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… 3 pers.; 1894 Warszawa; Polish; cous.Kiwelson 300 central parc west N.Y.; A.Uslander 80 broad str. 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… #107, age 57, arr 13.2, from Vilno
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 (register No. 868) and HIRSZ / HER… 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.