Haftka Hela

Haftka Hela received transit visa no. 2093 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 21 August 1940. The register records journalist, aged 37.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polish

Age in 1940

37

Occupation

Journalist

Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list

wife of #459

The journey

Reached Japan; registered in Kobe for USA.

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…
  #2238, Zarki, 1903, from Warszawa
• 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…
  No.72, age 38, b. Jarki
• 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 Jan 1941 (line 2093)
• Sylvia Wassertheil-Smoller (nee Sylvia-Maria Hafftka), daughter of ALEKSANDER HAFFTKA, register No. 459, writing to this archive on 4 September 2026 - correcting her mother's entry. Her mother was OLA Hafftka, not Hela: the register's No…
  Her daughter Sylvia Wassertheil-Smoller (nee Hafftka) writes that her mother's name was OLA, not Hela as the register's typed line reads, and that the family spelled the surname HAFFTKA with two f's. Two wartime Kobe lists already on this entry read the name the same way - 'Haftka Ola', aged 38, born Zarki - so the register's 'Hela' appears to be a misreading of Ola. Given by Sylvia Wassertheil-Smoller, 4 September 2026.