Ernst Lasdun

Ernst Lasdun received transit visa no. 426 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 30 July 1940. The register records merchant, aged 47.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Age in 1940

47

Occupation

Merchant

Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list

children (Dagmar, Gerhard)

The journey

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

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 52 of the Kobe Jewish Community's refugee register: aged 47, born at Koenigsberg, a merchant, who arrived in Japan from Kaunas on 24 December 1940.
• Oral history interview with Edith Hamer (née Finkelstein) — USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, interview 54889, Houston, Texas, 11 Novemb… — Theodor Finkelstein, No. 1680; another relative reached Bolivia on false papers (13:02)
  Named in Edith Hamer's USC Shoah Foundation testimony (interview 54889, tape 1, 14:04-14:24): the Lasdun family — Ernst, his wife Lisbett, children Dagmar and Gary — held German passports and Sugihara visas she gives as 'numbers 426 and 427'; they reached Kobe just after the Finkelsteins (Nos. 7-8) and, she says, were unable to leave Kobe — the witness's recollection, recorded as testimony — tape 2 (07:12-07:20): a group photograph with the daughter Dagmar Lasdun, 'who also received a Sugihara visa but ended up in a ghetto in Shanghai' (the witness's words; the family's Shanghai years are otherwise undocumented here)
• Find a Grave, Cedar Park Cemetery, Paramus, Bergen County, New Jersey — Ernest Lasdun, memorial 235273882
  Ernst Lasdun reached the United States after the war and settled in New Jersey as Ernest Lasdun. He died on 26 July 1951, aged 58, and is buried at Cedar Park Cemetery, Paramus, New Jersey, under a stone that gives his Hebrew name as Shmuel son of Dov HaLevi and his birth as 13 August 1892. His wife Lisbeth lies beside him. His age at death, 58 in 1951, fits the register's 47 in 1940, and the wife named on the stone is the register's Lisbeth (No. 427).
• La-karov ve-la-rachok, 11 April 1946 — the Far Eastern Palestine Committee's list of Jewish refugees in Shanghai (National Library of Israel, Historical Jewish Press)
  The Far Eastern Palestine Committee's list of Jewish refugees in Shanghai, printed by the Jewish Agency Search Bureau's bulletin La-karov ve-la-rachok on 11 April 1946, lists Ernst Lasdun: born 1893 at Koenigsberg, an agent, arrived in 1941 from Kaunas; the year and the town agree with the Kobe Jewish community's refugee register (National Library of Israel, Historical Jewish Press).

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