Kohn Chaskiel received transit visa no. 1586 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 9 August 1940. The register records second hand dealer, aged 21.
Reached Japan; reached Shanghai; registered in Kobe for USA.
Chaskiel Kohn of Rypin was twenty-one when visa No.1586 carried him east, and twenty-six when the Shanghai ghetto authorities photographed him for exit pass No.4181 — the little pink card that governed whether a soap-boiler from Tongshan Road could leave Hongkew for a day's work. His documents trace the whole exile: the Polish Association card renewed year after year through the ghetto, the pass stamped and re-stamped through the summer of 1944, and finally a 1946 Chinese travel permit in his old Polish passport — free at last to move, Nanking, Tientsin, Peiping, and eventually out. His daughter kept every scrap.