Melamedowicz Fejga

Melamedowicz Fejga received transit visa no. 1758 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 14 August 1940. Aged 29 in 1940.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Age in 1940

29

Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list

wife of #1768

The journey

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

What is known

This is a reproduction of the Japanese transit visa documents belonging to Leo Melamed (born Lejb Melamdowicz, 1932) and his mother Fejgla Melamdowicz (born 1902 in Bialystok, a teacher). The Polish certificate (Zaswiadczenie/Certificat No. M-409) was issued at the Polish Legation in Kaunas on 5 December 1939. A Sugihara-era Japanese transit visa dated 21 August 1940 permitted the journey through Japan to Surinam, Curacao and other Netherlands colonies, and an American immigration visa No. 513 dated 29 March 1941 was later issued in Tokyo. The family escaped Nazi-occupied Europe and Leo Melamed later became a prominent figure in the United States.

Where this comes from

• The JEWCOM register — the refugee register kept by the Refugee Committee of the Jewish Community of Kobe (Ashkenazim) at No. 6 Yamamoto-dori, 1-chome, whose cable address was 'JEWCOM Kobe'. Eighty-four pages on the committee's own printe…
  #456, 39, b. Bialystok, from Vilno
• 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 2 Feb 1941 (line 1758)
• USHMM pa1110057: Wooden crayon case given to Lejb Melamdowicz (now Leo Melamed) while studying at a Japanese school.
  The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's biography of Leo Melamed — born Lejb Melamdowicz at Białystok on 20 March 1932, son of Icchok and Fejga — states the family's transit visa numbers outright: 1758 and 1768, issued on 14 August 1940. Those are these two lines of the register, and both carry that date. The register enters them as husband and wife and its companion notes record a child, Leib (Leo), aged eight. This is an identification made on a number rather than on a name. The archive would ordinarily go no further than a spelling — the register writes Melamedowicz on one line and Melamdowicz on the other — but a family that states its own visa numbers, and a register that agrees on both numbers and the date, is a different order of evidence.
• A document held in the archive's files