Louis Finkelstein

Louis Finkelstein received transit visa no. 7 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 24 July 1940. The register records agent, aged 37.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

German

Age in 1940

37

Occupation

Agent

Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list

husband of #8, daughter Edith (3)

The journey

Reached Japan; registered in Kobe for USA.

Travelled with, and never given a number

• Edith — daughter, aged 3, born Kaunas, 1937

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

Transit visa No. 7 issued on 24 July 1940 to Louis Finkelstein, a German national.

Edith Hamer (nee Finkelstein), the daughter who crossed as a child of three, told the USC Shoah Foundation in 1998 (interview 54889, tape 1) how her family travelled. They had lived in Memel and left it in 1939 for Kaunas. The Sugihara visas of 24 July 1940 were her father's, No. 7, and her mother's, No. 8 — Edith went as a child entered on her mother's passport, which she still keeps (08:39-09:04). The passage to Japan had to be paid in advance (09:04-09:18). They boarded the Trans-Siberian on 19 November 1940 and were in Moscow on the 20th, where an attempt to get an American visa failed; on the train her father was nearly taken off, and a fellow Polish Jew vouched for him (11:11-12:28)…

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…
  age 37, born Karkschen, Agent, from Kaunas, arr. 5.12, left U.S.A.
• "California, San Francisco, Passenger Lists, 1893-1953", FamilySearch — entries for Louis, Sophie and Edith Finkelstein, 1940. Digitised from NARA microfilm publication M1410, roll 367, "Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving at San Francis…
  San Francisco, 1940, S.S. Nitta Maru. Age 37, born about 1903, birthplace Germany — the register gives his age in 1940 as 37 and his nationality as German. He arrived with his wife and their three-year-old daughter.
• Oral history interview with Edith Hamer (née Finkelstein) — USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, interview 54889, Houston, Texas, 11 November 1998 (interviewer Larry Steinfeld; held with Holocaust Museum Houston). Born Kaunas 14…
  Their daughter Edith, born Kaunas 14 May 1937 — the 'daughter Edith (3)' of the Nitta Maru manifest — gave a testimony to the USC Shoah Foundation in 1998 (Visual History Archive interview 54889, as Edith Hamer); the catalogue names Louis Finkelstein and Sophie Sonia Finkelstein as her parents
• The numbered Sugihara visa list, searchable text — the register of the visas issued at Kaunas, transcribed and reconciled by Dr George Bluman (University of British Columbia) and the researcher and author Akira Kitade. This is the text b…
• Catalogue still for the oral history of Edith Hamer (née Finkelstein) — USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, interview 54889 (the archive's public catalogue frame, 352x240); links to the testimony at vha.usc.edu/testimony/54889