Bernsztejn Zelda received transit visa no. 1882 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 17 August 1940. The register records tailor, aged 33.
What the register records
Nationality as recorded
Polnisch
Age in 1940
33
Occupation
Tailor
Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list
daughter Masha (9), brother of #1288
The journey
Reached Japan; aided by the Polish ambassador Tadeusz Romer; registered in Kobe for Canada and then USA.
Travelled with, and never given a number
Masha — daughter, aged 9
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.
What is known
Masha Bernstein and her mother Zelda followed the same escape route as the Melamdoviches, reaching Japan about two months later and the United States via Canada in August 1941, just ahead of the German invasion. Her father Mordechai (Matvey), an active Bundist, was arrested in 1940 and sent to Siberia. Masha (later Masha Leon) became a reporter and columnist for the Forward in New York.
Masha Leon (nee Bernstein), a Sugihara Survivor, escaped Nazi-occupied Warsaw with her parents Zelda and Mordechai W. Bernstein, reaching Kaunas, Lithuania in 1940. Using a Sugihara transit visa, the family traveled to Tsuruga (landing February 1941) and then Kobe, Japan, where Masha turned 10 and learned Japanese and the song 'Sakura.' Masha Leon became a longtime Forward columnist and died in 2017; she met Yukiko Sugihara many times and attended the 1994 opening of Sugihara's memorial in Yaotsu.
Masha Leon (nee Bernstein) fled Nazi-occupied Warsaw, traveling across Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, and Soviet Russia to reach Japan. While hiding in Vilnius, her mother traveled at night to Kaunas to wait outside the Japanese Consulate for a Sugihara visa; the family used the code phrase 'Uncle Sam has arrived' to signal its arrival. Masha Leon died April 5, 2017.
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… No.12, 1907 Byton/Slonim; sister S.Golden 1337 N.Noyne Ave Chicago Ill
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… #43, 34, b. Byton, tailor, arr 24.2, from Vilno
hunt/familysearch: US arrival manifest: Zelda Bernsztejn, Seattle, 1941 "Seattle Passenger Lists", FamilySearch, entry for Zelda Bernsztejn, 1941. Ship: Heian Maru. Matched from the Heian Maru's Polish-born passenger list (198 people, of whom 57 matched the register). Register No.1882 'Bernsztejn Zelda' records age 33; the manifest gives born 1907, arriving 1941.
