Szimkin Jozef received transit visa no. 1702 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 13 August 1940. The register records clerk, aged 35.
What the register records
Nationality as recorded
Polnisch
Age in 1940
35
Occupation
Clerk
The journey
Reached Japan; reached Shanghai; registered in Kobe for Japan.
What is known
Joseph Shimkin was one of the Sugihara visa recipients who later resided in Japan. He arrived at Tsuruga on the last boat in June 1941. He said he had devised a fake seal of the Japanese Consulate just like the one Sugihara had used, and employed it to save over a hundred more lives.
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… 312, 36, Warsaw, clerk; aunt S.Lewitin 831 Webster str San Francisco
Mark Halpern correspondence (9 Aug 2026): Netherlands Legation certificate, Tokyo, 18 March 1941 — Minister J.C. Pabst certifies that 74 named persons of Polish nationality "do not need a Netherlands visa in order to proceed to the Nethe… Amakusa Maru 74 — Netherlands Legation certificate (Tokyo, 18 Mar 1941), line 74. Cross-referenced by Mark Halpern, researcher (Aug 2026); archive pass concurs. register row reads Szimkin — confirms Halpern: line 74 held a Sugihara visa. — Mark Halpern's annotation (9 Aug 2026): #74 held a Sugihara visa but is identified, by Hillel Levine (In Search of Sugihara) and by Mark Halpern, as a Jewish forger of visas; he spent the war in Shanghai, returned to Japan and lived in Tokyo in the 1980s — a sourced historical claim, attributed, not the archive's verdict
The list of seventy-four — Netherlands Legation, Tokyo, 18 March 1941. On the Legation's letterhead (Gezantschap der Nederlanden), certifying 'that the undermentioned persons all of Polish nationality do not need a Netherlands visa in or… Named at position 74 of seventy-four on the Netherlands Legation's certificate of 18 March 1941 — the list of the people who reached Tsuruga on Sugihara's transit visas without a Curaçao endorsement, were refused permission to land, and whose ship was turned back towards Vladivostok. The Legation typed the name as "Szymkin Jozef". A pencilled note beside it gives this register number, which is how the two records are joined. His is the last name on the list, and the Curaçao visa written for him was never completed and never used — a fact established at the Nationaal Archief and reported to this archive by Johannes Willem de Vries. Why he was listed, and what became of him, are open questions the archive cannot yet answer.
A Curacao certificate of the Netherlands Consulate-General at Kobe in French, dated Kobe 18 March 1941 and answering a letter of the same day, addressed to Mr Szymkin Jozef at Tsuruga. The consul declares that for the admission of foreig… A Curacao certificate written for him by name. The Netherlands Consulate-General at Kobe answered his letter of 18 March 1941 on the same day, addressing him at Tsuruga as Szymkin Jozef and declaring that no entry visa was required for Curacao, Surinam or the other Netherlands possessions in America. The identification does not rest on the name: this register number is already joined to the Legation's certificate of 18 March 1941, on which he is the seventy-fourth and last name, by a pencilled note beside it. The certificate agrees with that record in name, in date to the day, and in place - the consulate at Kobe writing to the port at Tsuruga where the seventy-four had been refused permission to land.
mark-2026-08-21: References to Josef Szimkin in Hillel Levine — a document sent to the archive by a correspondent. References to Josef Szimkin in Hillel Levine’s In Search of Sugihara: The Elusive Japanese Diplomat Who Risked His Life to… A correspondent's collation of the published references to Jozef Szimkin — a Warsaw relief worker whose reports reached the committee from occupied Poland. This entry is already identified as the Szimkin of the Netherlands Legation's list of seventy-four and of the Shanghai consulate ledger, by the same correspondent, Mark Halpern.
A document held in the archive's files
Hillel Levine, In Search of Sugihara: The Elusive Japanese Diplomat Who Risked His Life to Rescue 10,000 Jews from the Holocaust (Plunkett Lake Press edition) — the passages on Jozef Szimkin, compiled by Mark Fishaut, Aug 2026: a Warsaw…