Ludwik Aronson

Ludwik Aronson received transit visa no. 181 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 29 July 1940. The register records banker, aged 55.

Documents

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What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Age in 1940

55

Occupation

Banker

Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list

wife Janina

The journey

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

What is known

For eighty years he was a register line, a Kobe roster entry, and a bank director's title. The Wiener family's papers give him back his voice: two letters from Shanghai in the spring of 1941, signed "Janka and Ludwik," bargaining in permits and currencies with his friend Übersfeld in Kobe, pricing the roads out of Europe item by item — thirty dollars for a Shanghai permit, fifteen more for the telegraph through Moscow, ten days, "naturally, prices can change." Between the lines, a household: a two-room flat shared with another couple, $8.50 in rent, furniture bought for eighteen dollars, bronchitis shaken off, "only the heat and mosquitoes are bothering us now." His wife's name, Janka — r…

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 8 of the Kobe community's list of refugees and their relatives abroad: born 1885 at Krakow, Polish.
• 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…
  Entry 15 of the Kobe Jewish Community's refugee register: aged 56, born at Krakow, a bank director, who arrived in Japan from Vilnius on 13 February 1941.
• JDC Archives, New York, collection AR33-44 fi… — “List of persons who left Japan for Shanghai and Harbin in the month of May 1941”, compiled by the Jewish Community of Kobe (Ashkenazim) for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee
  Sailed from Kobe for Shanghai on the Taiyo Maru, 18 May 1941. The line beneath his carries the same surname and the given name Janina.
• JDC Archives, New York, collection AR33-44 file 53 — “European Refugees Receiving JDC Aid in Japan, Including Information on Overseas Relatives”, 1941, compiled by the Jewish Community of Kobe (Ashkenazim)
  Listed at Kobe in 1941 among the Polish refugees receiving aid, given as of Krakow. The column for relatives abroad is left blank.
• 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 13 Feb 1941 (line 181)
• Tadeusz Romer papers, Library and Archives Canada, MG 31 D 68, vol. 2 (microfilm reel C-10451, frame 1088): 'Lista obywateli polskich ewakuowanych z Dalekiego Wschodu… — cited by link only (Canadiana Heritage); frame image not republished
  Romer papers read by eye (LAC reel C-10451, frames 1087-1089, 1106-1109, 241-242): Ludwik and Janina Aronsohn are NOT among the 101 Polish citizens evacuated from Japan and Shanghai on the exchange ships of July-August 1942, and the reel holds no typed register of refugees in Japan naming them; the Embassy's memorandum of early 1941 counts 74 embarked without names
• Archiwum Uniwersytetu Jagiellonskiego (Marcin Danek), reply of 25 August 2026 to the archive's enquiry — the university's record of LUDWIK ARONSOHN, from the biogram published in 'Corpus studiosorum Universitatis Iagellonicae' (vols A-D,…
  THE BIRTH YEAR SETTLED. The archive held two readings of this man: the Kobe refugee lists of February 1941 call him a bank director of Krakow aged 55-56, which implies a birth about 1885, while a Krakow genealogical source gives Ludwik Jozef Aronsohn, doctor of law, born 21 April 1895. What decides it is not the bracketed date in the University's biogram — which the Archive itself marks as coming from outside its records — but the academic chronology that IS the University's own: gymnasium at Podgorze completed June 1913, Vienna 1914/15, the Jagiellonian from 1913/14, absolutorium April 1918, doctorate December 1918. A man who finished gymnasium in 1913 was born about 1895; a man born in 1885 would have finished about 1903. So the register's No.181 was born in 1895, was a doctor of laws of 1918, and the Kobe committee's 'aged 55-56' was a clerk's error or a guess. It also gives him a father — Samuel Aronsohn, physician of Podgorze — and a mother, Natalia nee Spitzer. The New York naturalisation index, which has Ludwik Aronson petitioning in 1954 as born 22 April 1895, now agrees with the Krakow end to within a day.
• Archiwum Uniwersytetu Jagiellonskiego (Marcin Danek, starszy kustosz archiwalny), second reply, 26 August 2026 — the ARONSOHN family in the University's student records, with the citation: 'Corpus studiosorum Universitatis Iagellonicae',…
  THREE GENERATIONS, from the University's own enrolment cards (Corpus studiosorum Universitatis Iagellonicae, T. A-D, Krakow 1999, p. 55). The Ludwik Aronsohn of No. 181 was the son of DR SAMUEL SALOMON ARONSOHN, born 20 June 1857 in Krakow, who took his matura at the II Gimnazjum sw. Jacka in 1875 and his doctorate in medicine at the Jagiellonian on 20 January 1881 — the physician of Podgorze named in his son's own enrolment record. Samuel's father, and so Ludwik's grandfather, was ELKAN ARONSOHN, an industrialist and later commercial agent who by 1875 was living in LONDON; Samuel's mother was JETTI (GITEL) nee ROSENSTRAUCH. Father and son gave the same address all through Ludwik's studies: PODGORZE, RYNEK 13. The Archive holds no photograph of either man, keeps no personal files from that period, and has nothing at all on Janina/Janka Aronsohn — so the woman who travelled with him to Japan is still unaccounted for outside the Kobe and Shanghai papers.
• Archiwum Uniwersytetu Jagiellonskiego (Marcin Danek), third reply, 26 August 2026 — EVERY ARONSOHN who studied at the Jagiellonian University, 1… — and that no dissertation was required or deposited, so none survives for Samuel or Ludwik.
  LUDWIK ARONSOHN'S FAMILY, from the University's own enrolment cards. He was the youngest of three children of Dr Samuel Salomon Aronsohn, physician of Podgorze, and Natalia nee Spitzer: his brother ZYGMUNT (b. 1889) took a Jagiellonian doctorate in law in 1912, six years before Ludwik took the same degree, and his sister BERTA (b. 1891) read philosophy there from 1909. Their grandfather ELKAN ARONSOHN — a Krakow merchant, commercial agent and numismatist who was living in LONDON by 1875 — had five children at the same university across forty years: two physicians (Samuel 1881, Julian 1895), two lawyers (Maurycy 1885, Jakub 1889) and a daughter, Ludwika, who read philosophy in the 1890s. This is what makes the 1940 line legible: the man to whom Sugihara wrote No. 181 came from a Krakow professional family three generations deep in that university, with a London connection two generations before it was needed. Whether Zygmunt and Berta survived the war the archive does not know; neither is on Sugihara's register, and no fate is claimed for them here.
• George Bluman, compiler of the Chiune Sugihara Lists, in correspondence with the archive, 30 August 2026 — reading the destination column of the Polish embassy list he holds, of which the archive has only the sheet numbered 11.
  Asked what the embassy's destination column said beside Ludwik Aronsohn — one line off a page the archive does not hold — George Bluman answered in three words: BURMA FOR ARONSOHN. That is worth setting against the compiled register, which gives this line's destination as the United States. The two readings come from the same man: he compiled the register, and he is reading the embassy's own column here. The archive records both and resolves neither, because a contemporary destination column and a later compilation can both be right about different moments — a man could be listed for Burma in 1941 and reach America afterwards — and because Burma is not an outlier here: twenty-nine other lines on the register are recorded as Burma-bound.
• Archiwum Narodowe w Krakowie (National Archive in Kraków), eighteen scans supplied by Lidia Wadowska on 10 September 2026 (ref. OIII.6342.2450.2026) in answer to the archive's enquiry on Ludwik Aronsohn: Spis ludności miasta Krakowa z r.…
  Kraków municipal domicile records name a family matching this line's stated birthplace and, in one document, its stated occupation and approximate birth year: Dr Samuel Salomon Aronsohn, a Podgórze physician (1857–1920), and his wife Natalia née Spitzer (1859–1926), had a son Ludwik. The family's 1921 domicile card gives him as Ludwik Józef, an articled law clerk, born 21 April 1895, married that September to Regina née Paperło; his own 1933 identity-card application gives his occupation as bank director and his birth date as 22 April 1885 — a decade earlier, and a close match to this line's own age estimate and occupation. Neither document names a wife Janina, and a Roman Catholic bank official of the same given name and surname was recorded at the family's 1921 address in the same year, so the Kraków documents do not by themselves settle whether this is the man of No. 181.
• Archiwum Narodowe w Krakowie (National Archive in Kraków), Akta stanu cywilnego Okręgu Metrykalnego Wyznania Mojżeszowego Klasno-Podgórze, birth registers: sygn. 29/1473/34, 1895, entry 82 (Ludwik Józef Aronsohn, born 21 April 1895) and…
  The Kraków birth register settles his year. Entry 82 of 1895 in the Jewish birth register of Podgórze records Ludwik Józef, born on 21 April 1895 at Rynek 13, Podgórze, the son of Dr Samuel Aronsohn and Natalia, née Spitzer, of Mysłowice, who had married there on 18 February 1884. His brother appears in the same register as entry 100 of 1889: Simon, later Zygmunt, born 28 June 1889. The National Archive in Kraków was asked for a birth entry of 1885 and sent this one. The two sources that gave 1885, his identity-card application of 1933 and the Kobe list's age of 56, are therefore taken to be wrong. Archiwum Narodowe w Krakowie, Akta stanu cywilnego Okręgu Metrykalnego Wyznania Mojżeszowego Klasno-Podgórze, sygn. 29/1473/34 and 29/1473/28, sent by Lidia Wadowska, 30 September 2026.
• Debbie Wiener family papers, Melbourne (received 17 Aug 2026): the Aronsohn-Wiener Shanghai-Kobe correspondence. (1) Letter, Shanghai 28 May 1941, signed JANKA AND LUDWIK [Aronsohn], to "Usio" [Ascher Wiener] — with the ORIGINAL TELEGRAM…
• JDC Archives, New York, collection AR33-44 fi… — “List of persons who left Japan for Shanghai and Harbin in the month of May 1941”, compiled by the Jewish Community of Kobe (Ashkenazim) for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee

and 9 further records, shown on the full entry.

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