Trunk Chil Szaja

Trunk Chil Szaja received transit visa no. 1714 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 14 August 1940. The register records writer, aged 52.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Age in 1940

52

Occupation

Writer

Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list

husband of #1713

The journey

Reached Japan; aided by the Polish ambassador Tadeusz Romer; registered in Kobe for USA.

Where this comes from

• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Survivors and Victims Database — the Flight and Rescue electronic dataset (source 20725): USHMM's own transcription of the Kaunas register, 2,140 persons with citizenship, visa type, iss…
  USHMM Flight and Rescue dataset: arrived in Japan 25 Feb 1941 (line 1714)
• American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Archives: the Kobe Jewish committee's JDC relief list of February 1941, page 35
  Page 35 of the Kobe committee's list of refugees receiving JDC aid, February 1941, enters Trunk Chil-Szaja, 53, writer. Both given names agree, and so do the calling and the age: the register records a writer of 52 in 1940.
• "California, San Francisco, Passenger Lists, 1893-1953", FamilySearch — index entry for Chil-Szaja Trunk, 1941: born about 1888, Poland. Digitised from NARA microfilm publication M1410 (passenger lists of vessels arriving at San Francisc…
  FamilySearch's index of the San Francisco passenger lists, read by the archive on 20 September 2026, has Chil-Szaja Trunk, born about 1888 in Poland, arriving at San Francisco in 1941. The register's compiled line gives 1888, and the two agree. The name occurs once on the register, and a Polish-born passenger landing at San Francisco in 1941 fits the route through Japan, so the entry is taken as this person's under the archive's rule of 19 September 2026 for records from the route.
• Manifest of alien passengers, SS Tatuta Maru, sailing from Yokohama 6 March 1941, arrived San Francisco 20 March 1941 (US National Archives, M1410, film 368; read on FamilySearch's copy)
  The National Archives' passenger list of the Tatuta Maru (FamilySearch's copy) records Chil-Szaja Trunk, 53, an author, and his wife Doba Dacha, sailing from Yokohama in March 1941 on US transit visas issued in Moscow, their last home Wilno, bound for a cousin in New York. He named his father, A. Trunk of Warsaw, as his nearest relative. Both given names, the age within a year and the trade agree with the register's compilers, and the wife beside him is the register's next entry.
• 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…
  The Kobe community's list of refugees and their relatives abroad has, at entry 276, Chil Szaja Trunk, born in 1888 at Osmolsk, Polish, with his wife Doba Nacha, born in 1889, and a cousin in New York. Sugihara's ledger lost the first letter of his surname; the list has it in full.
• Yad Vashem Archives, Jerusalem — the card file of Jewish refugees from Poland who found refuge in various countries, 1939–1941
  Yad Vashem's card file of Jewish refugees from Poland who found refuge in various countries, 1939–1941, has a card for Chil Szaja Trunk, who was in Wilno during the war. The archive attaches it under its rule of 19 September 2026: the card file is a record of the refugees in Wilno, where the road through Sugihara's visas began; the full name occurs once on the register; and the card places the person in Wilno in 1939–41, on the road to Sugihara's visas. Credit: Yad Vashem Archives.

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