Samuel Kupinski

Samuel Kupinski received transit visa no. 873 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 2 August 1940. The register records farmer, aged 34.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Age in 1940

34

Occupation

Farmer

Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list

children (Sara (9), Hirsz (8))

The journey

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

Travelled with, and never given a number

• Sara — child, aged 9
• Hirsz — child, aged 8

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: born 1906 at Warszawa, Polish.
• 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 397 of the Kobe Jewish Community's refugee register: aged 35, born at Warsaw, who travelled from Vilnius.
• JDC Shanghai migration file: KUPINSKI Samuel
  JDC Archives, New York collection AR3344, 'Complete Shanghai Migration Files' (NY_AR3344_00014), page 164: KUPINSKI Samuel, file no. 7063. Match: register No.873 'amuel Kupinski' (repaired: Samuel Kupinski), and the register independently records this person as reaching Shanghai. Both name parts agr
• JDC Archives, New York — Shanghai Migration Files, box index (AR 33/44, file 00014): the alphabetical index to the JDC's Shanghai emigration case files, 1946-1950 — some 2,640 case files covering about 5,400 persons, each family under on…
  JDC Shanghai Migration Files, case file no. 7063 — an emigration case file opened for the family in Shanghai after the war; the file itself can be requested from the JDC Archives
• 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 14 Feb 1941 (line 873)
• "California, San Francisco, Passenger Lists, 1893-1953", FamilySearch — index entry for Samuel Kupinski, 1949: born about 1907, Poland. Digitised from NARA microfilm publication M1410 (passenger lists of vessels arriving at San Francisco…
  FamilySearch's index of the San Francisco passenger lists, read by the archive on 20 September 2026, has Samuel Kupinski, born about 1907 in Poland, arriving at San Francisco in 1949 on the General M. C. Meigs. The register's compiled line gives 1906, 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 842, 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. 47 on it is Samuel Kupinski, Polish, bound for Toronto. Eliasz Kupinski, the next line of the register, is on the same list. The register's typed line has lost the first letter of his name, and the list supplies it. 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.
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum — the Kupinski family collection (accession 2017.513): object records with the family's biography
  Samuel Kupinski was born at Lida, not Warsaw: the family biography that accompanies the Kupinski family collection at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (accession 2017.513, the collection records on collections.ushmm.org) says that he and his brother Eliasz (No. 874) gave Warsaw as their birthplace in Kaunas in 1940 to obtain Soviet exit visas, and received the family's Dutch and Japanese visas there on 2 August. Before the war the brothers and a partner had bought land outside Lida in 1935, shipping lumber to England and selling milk and cheese to the Polish Air Force. Stranded in Kobe without a visa onward, the family was sent to Shanghai in November 1941, where the brothers worked for an import-export firm. They left Shanghai on the General Meigs on 1 January 1949 and settled in Toronto.
• La-karov ve-la-rachok, 11 April 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 11 April 1946, lists Samuel Kupinski: born 1906 at Warsaw, a colonist, arrived in 1941 from Vilnius; the year and the town agree with the Kobe Jewish community's refugee register, the Kobe community's list of refugees and their relatives (National Library of Israel, Historical Jewish Press).

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