The orphans of Polish exiles, abandoned to die in the Siberian chaos of civil war, were saved by Japan. Fumi, a twenty-year-old nurse, cared for them to the very end and gave her young life for it.

“Anyone whose own child or younger sibling falls ill will try to save them, even at the cost of their own life. But these children have no parents, no brothers, no sisters. Someone has to take their place. I have decided to.”

Let us go back to 1921, to a Tokyo hospital, to the infectious-diseases ward. On the beds lie several Polish children. Their parents – descendants of insurgents and exiles whom the tsarist empire had driven to Siberia – had died in destitution during the revolutionary turmoil, and the children were left alone, condemned to die of hunger and cold. Japan tore them out of there, a distant country none of them had so much as heard of before. They had already survived hunger, frost and flight across half of Asia. And now, at the very threshold of rescue, in a harbour that was already safe, typhus caught up with them. The most gravely ill of the girls, one the doctors had already written off, is being cared for by her: a slight nurse from a village near Niigata, herself still almost a child. She does not leave the bedside even at night. She takes the little one, burning with fever, into her arms and stays like that, hour after hour, smoothing the sweat-soaked hair so that the dying child will not slip away alone. And yet – the girl will live. Fumi will not.

Her story is the inverse of the one Poland and Japan usually know from the side of the miracle: nearly a thousand rescued children, Japanese ships sent for the orphans, apples handed to the little ones at the port of Tsuruga, Empress Teimei stroking foreign children’s heads against the stiff protocol of the court. The Western world refused help at the time, and Japan organised a wide-ranging operation within seventeen days of the appeal. In that beautiful story, everyone survived.

But one life did go out after all. It belonged to the side of the rescuers, not the rescued. That one person, until now lost in the shadow of the great numbers, I want to draw out here from under the powder of history – the powder that hid the human being from us and laid bare a monument instead. Matsuzawa Fumi – before she became a heroine and a bridge between the Polish and Japanese nations – was an ordinary twenty-year-old girl from the small village of Manichi in Niigata Prefecture, working as a nurse. She was no diplomat. She was a plain country girl who wanted, through her tenderness, to save one particular child. And she managed it, though it was at the same time the last thing she did in her short life.

A Girl from the Snow Country

Niigata Prefecture lies on the side of Honshū that was once called ura Nihon (裏日本) – the Japan turned away. In winter, moist air masses from the Sea of Japan strike the mountains and dump metres of snow onto the coastal plain; in spring, the melting snow turns it into the country’s largest rice granary. Kawabata would later make this land the setting of “Snow Country”, but for the people of the small villages there was nothing literary about it. There was work in the fields, a winter that cut the world off for long months, and few ways out: for sons, the army or the city; for daughters – fewer still.

Fumi was born at the end of the nineteenth century in the village of Manichi on the Echigo Plain, in an area that today belongs to the Akiba ward of the city of Niigata. We do not know the exact year. Japanese accounts agree that she was twenty-three at the time of her death; journalists from her home prefecture, having gone to the local records, write of twenty. Two different birth dates are evidently in circulation.

On the road that took her from the rice paddy to the hospital ward the documents are silent, but the route itself is well known, for thousands of her peers walked it. The Japanese Red Cross, founded in 1887 out of the transformation of the earlier Hakuaisha society, had run its own system for training nurses since the 1890s – kangofu (看護婦), as the profession was then called. Candidates were admitted to three-year schools attached to the hospitals of the prefectural branches; after qualifying, each signed a commitment to remain on reserve for the next dozen-odd years and to report to any summons – to war, epidemic, earthquake. For a village girl this meant a profession, a wage of her own, a little of the wider world. And one of the very few uniforms a woman could wear in Japan at the time.

Fumi served in the Kanagawa prefectural branch, which covered Yokohama. When, in 1920, the Red Cross began assigning nurses to care for a group of foreign orphans brought to Tokyo, she was among those seconded. She was in her early twenties and – though she could not have known it – had less than a year of life ahead of her.

The Children the Sea Cast Ashore

I have written separately about the great machinery of this operation: about Anna Bielkiewicz and Józef Jakóbkiewicz, about the Rescue Committee from Vladivostok, about the transports through Tsuruga and the returns across two oceans. Whoever wants the whole of it will find it in that essay. Here, in brief. In the summer of 1920 Bielkiewicz, sent away empty-handed by the Western powers, stood in the Japanese foreign ministry with a plea to save the Polish children dying in Siberia. Japan answered, and acted within seventeen days. On the fifth of July the board of the Red Cross voted to undertake the operation, and by the end of the month the first children were already coming down the gangway at Tsuruga.

The 375 children of the first group were settled in Tokyo, at the Fukudenkai institution in the Hiroo district. In Polish texts this name usually functions as a mere address, which is a pity, for it conceals the whole philosophy of the undertaking. 福田 (fukuden) means “field of merit” – an old Buddhist notion according to which a good deed is a seed cast into fertile soil: good that is sown yields a harvest of good. The orphanage, run since 1879 jointly by monks of several Buddhist schools, was therefore called, literally, the “Society of the Field of Merit”. The Polish children came to live on a field where Japan had resolved to sow good.

And Japan sowed generously. Barbers from the neighbourhood came to cut the little guests’ hair for free, tailors sewed their clothes, pupils of Tokyo schools gave up their pocket money for the collections. But Siberia did not let its children out of its hands so easily. They had arrived lice-ridden and emaciated, with tuberculosis, whooping cough, scabies – and with an illness written in Japanese with the characters 腸チフス (chō chifusu): typhoid fever.

A Spring That Smelled of Carbolic

In the spring of 1921 an epidemic of typhoid fever spread through the Fukudenkai and Tokyo. Typhoid travels by the digestive route – through water, dirty hands, shared dishes. The most gravely ill children were moved from the orphanage to the infectious-diseases ward of the Red Cross hospital in nearby Shibuya. There the nurses were waiting for them. Among them, Fumi.

We must pause for a moment on what caring for a typhoid patient meant in 1921, because without it her decisions remain an empty platitude about sacrifice. There were no antibiotics – chloramphenicol, the first effective drug, would appear only after the Second World War. Medicine could only sustain and hope: give fluids, feed a liquid diet, bring down a forty-degree fever with compresses and baths, make sure the weakened heart did not stop and the ulcerated intestines did not burst. The illness dragged on for weeks. The whole of the treatment was nursing – unbroken, physical, close to the body. The nurse fed, washed, changed the bedding, carried out the bedpans. No one was more exposed than she.

Fumi was assigned to a girl in critical condition – so grave that, by later accounts, the staff gave the little one no chance. The institution’s records say it sparingly: one of the Polish girls owes her life to the care of Fumi Matsuzawa. Japanese accounts add a detail that is hard to shake off: Fumi did not leave the bedside at night either, and took the dying child into her arms, against herself. She held a foreign, contagiously ill orphan from the other end of the world for long hours – in an age when every nursing manual prescribed distance and disinfection.

The girl survived. Against the prognosis the fever fell, the little one returned to the Fukudenkai, and then to a ship and to Poland, where she grew up in a country whose existence her carer had known little more about than that it was somewhere out there and that its children were dying. Fumi fell ill a few weeks later. With the same thing.

The Eleventh of July

She died on the eleventh of July 1921, in the tenth year of the Taishō era. That much the documents say. More important, though, is what they do not say – and it is here that the story of Fumi splits into three currents.

The first current: paper from the period. The Japanese Red Cross kept a “Journal of Care for the Polish Orphans” – its pages have survived in museum collections and can be viewed today in the organisation’s online museum. From them follows a simple thing: the nurse Matsuzawa Fumi caught typhoid through contact with her charges and died. The operation’s report recorded her death as the only one on the side of the rescuers. The dry prose of administration; that very dryness is what gives it its credibility.

The second current: memory. In the memoir literature a scene has been preserved: the death of the beloved nurse was kept from the children, but the youngest kept asking the adults: “Where is Fumi-san? Where is Fumi-san?” When the truth finally came out, the children wept. Here a small thing gives one pause: the website run by the Fukudenkai itself states that Fumi died after the children had already left Japan. Both versions cannot be fully true – the Tokyo group left Yokohama in waves through the summer of 1921, so some children could still have been asking while others were already on the ocean. The discrepancy itself is instructive: even the institutions that guard this memory do not agree on who stood by her at her death.

The third current: legend. In contemporary Japanese accounts – lectures, educational pamphlets, school newsletters – Fumi utters a sentence that passes today for her epitaph. I will quote it in a moment, but first let me admit: I have not managed to reach any certain source for these quotations (which does not mean, of course, that none exists). Her words circulate in at least three versions. Which of them, if any, is true – I do not know; I give all three, together with the source from which I read each:

***

「せめて最期は自分の胸の中で」

(Semete saigo wa jibun no mune no naka de)

“Let the end, at least, come within my arms.”

– worldfolksong.com, „Porando koji o sukutta Nihonjin”

(the Japanese who saved the Polish orphans).

***

「この子には看てくれる父も母もいない。死んでも泣いて悲しんでくれる親はいない。死を待つほかないのなら、せめて自分の胸で死なせてやりたい」

(Kono ko ni wa mite kureru chichi mo haha mo inai. Shinde mo naite kanashinde kureru oya wa inai. Shi o matsu hoka nai no nara, semete jibun no mune de shinasete yaritai)

“This child has no father and no mother to watch over it. Even if it dies, no parent will weep over it in grief. Since nothing is left to it but to wait for death, let it at least die against my breast.”

– Hattori Takeshi, lecture series „Ima tsutaetai kandō no Nihonshi”

(the moving history of Japan I want to pass on today), 2020.

「人は誰でも自分の子どもや弟妹が病に倒れたら、己が身を犠牲にしても助けようとします。けれどもこの子たちは両親も兄弟姉妹もいないのです。誰かがその代わりにならなければなりません。私は決めたのです」

(Hito wa dare demo jibun no kodomo ya teimai ga yamai ni taoretara, onore ga mi o gisei ni shite mo tasukeyō to shimasu. Keredomo kono kotachi wa ryōshin mo kyōdai shimai mo inai no desu. Dareka ga sono kawari ni naranakereba narimasen. Watashi wa kimeta no desu)

“Anyone whose own child or younger sibling falls ill will try to save them even at the cost of their own life. But these children have no parents, no brothers, no sisters. Someone must take their place. I have decided to.”

– the ameblo.jp blog

(Chizuru, „Mirai e kataru Nihonjin, Matsuzawa Fumi”), 2024.

The Medal

What happened to Fumi after her death is a story of its own – about how two nations handle someone else’s sacrifice.

Poland reacted first. As early as 1921 the chapter of the Polish Red Cross awarded the dead woman a decoration; in 1929 came another, an honorary one. The press of the day reported a Warsaw ceremony at which the president of the Polish Red Cross Main Board, Zygmunt Zaborowski, placed in the hands of the Japanese delegation a third-class decoration for the “departed heroine”, writing of the “noble Japanese woman” who had “fallen a victim of duty”. And there is a detail that is almost beyond belief: a photograph of Fumi turned up years later in Poland. No one knows how it crossed the ocean. The loveliest of the hypotheses says the children took it with them. It seems possible.

Legend, however, threw in a medal of its own that never existed. On Polish-language Wikipedia one can read today that Fumi received, posthumously, the Florence Nightingale Medal – the highest nursing decoration in the world, awarded by the International Committee of the Red Cross. I checked the official list of all the Japanese laureates from the first edition in 1920 to the present day: one hundred and eighteen names. Matsuzawa Fumi is not among them. Someone, at some point, evidently decided that a real Polish decoration was too little for such a story – and added to it the highest one in the world. That is how a monument works: it grows on its own.

In Japan, by contrast, the opposite happened – silence fell. The story of the Polish orphans, present in the press of the whole country in the 1920s, after the war fell almost entirely out of Japanese memory; at the Fukudenkai itself, by the end of the twentieth century, no one knew of it any longer. It came back by a roundabout way. In 2010 the Polish ambassador in Tokyo, Jadwiga Rodowicz-Czechowska, on a morning walk through Hiroo, passed a sign reading 福田会 (Fukudenkai) – and recognised the name, because in Poland this story was still being handed down. The next day she telephoned the institution. That was how Poland reminded Japan of its own good deed. Eight years earlier, in 2002, during the imperial couple’s visit to Warsaw, the now elderly former wards had met Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko.

After that, memory began to come back in waves, in all sorts of forms. In 2018 Japanese researchers of nursing history reconstructed, in the pages of a scholarly journal, the biography of Fumi and her family, including her father, Matsuzawa Fusajirō. In the autumn of 2024, in Wejherowo – the town of the former Educational Institute for Siberian Children – pupils of the District Special Education Centre pressed their hands into clay; the fired imprints were to support a plinth commemorating the Japanese nurse. The head of the institution, Małgorzata Woźniak, said at the time, for Twoja Telewizja Morska, that Fumi “cared for Polish children in Wejherowo itself”.

I do not want to be unkind, but that is not how it was. Fumi never set foot in Poland. She died in 1921, two years before the Wejherowo institute opened, and she did not leave Japan even once. And yet there is no reason to correct this with reproach in one’s voice, because this is exactly how collective memory works: it draws the heroine toward itself, into its own backyard, because it wants her close, wants to feel she was here. Fumi’s home region is doing exactly the same thing today, from the other end of the world. In the spring of 2026 the press in Niigata reminded its readers that the girl Polish children learn about was born among them, amid the rice fields of the old village of Manichi. A hundred and five years after her death, two provinces at two ends of the continent are quietly quarrelling over Fumi, each wanting her for its own. That may be the tenderest tribute history knows.

The Girl Survived

Great humanitarian operations we remember in numbers: seventeen days to decide, two groups, 765 saved, two oceans on the way home. Numbers are convenient because they are safe – they have no face, they do not run a fever, they do not die in your arms. But the reckoning for every such operation is, in the end, paid by someone in person, with a single body, and that someone always has a name. In this story the name is Fumi.

And finally, something easy to miss beneath the layer of emotion: Fumi was not saving Poland. She did not know the country, she ran no policy of gratitude between nations, she did not think in terms of the grand gestures into which her death was later framed. She was no diplomat, only a country girl from Manichi. She was saving one particular child lying in front of her – someone else’s, foreign, speaking no language she could understand – because that was her craft and that was how she understood it: to the end. All the later symbolism, the medals real and invented, the monuments and the clay handprints, grew out of that one, entirely unsymbolic thing. Perhaps that is why this figure endures the passing of a century so well. In stories built on ideas there is always something to be annulled. In the story of a woman who holds a dying child in her arms at night – there is nothing to amend.

We do not know her last words, and honesty compels the admission: those beautiful ones, the ones circling the world, were added by posterity. What we do know is her last deed, attested by dry official writing – the least sentimental literary genre humankind has devised. It is a rare fate: after a hundred years, what has remained of her is precisely what matters most.

The girl survived.

Sources

1. 「シベリアのポーランド孤児を看護中に殉職した松澤フミ看護婦と、その父、松澤房二郎」, „看護実践の科学” 43 (6), 2018, pp. 61–69.

2. 日本赤十字社・赤十字WEBミュージアム: 「腸チフスとの闘い【波蘭（ポーランド）孤児救護日誌】」 – period documents from the collections of the Meiji-mura Museum (jrc.or.jp/webmuseum).

3. 「ポーランド孤児を救え！～日本とポーランドの友好を育んだ物語を多くの人に伝えたい」, „歴史街道” (PHP研究所), 2024.

4. 「新潟出身の看護師・松澤フミさんの記憶を後世に」, „新潟日報”, 20.04.2026.

5. Teruo Matsumoto, Wiesław Theiss, „Dzieci syberyjskie. Pomoc Japonii dzieciom polskim w latach 1919–1922”, 2018.

6. Wiesław Theiss, „Dzieci syberyjskie 1919–2019. Z Syberii przez Japonię i Stany Zjednoczone do Polski”, Muzeum Sztuki i Techniki Japońskiej Manggha, 2020.

7. J. Jakóbkiewicz, odczyt wiceprezesa Komitetu Ratunkowego na Syberii, „Czerwony Krzyż” 1921.

8. Sylwia Szarejko, „Polskie dzieci w Kraju Kwitnącej Wiśni”.

9. 日本赤十字社: 「日本におけるフローレンス・ナイチンゲール記章受章者一覧（第1回～第50回）」 – the official list of laureates.

10. 「ポーランドと100年の絆　渋谷の社会福祉法人が古都クラクフでウクライナ難民支援」, „東京新聞”, 14.04.2022.

"Strong Japanese Women"

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    未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

  Mike Soray

   (aka Michał Sobieraj)

未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

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