Danzig Kindertransport Passport: Betty Sass’s Story
A Passport That Carried a Woman to Danzig’s Last Children, and Then to Mauritius
I’ve handled a lot of travel documents in my time, but every so often one crosses my desk that does more than evidence a journey. It evidences a rescue, a tragedy, and a survival, all stitched into thirty-two pages of a Free City of Danzig Reisepass. However, this is a document from a fellow collector.
What This Passport Actually Documents
Direct answer: A single Danzig passport ties together the first Kindertransport rescue out of the Free City, a doomed refugee voyage to Palestine, and five years of British internment on Mauritius.
This document belonged to a woman who accompanied seventy-five Jewish children out of Danzig on the very first Kindertransport sailing, then later tried to reach Palestine herself, and ended up interned on a British island in the Indian Ocean instead. I don’t say this lightly: to my knowledge, no comparable Danzig Kindertransport passport with this exact combination of stamps and visas sits in any Holocaust-related museum collection. That’s not a sales pitch, that’s just where the research has led me.
Why “Kindertransport” Means More Than Just “Children’s Transport”
Direct answer: The Kindertransport was a British-run rescue program that brought close to 10,000 mostly Jewish children out of Nazi-controlled Europe between November 1938 and the outbreak of war in September 1939.
The German term translates plainly enough, children’s transport, but the history behind it is anything but plain. Nearly 10,000 children, the overwhelming majority of them Jewish, were brought out of Germany, Austria, occupied Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Free City of Danzig and resettled across Britain: with foster families, in hostels, on farms, in boarding schools. For a great many of these children, the people who waved them off at the platform were the last family they would ever see. The Holocaust would claim the rest.
The British government didn’t just tolerate the program, it actively backed it, waiving visa requirements that the existing Jewish relief infrastructure in Britain couldn’t possibly have met on its own. There was no quota ceiling either. The program simply ran until the war made it impossible to continue. By then, roughly 10,000 children had crossed the Channel and the North Sea to safety.
Smaller parallel efforts moved children into the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Sweden, and Switzerland, and you’ll sometimes see the Kindertransport label applied loosely to those movements too (the thousand children who passed through Château de la Hille in Belgium is the example most often cited). But when collectors and historians say “the Kindertransport” without qualification, they almost always mean the organized British program.
Behind the British end of the operation sat the Central British Fund for German Jewry, founded in 1933 and known today as World Jewish Relief. Across the Atlantic, the Wagner-Rogers Bill tried to do something similar for the United States, proposing an additional 20,000 places for Jewish children outside the existing immigration quota. It never made it out of committee, killed largely through the opposition of Senator Robert Rice Reynolds. The contrast between what Britain managed and what stalled in Washington is, frankly, one of the more sobering footnotes of this entire history.
The Woman Who Carried the Children, and the Passport That Proves It
The passport belonged to a widow from Sopot who escorted seventy-five Kindertransport children out of Danzig on May 5, 1939, and was later interned on Mauritius for nearly five years.
The holder’s name appears in the document as Betty Sass, a widow in her late thirties or early forties from Zoppot (today’s Sopot), just outside Danzig. May 5, 1939, the first Kindertransport sailing out of Danzig, routed through the Netherlands to the U.K., with Betty escorting seventy-five children. She herself returned to Danzig once the children were safely delivered to London via Harwich, which tells you something about the kind of courage this required. This wasn’t an escape for her. It was a round trip, undertaken so that children she likely barely knew could make a one-way trip to safety.
The Danzig exit visa stamped into the passport in 1940 carries revenue stamps that were only in circulation for a few weeks, which is exactly why they’re so difficult to find on surviving documents today. If you collect Free City of Danzig material, you already know how unforgiving that city’s philatelic and document history can be: short-lived issues, narrow windows, and a political entity that ceased to exist in 1939, all of which conspire to make anything genuinely Danzig-specific scarce by default.
What elevates this particular passport, in my view, comes down to four things stacked on top of each other: it’s a Danzig-issued passport in the first place, it carries the Kindertransport visa for escorting seventy-five children, it documents internment on Mauritius, and it survived intact as a complete, coherent record of all of it. Individually, any one of those is collectible. Together, they make this close to a museum piece.
From Danzig to a Doomed Voyage: How Betty Sass Ended Up on Mauritius
Betty Sass was likely among roughly 3,500 Jewish refugees who sailed from Romania toward Palestine in September 1940, an operation that ended in British internment on Mauritius after a botched sabotage attempt killed over 200 people aboard a different ship.
Here’s where the history gets genuinely harrowing, and where I want to be precise, because the popular shorthand version of this story tends to flatten what actually happened.
In 1940, Berthold Storfer, a Viennese Jewish businessman operating under Adolf Eichmann’s Central Office for Jewish Emigration, organized passage for roughly 3,500 to 3,600 Jewish refugees from Vienna, Prague, and Danzig aboard three chartered Greek vessels: the SS Pacific, SS Milos, and SS Atlantic. The ships departed the Romanian port of Tulcea in September 1940, bound for British Mandatory Palestine. Betty Sass was very likely among them, given her documented path toward Haifa.
When the ships reached Haifa, British authorities, enforcing the restrictive 1939 White Paper immigration quotas, ruled all the passengers illegal immigrants and ordered them deported to the British colony of Mauritius. Passengers from the Pacific and Milos were transferred onto a fourth vessel, the SS Patria, to carry out that deportation. It was during the transfer of passengers from the Atlantic that Haganah operatives planted explosives aboard the Patria, intending only to disable the ship and stall the deportation. The charge was far stronger than intended. The Patria sank within minutes, killing more than 200 refugees who had already survived flight from Nazi Europe and a sea crossing, only to die in Haifa’s harbor in an operation meant to save them. It remains one of the more painful ironies of this entire chapter of Holocaust history, and it’s a detail I think deserves to be stated plainly rather than glossed over.
The survivors of the Patria disaster were ultimately permitted to remain in Palestine. Those who had stayed aboard the Atlantic, however, were deported to Mauritius as originally planned, and this is almost certainly how Betty Sass came to spend the better part of five years interned there, from late 1940 until August 1945. Only after the war did she use this same Danzig passport to finally enter Haifa, this time with formal permission from the Palestine Department of Immigration.
As for Storfer himself: his story ends about as grimly as Holocaust history gets. Having spent years organizing emigration under direct Nazi supervision, he was ultimately deported and brought face to face with Eichmann at Auschwitz, where his pleas for his own survival went unanswered. Various sources credit him with helping thousands of Jews escape over the course of his work, though I’d encourage anyone citing specific figures here to treat them as estimates from secondary sources rather than confirmed totals, the bookkeeping of this period is notoriously incomplete.
A First-Hand Connection: An Afternoon With William Kaczynski
In 2012, I spent an afternoon in London with William Kaczynski, a Kindertransport-era refugee, postal historian, and friend of Sir Nicholas Winton, hearing his story firsthand.
I’ll add a personal note here, because it’s directly relevant to why this material matters to me beyond the page count. In 2012, I met William Kaczynski (†) in London. He had fled Nazi Germany as a child with his mother, carrying a child’s passport stamped with the infamous large red “J.” Kaczynski went on to become a serious postal historian in his own right, authoring Fleeing from the Führer: A Postal History of Refugees from the Nazis (The History Press, 2011) with Charmian Brinson. He was also a personal friend of Sir Nicholas Winton, the man largely credited with organizing the Czechoslovak end of the Kindertransport.
Sitting with someone who had lived this history, rather than simply researched it, is not something I take for granted. It’s part of why documents like this Danzig passport matter to me as more than inventory. They’re the closest thing we have to a primary witness once the people themselves are gone.
There’s a small postscript to that afternoon worth sharing. William later gave me his father’s British passport from the 1950s, a genuine gift, though one that proved temporary. He needed it back: it turned out to be relevant evidence in an ongoing property restitution claim in Germany, tied to what his family had been forced to leave behind when they fled. I returned it without hesitation, of course. And as far as I know, after many years, his claim succeeded. He received compensation from the German government. We’ve met on more time in 2013, again in London at the Ephemera Society Fair.
Following the passing of William Kaczynski in 2019, his extensive postal history collection has been permanently housed at the Wiener Holocaust Library.
A Final Word on This Document
I don’t say a document is irreplaceable very often. I’m saying it here. The combination of a Danzig issuance, an escort visa for seventy-five rescued children, and five years of internment paperwork from Mauritius, all surviving intact in one passport, is not something I expect to see duplicated. If you collect Holocaust-era or Kindertransport material, this is the kind of document that justifies building a collection in the first place.
Further reading: The William Kaczynski Story
Tom Topol | Passport Historian & Author
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