TOKYO — Japan is not clamoring for the lessons of the Nazi Holocaust to be taught to its children, but that is the passion of Fumiko Ishioka.
She is the sole reason that the life and death of Hana Brady, a 13-year-old Jewish victim of the Nazi gas chambers, has been recounted to several thousand Japanese students through the story of the brown suitcase Hana carried to Auschwitz.
The suitcase is on display at the modest children's Holocaust museum that Ishioka operates from a Tokyo storefront. It is the basis for "Hana's Suitcase," a gripping children's book derived from Ishioka's dogged efforts to learn Hana's story and published this month in the United States.
It is also--for some in Japan--a tale that is too unsettling to hear.
Instead of receiving unanimous acclaim for relating a tragedy with much of the emotional immediacy of Anne Frank's diary, Ishioka struggles to raise money and generate support to promote her museum. An Education Ministry official rejected her request for a government seal of approval, saying the exhibit would "just scare the children," Ishioka said.
In Japan, she notes, awareness of the Holocaust is somewhat incomplete. Schools do not give the subject much attention, and many people--adults and children--do not have a full understanding of the Nazi genocide during World War II.
"They have heard of Anne Frank," Ishioka said of typical Japanese children, "but they don't know why she [died]. She is a general symbol of war victims. They know that a lot of Jews were killed in the war, and they know Hitler started the war, but many have never heard the word Holocaust."
It also is true that Japan, itself a country accused of committing atrocities before and during World War II, finds it very difficult, or at least not very urgent, to contemplate the history of the era. Often the Japanese would prefer to turn away.
With some friends and acquaintances, Ishioka opened the Tokyo Holocaust Education Resource Center in 1998 with a collection of photographs, some books and other materials. But what it needed was artifacts--a few possessions from Jewish children.
Search just beginning
Ishioka, 32, undertook the search through letter-writing and by visiting the Holocaust museum at Auschwitz, where she got what she wanted: an anonymous child's sock and shoe, a sweater, a can used to hold Zyklon B poisonous gas and, most intriguing, a large, slightly battered suitcase with a description scribbled on it. "Hanna Brady," it said, misspelling her first name. There also was a date of birth and a chilling word written in German: "orphan."
That was what Ishioka was after.
But who was this girl? What did she experience? Did she survive? Ishioka and the children who visited her museum wanted to know.
Ishioka's long search for Hana led her across Europe, Israel and finally to Canada. Her breakthrough came in the Ghetto Museum in Terezin, Czech Republic, where she found a piece of paper--a Nazi dossier--that bore a list of 20 people.
There were check marks next to each name, indicating their deaths in the camps. Hana's name was on the paper. But one name, that of Georg Brady, had no check mark.
Today George Brady, who changed the spelling of his first name, is 75, a plumber living in Toronto. His sister Hana and their parents died in the horrors of the death camps, but he managed to survive by luck, by strength--he was 17--and by the skill he learned as a Nazi prisoner: plumbing.
When he received a letter from Ishioka, who had tracked him down through another survivor, Brady wrote back. He sent copies of family photographs that he had kept hidden during the war. Those photographs answered the most heartfelt question asked by Japanese children who visited the museum: What did Hana look like?
He also was able to describe in detail Hana's happy prewar life--they were the children of shopkeepers from a small town in Czechoslovakia--and how it was destroyed by the Nazis, who first took their parents and then condemned Hana and her brother to the death camps.
The search for Hana comprises about half of the book "Hana's Suitcase," which was written in English by Karen Levine, a Canadian journalist. The rest reconstructs Hana's life.
A best-selling children's book in Canada, it was translated by Ishioka into Japanese and has sold more than 27,000 copies in Japan. It was published in the United States this month by Albert Whitman & Co. of Morton Grove, Ill.
Brother's nightmares ease
For George Brady, the memory of his experience and his losses will never subside, but some of the pain has been eased.
In the years after Hana's death, Brady suffered from horrible nightmares. After he became involved in the story of the suitcase, they stopped. He lectures with Levine throughout Canada and elsewhere.
"When you see how much it teaches kids about tolerance, it's so gratifying that I cannot describe it," Brady said from Toronto. "It is so positive--it has just helped me."