Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese vice consul in Kaunas, Lithuania, defied his own government to issue transit visas to thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust in 1940. As the Soviets ordered consulates closed, desperate families crowded outside his office needing Japanese transit papers to escape east via the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Tokyo denied his requests three times, but Sugihara and his wife Yukiko chose to write visas anyway, working 18 to 20 hours a day by hand for weeks. He kept signing even as his train departed, tossing papers to the crowd. His career was destroyed, yet an estimated tens of thousands of descendants are alive because of his choice.

• He deliberately failed a medical school entrance exam to defy his father's career mandate.
• He resigned a prestigious post in Manchukuo in 1934 over the brutal tr ...