Samuel Graudenz

Samuel Graudenz received transit visa no. 330 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 30 July 1940. The register records student, aged 24.

Documents

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What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Age in 1940

24

Occupation

Student

The journey

Reached Japan; reached Shanghai; registered in Kobe for USA.

What is known

A worn, folded travel document bearing numerous ink stamps, revenue stamps, and handwritten notations, consistent with a wartime transit visa/passport of the Sugihara-Zwartendijk era. The archive holds this image as the document of Samuel Graudenz. Museum accession label 'L2008.16.3' is visible on the artifact.

L2008.16.3

Where this comes from

• 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 60 of the Kobe Jewish Community's refugee register: aged 25, born at Koln, a student.
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Survivors and Victims Database — 'List of Polish war refugees in China', 242 names: the Polish (Sugihara-stream) group in wartime Shanghai, among them Gedalia Zupnik of the Mir, Chaim Ba…
  USHMM 'List of Polish war refugees in China' (242 names); 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 24 Jan 1941 (line 330)
• Oral history interview with Samuel Graudenz — USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, interview 24160. Catalogue: born Oct 25 1916, Cologne (Germany); born Cologne 25 Oct 1916; Bluman: No.330 Samuel G… — the interviewee may be living
  USC Shoah Foundation VHA interview 24160: Samuel Graudenz — the interviewee himself — gave a testimony (catalogue: born Oct 25 1916, Cologne (Germany)); born Cologne 25 Oct 1916; Bluman: No.330 Samuel Graudenz, student, 24
• Oral history interview with Samuel Graudenz — second interview — USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, interview 52974. Catalogue: born Oct 25 1916, Cologne (Germany); born Cologne 25 Oct 1916. View… — the interviewee may be living
  USC Shoah Foundation VHA interview 52974: Samuel Graudenz — second interview — the interviewee himself — gave a testimony (catalogue: born Oct 25 1916, Cologne (Germany)); born Cologne 25 Oct 1916
• Dan Pine, "Rabbi Samuel Graudenz, 'pied piper' of congregation, dies", J. The Jewish News of Northern California, 13 October 2006
  Samuel Graudenz became a rabbi in California. His obituary in J. The Jewish News of Northern California (13 October 2006) records that he was born in Cologne in 1916, grew up in Orthodox orphanages, was ordained at a yeshiva in Poland at twenty-one, and was among the Jews to whom Chiune Sugihara issued transit visas in Lithuania; he went by way of Vladivostok to Shanghai, where he spent the war, and reached San Francisco on an American troop transport in 1947. He was principal of the Seattle Hebrew Day School and of a day school in Oakland, director of education at Congregation Beth Sholom in San Francisco, and from 1968 for thirty-one years the rabbi of Congregation Beth Shalom in Modesto. He died in San Francisco on 6 October 2006, a few weeks short of ninety. The register's Samuel Graudenz, 24 in 1940, born Cologne by the Kobe community's register, a student bound for the United States who reached Shanghai, matches in birth year, birthplace, route and destination.
• Find a Grave memorial 16052569 — Rabbi Samuel I. Graudenz, 25 October 1916 Cologne – 6 October 2006; Lakewood Memorial Park, Hughson, California
  A Find a Grave memorial gives Rabbi Samuel I. Graudenz born 25 October 1916 at Cologne and died 6 October 2006, buried at Lakewood Memorial Park, Hughson, California, with the inscription that he lived a life of Torah. The USC Shoah Foundation's catalogue of his interview gives the same birth date.
• La-karov ve-la-rachok, 28 March 1946 — the Far Eastern Palestine Committee's list of Jewish refugees in Shanghai (National Library of Israel, Historical Jewish Press)
  A possible record, not yet confirmed as this person: the Far Eastern Palestine Committee's list of Jewish refugees in Shanghai, printed in La-karov ve-la-rachok on 28 March 1946, lists Samuel Graudenz, born 1916 at Koeln a.Rh., a student, zion social worker, arrived in 1941 from Kowno, by way of Siberia, Japan (National Library of Israel, Historical Jewish Press).
• The travel document of Samuel Graudenz (No. 330), its pages worn and torn, photographed laid out under glass.
• Oral history interview with Samuel Graudenz — USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, interview 24160. Catalogue: born Oct 25 1916, Cologne (Germany); born Cologne 25 Oct 1916; Bluman: No.330 Samuel G… — the interviewee may be living
• Oral history interview with Samuel Graudenz — second interview — USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, interview 52974. Catalogue: born Oct 25 1916, Cologne (Germany); born Cologne 25 Oct 1916. View… — the interviewee may be living
• Catalogue still for the oral history of Samuel Graudenz — USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, interview 24160 (the archive's public catalogue frame, 352x240); links to the testimony at vha.usc.edu/testimony/24160

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