Haftka Samuel

Haftka Samuel received transit visa no. 1303 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 6 August 1940. The register records clerk, aged 34.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Age in 1940

34

Occupation

Clerk

Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list

husband of #1302

The journey

Reached Japan; reached Shanghai.

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 2368, Samuel Haftka, born 1905 at Częstochowa, who came from Warszawa; the year agrees with the register's compiled age, and the town with what the archive already holds for this 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 269 of the Kobe Jewish Community's refugee register: aged 35, born at Czestochowa, a clerk, who arrived in Japan from Kaunas on 3 February 1941.
• The Shanghai Ledger — register of Polish citizens kept by the Consulate of Poland in Shanghai, 1934-1943 (original at the Archives of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ref. 43/2003; digitised by the Library of Congress; indexed as…
  Registered with the Polish Consulate in Shanghai (ledger entry 1050); one of the register's two Samuel Haftka rows (see also No.2131) matching the ledger's single entry — approved by the owner's review, 19 Aug 2026
• 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 3 Feb 1941 (line 1303)
• JDC Archives, New York, collection AR33-44 fi… — “List of persons who left Japan for Shanghai and Harbin in the month of May 1941”, compiled by the Jewish Community of Kobe (Ashkenazim) for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee
  Named in the Kobe committee's list of persons who left Japan for Shanghai and Harbin in the month of May 1941 (JDC Archives). Haftka Samuel, Polish, sailed from Kobe for Shanghai on 24 May 1941 aboard the Kamakura Maru, travelling with Paulina. He reached Japan on 3 February 1941 from Kovno. NOTE: the register carries a Samuel Haftka twice, and this document bears on which line is meant, because this Samuel sailed with Paulina and Paulina is the line immediately before this one. That is evidence toward the question, not a settlement of it.
• Arolsen Archives, 3.1.1.4 (Shanghai), unit 19970: list of Polish Jewish refugees who came from Vilna via Kobe to Shanghai and died there be… — a typed list giving name, dates of birth and death, the Jewish date, the grave, and nationality
  Samuel Haftka died in Shanghai on 14 May 1944 (21 Iyar 5704) and was buried the next day in the Baikal Road Jewish cemetery, according to the list of Polish Jewish refugees buried there, now in the Arolsen Archives, which enters him as Szmuel Haftka, born 12 December 1906 — the register's compiled age of 34 agrees, as does the Kobe register's 35. His niece, Sylvia Wassertheil-Smoller, née Hafftka (the family spells the name Hafftka), writing to this archive in September 2026, said he died there of typhus; she has no document for it, and the cause rests on her word alone. The register carries a second Samuel Haftka at No. 2131; the burial list has one man, and the archive records him here, on the line that the Kobe and Vilna lists and the May 1941 sailing to Shanghai with Paulina also fit.

×