Aleksander Silberfeld

Aleksander Silberfeld received transit visa no. 14 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 26 July 1940. The register records engineer, aged 41.

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What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polisch

Age in 1940

41

Occupation

Engineer

The journey

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

What is known

One of the earliest lines on the register — No.14, written the day Sugihara's ledger opened its first pages — and one of its Australian endings. An engineer of forty-one, he crossed with the Kobe wave of early 1941 and stands in the group photograph of "Sugihara visa recipients, Kobe Japan, May 1941" beside his cousin Ascher Wiener; the two families' story survived because the Wieners of Melbourne kept the pictures.

Where this comes from

• 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 158 of the Kobe Jewish Community's refugee register: aged 42, born at Cracow, a qualified engineer, who arrived in Japan on 13 January 1941.
• Consul Sugihara and Urgent Mail to Japan in 1941 – Lithuanian Philately
  [context] The rail trip was then followed by a boat passage to Kobe, Japan, where there was a Russian Jewish community and an organisation by the name of The Jewish Committee for Refugees. One of its activists was an engineer, Alexander Silberfeld. He seems to have become a significant mediator and the addres
• The Shanghai Ledger — register of Polish citizens kept by the Consulate of Poland in Shanghai, 1934-1943 (original at the Archives of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ref. 43/2003; digitised by the Library of Congress; indexed as…
  Registered with the Polish Consulate in Shanghai (ledger entry 1226); the names closely match this register line — approved by the owner's review, 19 Aug 2026
• 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 Jan 1941 (line 14)
• Tadeusz Romer papers, Library and Archives Canada, MG 31 D 68, vol. 2 (microfilm reel C-10451, frame 1088): 'Lista obywateli polskich ewakuowanych z Dalekiego Wschodu… — cited by link only (Canadiana Heritage); frame image not republished
  Named on the Polish Embassy's evacuation list of 16 August 1942 among the OFFICIAL persons leaving Shanghai on the Kamakura Maru (evacuee no. 47) — consular staff, not a civilian refugee
• Group photograph captioned "Sugihara visa recipients, Kobe, Japan, May 1941" — some twenty men in suits before a building front — with an enlarged detail of the front rows beneath it, annotated in the family’s hand "Olek (Aleksander) Sil…
  The Wiener family's copy of this photograph is annotated by hand, beside an enlargement of the front rows: “Olek (Aleksander) Silberfeld”, with a line drawn to one of the men. The archive reads the annotation as naming this entry — the given name and its diminutive rather than a bare surname, the only Silberfeld on the register, and an engineer whom the Kobe committee recorded arriving from Vilna on 13 January 1941, which places him in Kobe when the photograph was captioned. Which face in the row is his rests on the pencilled line alone, and the archive does not say.
• Debbie Wiener family papers, Melbourne — second batch (17 Aug 2026): (1) photograph page captioned "Sugihara visa recipients, Kobe Japan, May 1941" — a posed group of the refugees — above a street photograph of Ascher Wiener with his cou…
• Shanghai Ledger, page 154 (left): entry 1226, SILBERFELD Aleksander — registered 14 October 1941, engineer, Jewish, born 15 January 1899 in Krakow, married. From the Library of Congress digitisation of the Polish Consulate's register (or…
• Shanghai Ledger, page 154 (right): entry 1226 continued — resident at 370/12 Rue Bourgeat in the French Concession; his Polish passport extended by the… — the paper trail of the Kobe-to-Shanghai transfer. Library of Congress digitisation
• Tadeusz Romer papers, Library and Archives Canada, MG 31 D 68, vol. 2 (microfilm reel C-10451, frame 1087): 'Lista obywateli polskich ewakuowanych z Dalekiego Wschodu… — cited by link only (Canadiana Heritage); frame image not republished

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