Sonja Kerner

Sonja Kerner received transit visa no. 103 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 29 July 1940. Aged 32 in 1940.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Age in 1940

32

Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list

wife of #97

The journey

Reached Japan; reached Shanghai; registered in Kobe for Australia.

Where this comes from

• List of Refugees, Vilna, 1940 — JDC Archives, New York, collection AR 33/44, file 00876. The contemporary register of Polish Jewish refugees in Lithuania, running to more than nine thousand numbered entries; the fullest independent check…
  The 1940 Vilna refugee list has, at entry 8661, Sonia Kerner, born 1908 at Krakow, who had come from Krakow; the year agrees with the register's compiled age, and her son Teodor, born 1931, stands on the next line.
• The JEWCOM register — the refugee register kept by the Refugee Committee of the Jewish Community of Kobe (Ashkenazim) at No. 6 Yamamoto-dori, 1-chome, whose cable address was 'JEWCOM Kobe'. Eighty-four pages on the committee's own printe…
  Entry 238 of the Kobe Jewish Community's refugee register: aged 33, born at Krakow, who travelled from Vilnius.
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Survivors and Victims Database — the Flight and Rescue electronic dataset (source 20725): USHMM's own transcription of the Kaunas register, 2,140 persons with citizenship, visa type, iss…
  USHMM Flight and Rescue dataset: arrived in Japan 24 Feb 1941 (line 103)
• World Jewish Congress, London: 'List of Poles in Shanghai who are looking for their relatives in Poland', 25 December 1945 — a typed sheet of twenty-seven lines for twenty-one petitioners in Shanghai, each with the relative sought and th…
  The World Jewish Congress's list of Poles in Shanghai looking for relatives in Poland, dated 25 December 1945 (Arolsen Archives 3.1.1.3, DocID 78796209, read online 18 September 2026), names a 'Kerner, Sonja' as a petitioner in Shanghai looking for Josef Lea Lisodower, last at Lwów. Under the archive's rule of 19 September 2026 a name on a list of the Sugihara refugees' own route counts as a corroboration when the full name occurs once on the register and the record's place and date fit the route; all three hold here, and the line is attached on that basis.
• "California, San Francisco, Passenger Lists, 1893-1953", FamilySearch — index entry for Sonia Kerner, 1949: born about 1908, Poland. Digitised from NARA microfilm publication M1410 (passenger lists of vessels arriving at San Francisco).…
  FamilySearch's index of the San Francisco passenger lists, read by the archive on 20 September 2026, has Sonia Kerner, born about 1908 in Poland, arriving at San Francisco in 1949 on the President Wilson. The register's compiled line gives 1908, and the two are 0 years apart, and the name occurs once on the register. The ship's manifest heading says she sailed from Shanghai, and a passenger born in Poland landing at San Francisco in 1949 from Shanghai is the route's end: the refugees who waited out the war there. So the entry is taken as this person's under the archive's rule of 19 September 2026 for records from the route. The sheet is NARA microfilm publication M1410, film 404, image 306, read by the archive on 20 September 2026.

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