Ambaras Ruchla received transit visa no. 2004 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 20 August 1940. The register records shoemaker, aged 44.
What the register records
Nationality as recorded
Polish
Age in 1940
44
Occupation
Shoemaker
Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list
children (Szmul (17), Chaja (10)), husband Berek (47)
The journey
Reached Japan; reached Shanghai; registered in Kobe for Canada.
Travelled with, and never given a number
Szmul — child, aged 17
Chaja — child, aged 10
Berek — husband, aged 47
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
Ruchla Leja Ambaras is No. 2004 on Sugihara's register, issued 20 August 1940. This card is the far end of that journey: her passage aboard the SS General Meigs from Shanghai to San Francisco in January 1949 — nine years and most of a continent after a consul in Kaunas wrote her name down. Refugees who left on those visas crossed Siberia to Japan and were moved on to Shanghai, where many waited out the war; this is the berth out. The Museum of Jewish Heritage holds it with her Polish travel document from Kaunas, the two ends of the same escape in one collection.
A Polish identity certificate — Zaświadczenie / Certificat — issued by the Legation of the Republic of Poland in Kaunas on 1 August 1940, confirming that Ruchla Leja Ambaras, born 1 May 1896 in Warsaw, was a Polish citizen entitled to travel. She is No. 2004 on Sugihara's register, issued nineteen days later. What stays with you is the three photographs attached to the sheet: hers, and two younger faces. Whatever the Legation was asked for that day, she was not trying to leave alone.