Saweli Kamienecki

Saweli Kamienecki received transit visa no. 80 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 29 July 1940. The register records cutter of neckties, aged 29.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Age in 1940

29

Occupation

Cutter Of Neckties

Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list

son of #83

The journey

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

Where this comes from

• List of Refugees, Vilna, 1940 — JDC Archives, New York, collection AR 33/44, file 00876. The contemporary register of Polish Jewish refugees in Lithuania, running to more than nine thousand numbered entries; the fullest independent check…
  The 1940 Vilna refugee list has, at entry 3063, Saweli Kamieniecki, born 1911 at Warsaw, who had come from Warsaw; the year agrees with the register's age and Warsaw agrees with the archive's other records.
• 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 135 of the Kobe community's list of refugees and their relatives abroad: aged 30, born at Warsaw, a merchant, Polish; relatives abroad: a cousin, Merwin Ritter, 1651 West Chicago Avenue, Chicago; a cousin, R. Bergson, Richfield Springs, New York.
• United States National Archives, RG 84, Classified Visa Files 1946-51, U.S. Consulate General Shanghai — the file unit “CURACAO VISAS” (NAID 12017241), declassified 2014, parts formerly SECRET. A 1949 investigation by the American consul…
  Named in the NARA file unit “Curaçao Visas” as “Kamieniecki, Saweli and wife Rachel Theresia (nee Rosenfeld)” — the 1949 investigation by the American consulate in Shanghai into fraudulent Curaçao entrance visas. He is in the folder because the enquiry swept in everyone holding a Curaçao paper, and the Dutch vice-consul's own evidence puts him on the right side of it: when Visscher handed the Americans the list of Netherlands West Indies visas his office had genuinely issued since 16 November 1948, S. Kamieniecki and wife were on it, their Curaçao visa dated 26 November 1948 and their American transit visas 22 December. The register has him as a cutter of neckties, 29, born 1911 in Warsaw, son of No. 83, who reached Japan and then Shanghai — which is where this file finds him eight years later, still trying to leave. It also gives his wife: Rachel Theresia née Rosenfeld, whom the register never names.
• United States National Archives, RG 84, Classified Visa Files 1946-51, U.S. Consulate General Shanghai, file unit 'Curacao Visas' - the consular data sheet on Saweli KAMIENIECKI, dated 30 November 1948, from Helen Lyons to N. B. Hannah,…
  The consular data sheet made at Shanghai on 30 November 1948, with his photograph attached. It gives his birth as 17 January 1911 at Warsaw, Poland; the register makes him 29 in 1940, which is the same year of birth. It gives his nationality as Polish and his faith as Jewish, as the register gives Polish; and under employment since arrival in China it says 'Came to Shanghai 1941' - which is what the register's own metadata records for him and for nobody by accident, since his transit visa was issued at Kaunas on 29 July 1940 and the Kobe refugees were moved on to Shanghai in the summer of 1941. Given name, surname, year of birth, nationality and the arrival in Shanghai all agree. The sheet adds what the register could not: that he had been interned at Hongkew; that he married Rachel Theresia Rosenfeld, born at Berlin in 1926, whose father Victor Rosenfeld ran the Holiwood Jam Factory on Wayside Road and employed him from 1942 to 1944; that he worked some months for the United States Army after the war and was then with a Swiss forwarding firm on Museum Road; that he stood 5 feet 5 inches, brown eyes, black hair; and that he was leaving on the General Meigs on 29 December 1948 in…
• "California, San Francisco, Passenger Lists, 1893-1953", FamilySearch — index entry for Saweli Kamieniecki, 1949: born about 1912, Poland. Digitised from NARA microfilm publication M1410 (passenger lists of vessels arriving at San Franci…
  FamilySearch's index of the San Francisco passenger lists, read by the archive on 20 September 2026, has Saweli Kamieniecki, born about 1912 in Poland, arriving at San Francisco in 1949 on the General M. C. Meigs. The register's compiled line gives 1911, and the two are 1 year apart, and the name occurs once on the register. The ship's manifest heading says she sailed from Shanghai, and a passenger born in Poland landing at San Francisco in 1949 from Shanghai is the route's end: the refugees who waited out the war there. So the entry is taken as this person's under the archive's rule of 19 September 2026 for records from the route. The sheet is NARA microfilm publication M1410, film 402, image 824, read by the archive on 20 September 2026.
• American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Far Eastern Office, Shanghai: the list of persons who left Shanghai on the S.S. General Meigs and the S.S. Breckenridge on 1 January 1949, sent to the American Consulate General on 10 January…
  On 10 January 1949 the Joint's Far Eastern Office sent the American Consulate General at Shanghai its list of the people who had left Shanghai on the S.S. General Meigs on 1 January 1949. No. 61 on it is Saweli Kamieniecki, Polish. The register writes the surname Kamienecky. The name is matched to this line because the full name occurs once on the register, the list is the Joint's own record of refugees leaving Shanghai, and a Polish refugee in Shanghai in 1949 is where the move from Kobe in 1941 had left the people of this register. The list gives no age and no birthplace.
• La-karov ve-la-rachok, 31 March 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 31 March 1946, lists Saweli Kamieniecki: born 1911 at Warsaw, a merchant, arrived in 1941 from Kowno; the year, the town and the trade agree with the Kobe community's list of refugees and their relatives and the 1940 Vilna refugee list (National Library of Israel, Historical Jewish Press).

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