Liwer Chawa received transit visa no. 1025 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 3 August 1940. Aged 48 in 1940.
What the register records
Nationality as recorded
Polnisch
Age in 1940
48
Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list
wife of #1026, child Jochewet (19)
The journey
Reached Japan; aided by the Polish ambassador Tadeusz Romer; registered in Kobe for Canada.
Travelled with, and never given a number
Jochewet — child, aged 18
The register recorded visa holders. It did not reliably record the wives and children who travelled on somebody else’s visa, so these people have no entry of their own and cannot be searched for. Where the archive has recovered a name, it is here.
What is known
Chawa Heller was born in Szydlowiec, Poland, on 1 November 1891. Because her birth was not registered until two years later, her date of birth was afterwards recorded wrongly. She had four sisters and three brothers, most of whom did not survive the war. Her marriage to Abraham Liwer was arranged, but the couple met in secret before the wedding; defying Orthodox tradition, she neither shaved her head nor wore a wig. After marrying she moved to Abraham's home town of Bedzin. On 2 September 1939 she fled Bedzin with her husband Abraham and their daughter Jadzia. Her son Jacob was studying in Belgium. They settled in Lwow. On 29-30 June 1940, while Abraham was in Lithuania getting visas for…
Where this comes from
The Kobe relatives list — refugees at Kobe in 1941 recorded with their relatives abroad. Seventy-six pages in numbered sheets (LIST No. 7, No. 16 and others), each line giving a name, age, birthplace, occupation and citizenship, and then… 86; 48
David Rosen, 'Lithuania to Moscow to Yokohama to Seattle: Holocaust Escape via Japan', Mass-Pocha (Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Boston), October 2022, pp. 17-21. Reproduces the United States arrival manifest of the M.S. Hie Mar… The article in which this manifest reaches the archive. David Rosen read the Liwer family's lines out of the original sheet himself - Chawa's and her daughter's among them - and he sent the article to the archive in August 2026. The questions it answers are Arlette Liwer-Stuip's, whose research prompted it. What the manifest itself records is set out below, under the sheet.
M.S. Hie Maru, Yokohama 26 June - Seattle 7 July 1941, continuing to Vancouver: the ship's last commercial crossing before she was taken for the Japanese Navy. Read from the manifest reproduced in David Rosen's Mass-Pocha article of Octo… Lines 10 and 11 of the same sheet, and the reason this family is on two different pages of the archive. Chawa Liver, 48, and her daughter Jochewet, 18, a student - both Polish citizens, both marked 'Det'. They were detained aboard rather than landed, along with every other passenger on that page but one, and then continued to Vancouver: they held Canadian visas and he did not. Column 13 records passports issued at KOBE on 20 February 1941. Those were Polish passports obtained through Ambassador Tadeusz Romer, together with the Canadian visas, and mother and daughter shared a single joint passport because the Polish embassy in Japan had run out of blank forms. The sheet is stamped SEATTLE, WASH. JUL 7 1941 and certified the following day by Immigrant Inspector Albert Wolstenholme. The compiled register's note that this line went to Canada while No. 1026 went to the United States is exactly right, and this is the document that shows why.
List or Manifest of Alien Passengers for the United States - M.S. Hie Maru, which sailed from Kobe on 23 June and from Yokohama on 26 June 1941 and reached Seattle on 7 July 1941; list 19, the sheet stamped 34251/24, sailing from Yokoham… Line 10 of the sheet. LIWER, CHAWA, 48, female, married; reads Polish and German and writes; Polish nationality, Hebrew; born at Bedzin, last permanent residence Bedzin; no United States visa in the visa column. The register has her as Liwer Chawa, 48, wife of No. 1026, going to Canada. The surname is spelt exactly as the register carries it, the given name is the same, the age is the same to the year, and the destination agrees: the ship went on from Seattle to Vancouver, and the inspectors' notes at the foot of the sheet record that she was detained on board at Seattle on 7 July 1941 and that her departure for a foreign port was witnessed the next day. The register's 'Canada' for her and 'USA' for her husband were compiled from a source that had nothing to do with this manifest, and both are what the manifest shows.
Arlette Liwer-Stuip, account written for this archive of her grandfather ABRAM (AVRAM) LIWER, register No. 1026, and his wife CHAWA, No. 1025 — the flight from Będzin, the crossing into Lithuania, the Curaçao declaration from Jan Zwarten… Her granddaughter's written account of the flight from Będzin, the Curaçao declaration and the Sugihara visas, the deportation to Siberia, and the reunion in New York. Given by Arlette Liwer.
stuip-2026-08-04: The Liwers for Chaim's site — a document sent to the archive by a correspondent. Abraham Liwer, born in Będzin, Poland, 1892. On Chiune Sugihara’s official list – No. 1026
Also known as / spellings: Abram Liver Polish .… Her granddaughter's written account of the flight from Będzin, the Curaçao declaration and the Sugihara visas, the deportation to Siberia, and the reunion in New York. Given by Arlette Liwer.
David Rosen, 'Lithuania to Moscow to Yokohama to Seattle', Mass-Pocha, October 2022, page 18 — the second printed page, and the one that reproduces the United States arrival manifest of the Hie Maru at Seattle. Two strips of the manifest… All five printed pages of the article reconstructing this family's crossing, given by its author David Rosen.
Arlette Liwer-Stuip, account written for this archive of her grandmother CHAWA LIWER, nee HELLER, register No. 1025 — her birth at Szydlowiec in 1891 and the registration two years late that put a wrong date of birth into the records, th…