Zygmunt Kerner

Zygmunt Kerner received transit visa no. 149 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 29 July 1940. The register records lawyer, aged 40.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Age in 1940

40

Occupation

Lawyer

Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list

husband of #148, daughter Bella (5)

The journey

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

Travelled with, and never given a number

• Bella — daughter, aged 5

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.

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 8652, Zygmunt Kerner, born 1900 at Krakow, who had come from Krakow; the year agrees with the register's compiled age, and Kraków agrees with what the archive already holds.
• 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…
  Entry 130 of the Kobe community's list of refugees and their relatives abroad: born 1900 at Krakow; relatives abroad: a father, Jonas Wortsman, Tel Aviv; an aunt, Dora Cukier, Brooklyn.
• 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 350 of the Kobe Jewish Community's refugee register: aged 41, born at Krakow, a lawyer, who travelled from Vilnius.
• 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 1279) — the consulate's register of Polish citizens who reached the city, 1934-1943 — the ledger reads: Kerner Zygmunt, ADVOCATE, born 1900 Krakow, married; registered 12 November 1941; 1173/50 Bubbling Well Road, tel. 37913; Warsaw passport of 29 May 1939 extended by the Embassy in Tokyo 6 August 1941.
• 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 149)
• "California, San Francisco, Passenger Lists, 1893-1953", FamilySearch — index entry for Zygmunt Kerner, 1948: born about 1901, 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 Zygmunt Kerner, born about 1901 in Poland, arriving at San Francisco in 1948 on the General W. H. Gordon. The register's compiled line gives 1900, and the two are 1 year 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 1948 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 398, image 687, read by the archive on 20 September 2026.
• La-karov ve-la-rachok, 31 March 1946 — the Far Eastern Palestine Committee's list of Jewish refugees in Shanghai (National Library of Israel, Historical Jewish Press)
  The Far Eastern Palestine Committee's list of Jewish refugees in Shanghai, printed by the Jewish Agency Search Bureau's bulletin La-karov ve-la-rachok on 31 March 1946, lists Sigmund Kerner: born 1900 at Krakau, a lawyer, arrived from Lithuania by way of Siberia, with his wife Else and daughter Bella; the year, the town and the trade agree with the Kobe Jewish community's refugee register, the Kobe community's list of refugees and their relatives and the 1940 Vilna refugee list (National Library of Israel, Historical Jewish Press).

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