Heyman Stefan

Heyman Stefan received transit visa no. 1591 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 10 August 1940. The register records engineer, aged 32.

Documents

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What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Age in 1940

32

Occupation

Engineer

Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list

brother of #1589, husband of #1590

The journey

Reached Japan; registered in Kobe for Canada.

What is known

Two lines in the register's August crowd — Nos.1590 and 1591, written 10 August 1940 — carried a couple whose children became public figures of British Columbia: George Heyman, the environment minister who has told his parents' story in the legislature, and Jane Heyman, the theatre director honoured in the province's Entertainment Hall of Fame. Stefan and Marta Heyman crossed through Japan on Sugihara's visas, were sponsored by relatives in Canada, and settled in Vancouver, where Stefan worked as a machinist until his engineering credentials were recognized.

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…
  Entry 102 of the Kobe community's list of refugees and their relatives abroad: born 1908 at Warszawa.
• US arrival manifest: Marta Roza Heyman, Seattle, 1941
  "Seattle Passenger Lists", FamilySearch, entry for Stefan Heyman, 1941. Ship: Heian Maru. Matched from the Heian Maru's Polish-born passenger list (198 people, of whom 57 matched the register). Register No.1591 'Heyman tefan' records age 32; the manifest gives born 1909, arriving 1941. Confid
• M/S Heian Maru manifest, sheet 21 — List or Manifest of Alien Passengers, sailed Yokohama 27 May 1941, arrived Seattle 7 June 1941, all thirty admitted (NARA M1383, roll 262, Seattle Passenger Lists; retrieved with the owner signed in).…
  M/S Heian Maru, Yokohama 27 May - Seattle 7 June 1941; line 10: 32, engineer, of Warsaw
• 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 25 Feb 1941 (line 1591)
• "Washington, King, Seattle, Passenger Lists, 1890-1957", FamilySearch — index entry for Stefan Heyman, 1941: born about 1909, Poland. Digitised from NARA microfilm publication M1383 (passenger and crew lists of vessels arriving at Seattl…
  FamilySearch's index of the Seattle passenger lists, read by the archive on 20 September 2026, has Stefan Heyman, born about 1909 in Poland, arriving at Seattle in 1941. The register's compiled line gives 1908, and the two are 1 year apart. The name occurs once on the register, and a Polish-born passenger landing at Seattle in 1941 fits the route through Japan, so the entry is taken as this person's under the archive's rule of 19 September 2026 for records from the 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… — "List of refugees who left Japan to places other than Shanghai in the month of May 1941", Nos. 1–321
  He left Yokohama on the Heian Maru on 27 May 1941, bound for Canada (the Jewish Community of Kobe's list of departures, May 1941 (JDC Archives, AR 33/44 file 53)). The list reads: "Heyman Stefan, ″ Marta". (Heian Maru, Yokohama, 27 May 1941.)
• Yad Vashem Archives, Jerusalem — the card file of Jewish refugees from Poland who found refuge in various countries, 1939–1941
  Yad Vashem's card file of Jewish refugees from Poland who found refuge in various countries, 1939–1941, has a card for Stefan Heyman, aged 31, of Warsaw, who was in Wilno during the war; his age and his town agree with this register line. Credit: Yad Vashem Archives.
• Wikipedia: George Heyman, British Columbia MLA and cabinet minister — son of Stefan and Marta Heyman, a Polish-Jewish couple who escaped occupied Poland by way of Japan with the help of Chiune Sugihara, vice-consul at Kaunas; sponsored b…
• M/S Heian Maru manifest, sheet 21 — List or Manifest of Alien Passengers, sailed Yokohama 27 May 1941, arrived Seattle 7 June 1941, all thirty admitted (NARA M1383, roll 262, Seattle Passenger Lists; retrieved with the owner signed in).…
• The Heian Maru, arriving at Seattle in 1941: list or manifest of alien passengers, the sheet that names Emanuel Distler — US National Archives, Record Group 85 (Immigration and Naturalization Service), Passenger and Crew Lists of Vessels…
• The Heian Maru, arriving at Seattle in 1941: the continuation sheet, with the relatives named and the destinations, for the sheet that names Norbert Henryk Gorwic — US National Archives, Record Group 85 (Immigration and Naturalization Se…

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