Syma Crane papers

Syma Crane (b. 1921) was born in Vilnius, Lithuania (Wilno, Poland) to Chaim and Basia Minc. Syma’s parents and sisters Sonja Minc Lipofsky and Chaya Minc Chodos perished in the Holocaust. Her brother Czalel Minc survived in hiding in Belgium. Syma and her husband Marcus Klok fled Vilnius in 1941 and used ten day Japanese transit visas obtained via the Jewish Labor Bund under the false names Syma and Marcus Miller to travel via Vladivostok to Kobe. They were relocated by Japanese authorities to Shanghai, where they lived in the Jewish ghetto for about a year. In 1942 they obtained places on a British diplomatic ship that was leaving Shanghai as part of a prisoner exchange between the British and Japanese and sailed to England via Cape Town. Syma studied English and child development in London, and Marcus joined a Polish unit of the British army under General Anders. After the war, Syma joined the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). She worked as a child welfare officer in Wolfsburg and at the children’s homes at Leoben and Bad Schallerbach. Her responsibilities including locating unaccompanied children and requisitioning money and resources for the children’s homes. She helped establish a separate home for older children near Bad Schallerbach named Camp Leitendorf. She also accompanied a transport of fifty children to Yugoslavia in 1947. She immigrated to the United States in 1950, divorced Marcus, and married George (Katz) Crane, a fellow Holocaust survivor from Vilnius, in 1954.