This short story, told from the point of view of the five-year-old son, is for young readers age 6 and up. He could not help everyone, but he saved as many as 10,000 people. Sugihara kept issuing visas up until the time his train left the station. Meanwhile, both his government and the Soviets pressured the consul to leave Lithuania. He worked day and night writing thousands of visas by hand. Sugihara decided to follow his conscience and, in a display of curiously un-Japanese behavior, defy his superiors. The whole Sugihara family was moved by the desperate faces of men, women and children just outside their windows. Sugihara was immediately sympathetic, but he needed his government's approval. Without the visas, they would probably be killed. Hitler's army occupied part of Poland, prompting some refugees to seek visas to Japan. Passage to Freedom tells the story of Chiune Sugihara, who was a newly posted Japanese consul to Lithuania when hundreds of Polish Jews began arriving at the front gate of his residence. They also remind us of the disruption and pain that armed conflicts inflict on ordinary people.

Their firsthand accounts help us understand how that colossal tragedy affected tens of millions of people. Particularly poignant are the recollections of people who were children during the war. Thus, their stories are more urgent, more important. $17 THE GENERATION that lived through World War II, the event that shaped the second half of this century, is getting smaller. $15.95 I HAVE LIVED A THOUSAND YEARS Growing Up in the Holocaust By Livia Bitton-Jackson Simon & Schuster. $15.95 HOSTAGE TO WAR A True Story By Tatjana Wassiljewa Translated from the Russian by Anna Trenter Scholastic. PASSAGE TO FREEDOM The Sugihara Story By Ken Mochizuki Illustrated by Dom Lee Lee & Low.

I have lived a thousand years questions