Aleksander Silberfeld received transit visa no. 14 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 26 July 1940. The register records engineer, aged 41.
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… No.158, age 42, b. Cracow, Qual. Engineer, arr. 13.1.
hunt/webhunt: 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
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…