Abraham Sommer

Abraham Sommer received transit visa no. 489 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 31 July 1940. The register records dealer in wood, aged 30.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Age in 1940

30

Occupation

Dealer In Wood

Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list

wife Regina (34), child Rytha (3)

The journey

Reached Japan; aided by the Polish ambassador Tadeusz Romer; registered in Kobe for Palestine.

Travelled with, and never given a number

• Regina — wife, aged 34
• Rytha — child, aged 3

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.

Where this comes from

• 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…
  Entry 228 of the Kobe community's list of refugees and their relatives abroad gives as relatives abroad a brother-in-law, Maurycy Lustig, Jehuda Lewi 100, Tel Aviv; a cousin, Braczewski, New York.
• 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 164 of the Kobe Jewish Community's refugee register: aged 30, born at Nowy Sacz, a dealer in wood, who arrived in Japan on 25 January 1941.
• 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 25 Jan 1941 (line 489)
• The censuses of Nowy Sącz, 1870–1910 (Archiwum Narodowe w Krakowie, Oddział w Nowym Sączu), as indexed by archival.name
  Abraham Sommer was born at Nowy Sącz on 21 April 1911, the son of Bernard Sommer, a watchmaker, and his wife Anna of Zembrzyce: a later entry in the 1910 census book of Nowy Sącz adds him to his parents' household at house 125, with brothers Wolf and Aron and sisters Ruchel, Pesel and Chaja Helena. The match rests on more than the name: the Kobe community's register gives this line the same birth year and birthplace, and the full name occurs once on the register. (Read on archival.name's index of the Nowy Sącz censuses; the census books are in the National Archive in Kraków's Nowy Sącz branch.)

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