Maria Lifsyc received transit visa no. 1818 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 16 August 1940. The register records student, aged 15.
What the register records
Nationality as recorded
Lithuanien
Age in 1940
15
Occupation
Student
Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list
daughter of #1934
The journey
Reached Japan; reached Shanghai.
What is known
Peter Lurye and his brother visited Sugihara House in Kaunas, standing at the desk in the room where their mother, then aged fifteen, collected Sugihara transit visas Nos. 1817-1818 on 16 August 1940.
She was fifteen, and everything depended on her: father in prison, brother Rubin hiding from his Soviet draft notice. On 16 August 1940 she traveled alone from Vilnius to Sugihara's office in Kaunas and collected transit visas Nos.1817 and 1818, then walked into the one building in Vilnius that held both the exit-visa office and the draft board, and applied under the family name anyway. Bureaucratic incompetence saved them. Every day she checked the list on the wall — until one evening her friend Rutka Berkowicz burst in while she stood ironing: "Where the hell are you?! Your names are on the list!" They boarded the Moscow train the next morning. Eighty-five years later her sons stood at…
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… #430, 16, b. Warsaw, from Vilno
Peter Lurye (Facebook): with his brother at Sugihara's desk, Sugihara House, Kaunas — the room where their mother, aged fifteen, collected visas Nos.1817-1818 on 16 Aug 1940