Szmul Kruk

Szmul Kruk received transit visa no. 1807 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 16 August 1940. The register records journalist, aged 38.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Age in 1940

38

Occupation

Journalist

Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list

husband of #1809, child Joseph (11)

The journey

Reached Japan; registered in Kobe for USA.

Travelled with, and never given a number

• Joseph — child, aged 11

The register recorded visa holders. It did not reliably record the wives and children who travelled on somebody else’s visa, so these people have no entry of their own and cannot be searched for. Where the archive has recovered a name, it is here.

Where this comes from

• List of Refugees, Vilna, 1940 — JDC Archives, New York, collection AR 33/44, file 00876. The contemporary register of Polish Jewish refugees in Lithuania, running to more than nine thousand numbered entries; the fullest independent check…
  The 1940 Vilna refugee list has, at entry 2789, Szmul Kruk, born 1902 at Płock, who had come from Warsaw; the year agrees with the register's age.
• "California, San Francisco, Passenger Lists, 1893-1953", FamilySearch — index entry for Shmul or Szmul Kruk, 1940: born about 1902, Poland. Digitised from NARA microfilm publication M1410 (passenger lists of vessels arriving at San Franc…
  FamilySearch's index of the San Francisco passenger lists, read by the archive on 20 September 2026, has Shmul or Szmul Kruk, born about 1902 in Poland, arriving at San Francisco in 1940. The register's compiled line gives 1902, and the two agree. The name occurs once on the register, and a Polish-born passenger landing at San Francisco in 1940 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 President Pierce, sailing from Kobe 4 November 1940, arrived San Francisco November 1940 (NARA, passenger lists of vessels arriving at San Francisco, M1410, film 366; read on FamilySearch's copy)
  The President Pierce sailed from Kobe on 4 November 1940, took shore leave at Honolulu on the 13th and landed at San Francisco in the third week of November; its manifest, ten names on the page, has Szmul Kruk, aged 38, married, a journalist, reading Polish, German and English, born at Płock, last residence Wilno, on an American non-immigrant visa, No. 57, issued at Kaunas on 15 June 1940, with his wife Regina, 42, and their son Joseph, a student, on the lines below; a later note records papers issued to the family in December 1941. The register gives his age as 38. The trade is the same, and the register's son Joseph is the boy on the sheet. (The sheet is in the National Archives' passenger lists of vessels arriving at San Francisco, microfilm M1410; the archive read FamilySearch's copy.)

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