The Sugihara Visa Archive

Abram Jona Sielecki

Visa no. 521 · Kaunas, 31 July 1940

Abram Jona Sielecki received transit visa no. 521 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 31 July 1940. Aged 50 in 1940.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded
Polnisch
Age in 1940
50
Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list
daughter Marie (16)

Travelled with, and never given a number

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

Marek Sielecki was the boy in the class photograph — his sister's little brother. He and his great-grandfather held Sugihara visas, but unlike the thousands who boarded the eastbound trains, they never got out: the Kovno Ghetto closed around them. His sister survived and searched for him for the rest of her life. Two photographs on the JDC website — a school group and a boy with a walking stick before a waterfall — are, so far, all that answered her. The visas saved thousands; this record remembers two of those they could not.

Where this comes from

Open this entry in the full register →