Maria Liwszyc

Maria Liwszyc received transit visa no. 1818 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 16 August 1940. The register records student, aged 15.

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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…

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.

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 a Mika Liwszyc at entry 7662, born 1921 at Warszawa; the register's compiled age points to a birth about 1925, so the archive shows the entry as a lead, not as this person's record.
• 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 430 of the Kobe Jewish Community's refugee register: aged 16, born at Warsaw, who travelled from Vilnius.
• The Shanghai Ledger — register of Polish citizens kept by the Consulate of Poland in Shanghai, 1934-1943 (original at the Archives of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ref. 43/2003; digitised by the Library of Congress; indexed as…
  Registered with the Polish Consulate in Shanghai (ledger entry 1419); the names closely match this register line — approved by the owner's review, 19 Aug 2026
• 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 1818)
• Oral history interview with Maria Klein Lifszyc — USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, interview 26232. Catalogue: born Jun 25 1925, Warsaw (Warsaw, Poland); born Warsaw 25 Jun 1925; parents Joseph… — the interviewee may be living
  USC Shoah Foundation VHA interview 26232: Maria Klein Lifszyc — the interviewee herself — gave a testimony (catalogue: born Jun 25 1925, Warsaw (Warsaw, Poland)); born Warsaw 25 Jun 1925; parents Joseph and Estera Lifszyc; Bluman: No.1818 Maria Liwszyc, student, 15, and No.1817 Rubin, 20 — the Lifszyc brother and sister of the Shanghai dossier (C-10452 fr.627, entries 24-25)
• Library and Archives Canada, Tadeusz Romer fonds, MG 31 D 68, reel C-10452, frame 627, via Canadiana Heritage — the same list, page 3, entries 23-32 (Lewkowicz, Lifszyc brother and sister, Mann, Marber, Matecka, Merzel, Pikielny, Pinus,…
  On the Polish Embassy's list of 41 Polish refugees (Romer's Shanghai-period papers) (Romer fonds, reel C-10452, frame 627, entry 25): LIFSZYC Maria, schoolgirl, born 1925; passport L:70/1/17/41 Shanghai 3.12.41; no visa — as Klok, and asks not to be separated from her brother (poz. 24); also on the Kamakura Maru evacuation list of 16 Aug 1942 (evacuees 84-85)
• 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
• Oral history interview with Maria Klein Lifszyc — USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, interview 26232. Catalogue: born Jun 25 1925, Warsaw (Warsaw, Poland); born Warsaw 25 Jun 1925; parents Joseph… — the interviewee may be living
• Catalogue still for the oral history of Maria Klein Lifszyc — USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, interview 26232 (the archive's public catalogue frame, 352x240); links to the testimony at vha.usc.edu/testimony/26232

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