Iwri Samuel received transit visa no. 1046 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 5 August 1940. The register records teacher - yeshiva, aged 29.
What the register records
Nationality as recorded
Polnisch
Age in 1940
29
Occupation
Teacher - Yeshiva
Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list
wife Nina (23)
The journey
Reached Japan; reached Shanghai; registered in Kobe for USA.
Travelled with, and never given a number
Nina — wife, aged 23
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
Samuel Iwry's oral history 'To Wear the Dust of War: From Bialystok to Shanghai to the Promised Land,' edited by L.J.H. Kelley, recounts his escape from Bialystok, Poland, through wartime routes (paralleling the Sugihara/Kaunas escape corridor) to Shanghai, and eventually onward to build a new life, described by reviewer Elie Wiesel as an oral history of 'a turbulent century's triumphs and victories.'
This is a forged Polish safe-conduct certificate (Zaświadczenie/Certificat) created for Samuel Iwry, born 25 December 1910 in Białystok, listing him as an unmarried teacher. The document, dated 12 February 1940 and bearing seals of the Polish Legation in Kaunas and later a Polish Embassy in Tokyo stamp, was produced with the help of Iwry's underground activist colleagues in Europe, who used their forging skills to create life-saving travel documents for refugees fleeing through Lithuania and onward via Japan.
Samuel Iwry, a Polish Jew born in Bialystok in 1910, used a professionally forged Nansen 'sauf conduit' (safe conduct) certificate identifying him as a Polish citizen to escape Soviet-occupied Poland into Lithuania, hiring smugglers and carrying only a nonincriminating sports club card for identification. When the Soviets invaded Lithuania in June 1940 and voided Polish passports, this forged document served as a replacement. The accompanying text describes the desperate, dangerous journey of refugees attempting to travel onward—risking travel through Moscow and seeking routes to places like Sweden or Palestine—amid the chaos of the war's escalation in Europe.
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… No.117, 1910 Bialystok; uncle Lazar Evry Bronx NY
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… 224, 31, b. Bialystok, Teacher, arr. 25.2, from Wilno
Certificate of Polish citizenship No. J-8/1/40, made out to Samuel Iwry and dated at Kaunas 12 February 1940, reproduced as a full-page plate in Samuel Iwry's published oral history. It records his birth on 25 December 1910 at Bialystok,… The sheet names Samuel Iwry and gives his birth as 25 December 1910 at Bialystok, which agrees with the register's age of 29 in 1940, and his profession as teacher, which is the occupation the register records. One difference should be set down: the sheet, drawn up in February 1940, describes him as unmarried, where the register notes a wife. The account in which the plate appears carries the author's own commentary on how the document came to him; that commentary is left to the book.
A document held in the archive's files
Owner's Sugihara research library (photo 3 of 3): Emerging Heroes + Visas of Life (Kitade), To Wear the Dust of War (Iwry), Esin Ayirtman-Sugihara, Sugihara's List (Hartman), I Have My Mother's Eyes (Barbara Ruth Bluman), Medzini, manga,…