Chaim Nussbaum

Chaim Nussbaum received transit visa no. 1630 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 13 August 1940. The register records rabbi - telshe yeshiva.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Occupation

Rabbi - Telshe Yeshiva

Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list

husband of #1632

The journey

Reached Japan; registered in Kobe for Indonesia.

Where this comes from

• Proposal to Yad Vashem for the recognition of NICOLAAS ARIE JOHANNES ('NIEK') DE VOOGD as Righteous Among the Nations, reference CAS-248383, written by his nephew Johannes Willem de Vries and supplied to this archive by the author. Twent…
  Hans de Vries's 2020 account of the Dutch consul at Kobe names a Chaim Nussbaum family among those interned by the Japanese on Java from 1942. This register line was bound for the Indies and the name fits, but the account does not say this is the same man, and the archive has not yet confirmed it.
• Nieuw Israelietisch weekblad, 16 June 1989 (Delpher, Koninklijke Bibliotheek)
  A review of his memoir in the Nieuw Israelietisch Weekblad of 16 June 1989 tells his story: born in 1909, brought to the Netherlands at six, rabbinical training in Lithuania among other places, he fled 'via Siberië naar Japan' (by way of Siberia to Japan), where, by his account, the Dutch envoy asked him to go to the Netherlands Indies, which had no rabbi. He served the Jewish community there until Japan entered the war, joined the army at the end of 1941, was taken prisoner at Bandung in March 1942, and was held in camps on Java and on the Burma railway, keeping a diary in the form of letters to his wife Rachel. He found his wife and children again after the war, and was living in Toronto in 1989. His book is Chaplain on the River Kwai: The Story of a Prisoner of War (Shapolsky, New York, 1988). From the Nieuw Israelietisch Weekblad, through Delpher, Koninklijke Bibliotheek.

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