Bluman Nuta received transit visa no. 1569 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 9 August 1940. The register records engineer, aged 25.
What the register records
Nationality as recorded
Polnisch
Age in 1940
25
Occupation
Engineer
Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list
wife Zysla (19)
The journey
Reached Japan; aided by the Polish ambassador Tadeusz Romer; registered in Kobe for Canada.
Travelled with, and never given a number
Susan (Zysla) Bluman — wife, aged 20
Zysla — wife, aged 20
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
Nathan Bluman (1914-1986) of Poland received a transit visa issued by Chiune Sugihara at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas, Lithuania. He fled to Canada by way of Japan in 1941. His passport was kept by his family after his death, and his sons George and Bob brought it from Canada to Japan to be entrusted to the Sugihara Chiune Sempo museum in Tokyo.
A British passport (British Consulate, issued in Kaunas/Kowno) belonging to Nathan Bluman, born 1920. The document is associated with the Sugihara visa story.
This is a Sugihara transit visa stamped in a passport, granting passage through Japan to Surinam, Curacao and other Netherlands colonies. The visa was issued at the Japanese Consulate in Kaunas, Lithuania on August 9, 1940, and signed by the Consul du Japon. Japanese entry/transit stamps are also visible.
Where this comes from
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… #58, 27, b. Warsaw, arr 2.2, from Vilno
hunt/webhunt: Nathan (Nuta) Bluman — vhec.org Zachor, Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, Fall 2015 - the issue accompanies a Kristallnacht lecture by Dr George Bluman, who compiled the numbered Sugihara list this archive rests on. It gives his parents' journey entire: Natek and Zosia Bluman (later Nathan and Susan) fled Warsaw to Lithuania a
hunt/webhunt: group portrait, Kobe — collections.ushmm.org USHMM photograph 07665: 'Group portrait of Jewish refugees in Kobe, Japan, who escaped from Europe with visas signed by Chiune Sugihara', 25 May 1941, courtesy of Eric Saul. The museum's record names nobody. The same photograph is published in Zachor (Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, Fall 2015)
hunt/familysearch: US arrival manifest: Nuta Bluman, Seattle, 1941 "Seattle Passenger Lists", FamilySearch, entry for Nuta Bluman, 1941. Ship: Heian Maru. Matched from the Heian Maru's Polish-born passenger list (198 people, of whom 57 matched the register). Register No.1569 'Bluman Nuta' records age 26; the manifest gives born 1914, arriving 1941. Confidenc
List or Manifest of Alien Passengers for the United States - M.S. Hie Maru, which sailed from Kobe on 23 June and from Yokohama on 26 June 1941 and reached Seattle on 7 July 1941; list 20, the sheet stamped 34251/26, sailing from Yokoham… Line 23 of the sheet. BLUMAN, NUTA, 27, male, married, engineer; Polish nationality, Hebrew; born at Warsaw and last resident at Warsaw. His nearest relative in the country he came from is given as his father, Szmul-Szaja Bluman, of Orla 3/3, Warsaw; his final destination is entered as going to Canada; and in Canada he was to be met care of Thomas Cook at Vancouver. He paid his own passage and showed $46. The register has him as Bluman Nuta, an engineer, with a wife Zysla, going to Canada. Four independent agreements: the trade, the destination, the wife on the very next line of the same sheet, and the age, 25 on a list compiled in 1940 against 27 in July 1941. He was detained on board at Seattle on 7 July 1941 with everyone else on the sheet and identified the next day.
Barbara Ruth Bluman, 'I Have My Mother's Eyes: A Holocaust Memoir Across Generations' (Ronsdale Press, Vancouver, 2009) — the memoir of Susan (Zysla) Bluman, register No. 1569, written by her daughter. The title was given to the archive… The memoir of Zysla (Susan) Bluman, written by her daughter. The arrival sheet already on this entry carries Nuta Bluman on one line and Zysla Bluman immediately below, as husband and wife. Given by her son, George Bluman, with the request that it be cited on her entry.