Samuel Semenski

Samuel Semenski received transit visa no. 1619 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 13 August 1940. The register records locksmith, aged 42.

Documents

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What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Age in 1940

42

Occupation

Locksmith

Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list

wife Helena (35)

The journey

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

Travelled with, and never given a number

• Helena — wife, aged 35

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

• 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 292 of the Kobe community's list of refugees and their relatives abroad: aged 43, born at Szczuczyn, a locksmith; relatives abroad: brothers, B. and E. Semenski, Richon Lzijon, Palestine; an uncle, Feinberg, 75 Lennox Road, Brooklyn, New York.
• Arolsen Archives, Bad Arolsen, collection 3.2.1.1 (IRO care-and-maintenance files, G… — envelope, application, review-board decision of 7 February 1951 and the Hamburg office's certificate of 3 July 1951 (documents 79769865 and following)
  The Arolsen Archives at Bad Arolsen hold his post-war file with the International Refugee Organization: Samuel Semenski, born 13 September 1898 at Szczuczyn (a certificate in the same file writes 13 December), with his wife Helene, née Brager, born 25 September 1895 at Hamburg. The organization's Hamburg office certified on 3 July 1951 that he had been in its care for a time, that after his return from Israel to Germany, where he had lived before the war, its care had been withdrawn, and that it regarded him as stateless; its review board in Geneva had ruled on 7 February 1951 that he was outside its mandate. The birthplace is the one on the Kobe community's relatives list, the year of birth fits the age recorded for him, the wife's name is the one the register's compilers give (though they record her age as 35 in 1940, ten years younger than the file's 1895), and Israel was the destination recorded for him in Kobe, where his brothers at Rishon LeZion were his relatives abroad. So the arc runs from Kobe and Shanghai to Israel and back to Hamburg by 1950.
• Yad Vashem — Card file of Jewish refugees from Poland who found refuge in various countries, 1939–1941
  Yad Vashem's names index lists a Szmul Semenski, born in 1898, whose permanent home was Hamburg and who was in Wilno during the war, from a card file of Jewish refugees from Poland who found refuge in various countries in 1939 to 1941; the same card file has a Helena Semenski, also of Hamburg, born in 1905. His year of birth and his Hamburg home agree with his post-war refugee file at Arolsen, which says he had lived in Germany before the war; hers does not quite, since that file gives her birth as 1895. The card itself has not yet been seen, so this is a lead. Found in Yad Vashem's names index, October 2026.
• Arolsen Archives, Bad Arolsen, collection 3.2.1.1 (IRO care-and-maintenance files, G… — envelope, application, review-board decision of 7 February 1951 and the Hamburg office's certificate of 3 July 1951 (documents 79769865 and following)

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