Zielonka Berek received transit visa no. 789 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 2 August 1940. The register records flourmiller, aged 35.
Reached Japan; aided by the Polish ambassador Tadeusz Romer; registered in Kobe for USA.
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.
The parents of American businessman Sam Zell (born Shmuel Zielonka), Berek (later Bernard) and Ruchla (later Rochelle) Zielonka, were Polish Jews who fled Poland four months before Sam's birth to escape the Nazi invasion. They immigrated to the United States with their young daughter Julie via Russia and Tokyo on transit visas supplied by Chiune Sugihara, pretending to be tourists at the Bolshoi Ballet to avoid standing out. They settled in Seattle before moving to Albany Park, Chicago, where Bernard became a wholesale jeweler and successful investor. [Archive note, 2026-07-28: the source names the travelling daughter as Leah. Corrected to Julie — per Leah Zell's own account (Liberties Jo…
The Zielonka family escaped the Germans from Sosnowiec, a Polish town near Auschwitz, with three-year-old daughter Julie. After receiving a Sugihara visa, they traveled via Vladivostok to Japan and eventually settled in Chicago. Once in the United States, and after their son Sam was born, they changed their name to Zell; Sam Zell became a renowned real estate entrepreneur.
Berek (Bernard) Zielonka-Zell, a businessman from Sosnowiec, fled to Lithuania in 1939 with his wife Ruchla and their small daughter. On visas Nos.789-790 (2 Aug 1940) the family crossed on the Trans-Siberian to Vladivostok and Japan, reaching the United States in May 1941 — four months before their son, the future Chicago real-estate magnate Sam Zell, was born. Decades later, in April 1989, the two widows — Mrs. Zell and Yukiko Sugihara — met at O'Hare and shared an evening of Eastern European dishes over Lake Michigan, an encounter Yukiko recorded in the prologue of her memoir. Daughter Leah Zell has written about reintroducing nuance into both fathers' hero stories.