Szimkin Jozef

Szimkin Jozef received transit visa no. 1702 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 13 August 1940. The register records clerk, aged 35.

Documents

Click a document to see it larger.

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.

Joseph Shimkin, who had been one of the Sugihara visa recipients and later resided in Japan, had arrived at Tsuruga on the last boat in June of 1941. Shimkin said that he had devised a fake seal of the Japanese Consulate just like the seal which Sugihara had had and he had used it in order 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…
  Entry 312 of the Kobe community's list of refugees and their relatives abroad: aged 36, born at Warsaw, a clerk; relatives abroad: an aunt, S. Lewitin, 831 Webster Street, 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 Shanghai Ledger — register of Polish citizens kept by the Consulate of Poland in Shanghai, 1934-1943 (original at the Archives of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ref. 43/2003; digitised by the Library of Congress; indexed as…
  Registered with the Polish Consulate in Shanghai (ledger entry 1525) — found on reading the ledger page itself — the ledger reads: Szymkin Jozef, born 17 March 1905 Warsaw, single; 561/29 Point Road; registered 16 December 1941 on a passport issued by the Shanghai consulate itself (S-251, 4 December 1941), valid to December 1943 — found on reading the page; the Shanghai register's only Szymkin.
• 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 docu… — provided Beckelman with reliable updates. “The activity is conducted with German permission,” Beckelman writes of the violence Polish Jews were suffering. But ultim
  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 Holocau… — adding that most of the relief money came from the refugees themselves, nine in ten of whom 'didn't make it'
• Shanghai Ledger, page 191 (left): entries 1522-1529, registered 16 December 1941 on passports issued by the Shanghai consulate itself 2-4 December 1941: Nowomiast Stanislaw (merchant, b. 6 Mar 1908 Warsaw, wife Mina b. 1915), Rajczyk Szm…
• Shanghai Ledger, page 191 (right): entries 1522-1529, registered 16 December 1941 on passports issued by the Shanghai consulate itself 2-4 December 1941: Nowomiast Stanislaw (merchant, b. 6 Mar 1908 Warsaw, wife Mina b. 1915), Rajczyk Sz…

×