home in this alien world where, in spite of the kindnesses of Jewcom, she was, to all intents and purposes alone.

  Clusters of pink azaleas were already beginning to come into bloom as Captain Inuzuka passed through Yokohama in late April on one of his frequent trips back from Shanghai. Time consuming as the voyage was, he was never sorry when ordered to attend naval conference meetings in Tokyo. He enjoyed the brief sea voyage; but more important, he felt more secure when he was at the center of what was happening. As was his custom, he went directly to his home in suburban O-mori, just south of Tokyo, where his wife lay ill with the tuberculosis that had kept her from moving to Shanghai with him. Also at his home, Inuzuka kept a second office, and it was to there that Kobe Jewcom mailed its statistics each week, keeping him up to date on refugee immigration. The base figures were in the arrivals column: December 1940 - 198; January 1941 356; February - 969; March - 805. And that last figure was in spite of the fact that there had been no more transit visas issued after the middle of the month! But the figures that told a more significant story were the monthly departure totals: December 1940 91; January 1941 - 236; February - 147; March - 182. They came nowhere near balancing, or even keeping pace with the increases in the arrivals. No wonder the government felt it had to put an end to the influx. The figures for April already reflected the halt in transit visa issuance. Arrivals for the first half of the month were only a third of the comparable figure for March and less than a quarter of February's. As requested, Jewcom had also provided a running breakdown of the total refugee population as to sex and age (month-by-month, there were always three or four times as many males of military age) and as to country of origin and occupation. Inuzuka winced every time he noted this last column. Those Jews - financial wizards, invisible powers behind so many thrones, controllers of vast networks of influence! But forty-six percent of those who had come to Japan had absolutely no occupation at all!