Sondheimer Hanni received transit visa no. 1320 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 6 August 1940. Aged 16 in 1940.
Reached Japan; reached Shanghai; registered in Kobe for USA.
Hanni Sondheimer, born in Berlin in 1923, fled Nazi Germany with her family in 1934 to Kaunas, Lithuania, where her father Moritz ran a small plastics factory. After the Soviet takeover in 1940, the family obtained German passports, a Curacao visa from Dutch Consul Zwartendijk, and Japanese transit visas from Sugihara—one of the few non-Polish families to receive them. They traveled via Moscow and the Trans-Siberian railroad to Vladivostok, then to Japan (Yokohama), and were deported to Shanghai in late summer 1941. After the war Hanni married a U.S. Army lieutenant and immigrated to Iowa in 1946, with her family following to Los Angeles the next year.
Japanese transit visa issued to Hanni Sondheimer. Hanni Lori Sondheimer is the daughter of Moritz and Setty Sondheimer. She was born on October 5, 1923 in Berlin, Germany and has a younger brother, Karl. In 1934, the family fled Nazi Germany and moved to Kaunas, Lithuania. Moritz had owned a leather goods store in Berlin, and in Kaunas he opened a small plastics factory which manufactured combs and buttons. He helped many Polish refugees by employing them in his factory. Hanni first attended a German school in Kaunas but after it became increasingly antisemitic, she transferred to an ORT school to learn millinery skills. After the Soviet take-over of Lithuanian in the summer 1940, the gov…