Zwartendijk, Jan, born 29-07-1896 in Rotterdam 
and had a twin brother Pieter Anthonie (1896-1986). Jan Zwartendijk in 1939, when the war broke out, was director of the Philips branch in the then capital of Lithuania, Kaunas. After the German occupation of the Netherlands in May 1940, Leendert Pieter Johan de Decker 
the ambassador in Riga of the Dutch government in exile, the consul in Kaunas, who sympathized with the Nazis, from office. He asked Zwartendijk to act as deputy consul. Since the German-Soviet division and occupation of Poland in August 1939, 
many Polish Jews had fled to neutral Lithuania, but it was clear that the Soviet Union would soon annex Lithuania. This happened in July 1940. The Jewish refugees feared persecution in the Soviet Union and had nowhere to go.
Nathan Gutwirth, 
who died in 2000, was a remarkable survivor. Because without him the large-scale Jewish exodus through Zwartendijk’s ruse would never have taken place on such a large scale. Gutwirth, who had a Dutch passport, asked Zwartendijk in June 1940 for a visa for Curaçao to get away. He asked the same for Jewish friends. In July Nathan Gutwirth and his fiancée were the very first “Curaçao refugees” to travel through the Soviet Union to Japan on the Trans-Siberian Express..Nathanr’s parents had come to Belgium from Poland. Nathan himself was born in Antwerp in 1916, in the middle of the World War. He moved with his parents to Scheveningen at a young age, where he spent his childhood. Nathan then became a Dutchman. When he was 19 years old, he wanted to study with a Jewish friend from Scheveningen in Telsche (now: Telšiai, GS), a town in northwestern Lithuania where there was a famous yeshiva, a Talmudic school. He felt he could broaden his horizons there.”
Visa (1940) with signature of Zwartendijk and visas for the Jewish refugees
Fourteen limes for Jan Zwartendijk at the Kop van Zuid in Rotterdam Zwartendijk then started issuing visas for Curaçao to Jewish refugees, although the permission of the governor of Curaçao was actually required to enter the island. He collaborated with the Japanese consul, Chiune Sugihara, 
who provided refugees in possession of a Curaçao visa with a transit visa for Japan. In possession of both papers, the refugees could also be given permission to travel through the Soviet Union. They could then take the boat from Vladivostok to Japan. Although the Curaçao visas had no official value, Zwartendijk and Sugihara issued about 2300 visas in this way within three weeks. As families of three or four people traveled on many visas, they may have diverted between nine and ten thousand Jewish refugees from Lithuania in total. Once in Japan, most refugees traveled to other countries instead of to Curaçao.
On 03-08-1940, the embassies and consulates in Kaunas were closed by order of the Soviet authorities; Lithuania had meanwhile been incorporated into the Soviet Union. Zwartendijk then had to return to the Netherlands, where he would continue to work for Philips until his retirement. Not long after his departure from Lithuania, on June 25-29, 1941, the Kaunas pogrom took place in Lithuania, now occupied by German troops: Lithuanian nationalists beat dozens of Jews in the skulls with a metal rod at a place called Lietūkis garage.
During his lifetime, Zwartendijk 
received no recognition for his role in the Second World War. On the contrary, he was reprimanded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for not acting in accordance with consular guidelines. Shortly after Zwartendijk’s death, among other things, the family received a list with 2132 names of Jews who had actually escaped by Jan Zwartendijk.
In 1996, the Boys Town Jerusalem orphanage in Jerusalem honored Zwartendijk at a dinner in New York, and announced that a Jan Zwartendijk Award for Humanitarian Ethics and Values would be established. The award has since been awarded to other Jewish rescuers, such as Philippine President Manuel Quezon and the people of the Commonwealth of the Philippines.
In 1997 Zwartendijk was posthumously awarded the honorary title Righteous Among the Nations 
by the Israeli Jad Wasjem Museum. In Rotterdam, fourteen lime trees were planted for him on the Kop van Zuid in the same year. A monument to Zwartendijk has been erected in Vilnius and a memorial plaque in Kaunas hangs opposite the former consulate. On 10-09-2012, he was awarded the Life Saving Cross of the Republic of Lithuania. 
In 2018, the artist Giny Vos created a work of art, a spiral of light stripes, 
which hung high around the tree in front of Zwartendijk’s former office. In 2018, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs also apologized to the relatives of Zwartendijk.
Death and burial ground of Zwartendijk, Jan.
Jan Zwartendijk died 14-09-1976, age 80, in Eindhoven, my hometown and is buried at the cemetery of the Hillegondakerk in Rotterdam-Hillegersberg.
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