I parted the curtains a tiny bit.  Outside, I saw hundreds of people crowded around the gate of our house...My life changed forever.

In 1940, five-year-old Hiroki Sugihara, the eldest son of the Japanese consul to Lithuania, saw from the consulate window hundreds of Jewish refugees from Poland.  They had come to Hiroki's father with a desperate request: Could consul Sugihara write visas fro them to escape the Nazi threat?

The Japanese government denied Sugihara's repeated requests to issue the visas.  Unable to ignore the plight of the refugees, he turned to his family.  Together they made the crucial decision that saved thousands of lives.

Passage to Freedom, based on Hiroki Sugihara's own words, is one of the most important stories to emerge from the ruins of the Holocaust.  It is the story of one man's remarkable courage, and the respect between a father and a son who shared the weight of witness and an amazing act of humanity.

From the dust jacket