Hirsz Czertok

Hirsz Czertok received transit visa no. 869 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 2 August 1940. The register records clerk, aged 57.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Age in 1940

57

Occupation

Clerk

Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list

wife Bejla (48), daughter Netel (16)

The journey

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

Travelled with, and never given a number

• Bejla — wife, aged 48
• Netel — daughter, aged 16

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…
  The Kobe community's list of refugees and their relatives abroad: a line for three persons, born 1894 at Warszawa, Polish; relatives abroad: a cousin, Kiwelson, 300 Central Park West, New York; A. Uslander, 80 Broad Street, New Jersey.
• 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 107 of the Kobe Jewish Community's refugee register: aged 57, who arrived in Japan from Vilnius on 13 February 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 13 Feb 1941 (line 869)
• Anthony Rabin, correspondence with the archive, 26 August 2026 — the CZERTOK BROTHERS of LIDA, from the family (Gdalya was the grandfather's first cousin of the writer's Rabinowitz line). GDALYA CZERTOK (regist… — these two families only.
  THE FAMILY'S ACCOUNT (Anthony Rabin, 26 Aug 2026). No. 869 was HIRSZ (Hershel) CZERTOK, BROTHER of No. 868 Gdalya, with whom he founded the Drutindustria iron works at Lida in 1926 — about a hundred workers — and owned the hardware shop Metal on Krzywa Street. The archive's own record of this line gives 'wife Bejla (48), daughter Netel (16)' and a next destination of FRANCE; the family names the same wife, Bejla (perhaps called Pera), the same daughter, Netel or Neta, and a son LEON who read medicine in Prague until 1939, escaped to Paris, worked for the FRENCH RESISTANCE, became a well-known psychiatrist in France and died in 1991 — which is very likely why the family's destination was recorded as France. Neta is believed to have gone to the United States. One thing does not yet agree: the Kobe list gives this man's birth as 1894 at WARSAW, while the family places the Czertoks at Lida for generations. Both may be true — a man born in Warsaw to a Lida family — and the archive leaves it open rather than choosing.
• Anthony Rabin, correspondence with the archive, 26 August 2026 — the CZERTOK BROTHERS of LIDA, from the family (Gdalya was the grandfather's first cousin of the writer's Rabinowitz line). GDALYA CZERTOK (regist… — these two families only.
  BIRTHPLACE SETTLED (Anthony Rabin, 26 Aug 2026): the archive had left open whether Hirsz was born at Warsaw, as the Kobe list says, or at Lida, where the family had been for generations. The family confirms WARSAW — the Brazilian immigration records of 1949 give 1894 at Warsaw as well, independently of the Kobe clerk. What the family cannot say is what his parents were doing in Warsaw. Their mother, ESTER MALKA, was born at NESVIZH (Nieswiez, now in Belarus, then Imperial Russia).
• HIAS, supplementary list of refugees who left Shanghai during December 1946 — Arolsen Archives, Bad Arolsen, collection 3.1.1.3, unit 19613
  The HIAS list of refugees who sailed from Shanghai in December 1946 (Arolsen Archives, 3.1.1.3) has Bejla and Netel Czertok leaving for France on 25 December 1946. The register records Hirsz Czertok's wife as Bejla and his daughter as Netel, aged 48 and 16 in 1940; the two names together are his family. His own name is not on that list.
• Arolsen Archives, 3.1.1.4 (Shanghai), unit 19970: list of Polish Jewish refugees who came from Vilna via Kobe to Shanghai and died there be… — a typed list giving name, dates of birth and death, the Jewish date, the grave, and nationality
  Hirsz Czertok did not leave Shanghai. He died there on 7 February 1945 (24 Shevat 5705), aged 60, and was buried the next day in the Baikal Road Jewish cemetery, according to the list of Polish Jewish refugees buried there, now in the Arolsen Archives, which gives his birth date as 10 October 1884 — the Kobe register's age of 57 in February 1941 is close, and the Kobe relatives list's 1894 is the outlier — and spells his name Girsz, as the Kobe register does. His wife Bejla and daughter Netel left Shanghai for France in December 1946. Published with the owner's agreement on 4 October 2026.
• La-karov ve-la-rachok, 21 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 21 March 1946, lists Girsz Czertok: born 1884 at Warsaw, a merchant, arrived in 1941 from Wilno; the year and the town agree with the Kobe community's list of refugees and their relatives (National Library of Israel, Historical Jewish Press).

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