Hilel Gostynski

Hilel Gostynski received transit visa no. 144 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 29 July 1940. The register records journalist, aged 32.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Age in 1940

32

Occupation

Journalist

Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list

husband of #143, child Elisabeth (4)

The journey

Reached Japan; registered in Kobe for Australia.

Travelled with, and never given a number

• Elisabeth — child, aged 4

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: Polish; relatives abroad: J. Frankenstein, Capitan Violetto 3109, Montevideo; Abram Wroblewski, Praca Guilhevma Rudge 5, Sao Paulo; Samuel B. Horovitz, 105 Central Oke, Chicago; Adela Wroblewska, De Graca 482, Sao Paulo.
• 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 243 of the Kobe Jewish Community's refugee register: aged 33, born at Tomaszow, a journalist, who arrived in Japan from Vilnius on 3 February 1941.
• Sydney Jewish Museum Collection, M2019/031 — the papers of Henryk Gostin (Gostynski): catalogue records with a biographical note (born 15 July 1908 Tomaszów Mazowiecki; Sugihara visa at Wilno; Tsuruga 1941; left Kobe 3 July 1941, arrived…
  The Sydney Jewish Museum holds the papers of Henryk Gostin, as he was known in Australia. Its catalogue records that he was born in Tomaszów Mazowiecki on 15 July 1908, that the family received Japanese transit visas from Chiune Sugihara in Wilno, that they reached Tsuruga in 1941 and sailed from Kobe on 3 July 1941, arriving in Sydney on 9 August 1941, and that in Sydney he was the Australian correspondent of the Polish papers Nowy Świat of New York and Dziennik Polski of London; the family made its home in Bellevue Hill. (Sydney Jewish Museum Collection, M2019/031.) The register's Hilel Gostynski, 32, journalist, with his wife and a daughter, bound for Australia, matches in birth year, birthplace, trade, family and route.
• JDC Archives, New York, collection AR 33/44 file 53 (the Jewish Community of Kobe's returns to the JDC, 1941; Set I, item 00761) — Set I pp. 5–7 — "List… — "List of persons who left Japan for Shanghai in the month of July 1941", Nos. 1–15
  He left Kobe on the Kasima Maru on 6 July 1941, bound for Australia (the Jewish Community of Kobe's list of departures, July 1941 (JDC Archives, AR 33/44 file 53)). The list reads: "Costynski Henryk (″ Rejzla, ″ Elzbieta)". (Kasima Maru, Kobe, 6 July 1941, destination Australia.)

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