The Sugihara Visa Archive

Goldsztein Stefan

Visa no. 2118 · Kaunas, 22 August 1940
Goldsztein Stefan
Detail of a document published in full on this page.

Goldsztein Stefan received transit visa no. 2118 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 22 August 1940. The register records engineer, aged 36.

Documents

Document — Goldsztein Stefan
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). Line 7: Goldsztein Stefan, 37, divorced, engineer, of Warsaw. Lines 10-11: Heyman Stefan, 32, engineer, and Marta Roza, 31, of Warsaw. Twenty-nine Polish refugees and one Chinese cook, every refugee line first marked detained, then released 7-8 June
Document — Goldsztein Stefan
Stefan Golston's own Sugihara transit visa, reproduced with his 2016 profile by the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute: the typed English form of the Kaunas consulate — 'through Japan (to Suranam, Curaçao and other Netherlands'' colonies)' — dated 21 August 1940, with the consular round stamp, the vice-consul's signature block, a long handwritten Japanese annotation, and a Fukui prefecture entry-permit stamp of February 1941
Document — Goldsztein Stefan
Stefan Golston in later life — portrait from his 2016 profile by the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute
Document — Goldsztein Stefan
Permit for Stay in Japan No.4075/2205, issued by the Governor of Hyogo Prefecture: FRUCHS, Lidia-Barbara, Polish, student, aged 21 years 4 months — granted 6 May 1941 and extended in the margins to 24 August. Shown in the USHMM special exhibition Flight and Rescue as the exemplar of the permits the refugees lived by; the future Lydia Golston
Document — Goldsztein Stefan
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 Arriving at Seattle, microfilm publication M1383, roll 262, frame 96 of the file unit “June 2, 1941, SS Princess Marguerite-July 7, 1941, SS Hie Maru” (NAID 553889808). Public domain; credit: National Archives at Washington, DC.
Document — Goldsztein Stefan
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 Service), Passenger and Crew Lists of Vessels Arriving at Seattle, microfilm publication M1383, roll 262, frame 97 of the file unit “June 2, 1941, SS Princess Marguerite-July 7, 1941, SS Hie Maru” (NAID 553889808). Public domain; credit: National Archives at Washington, DC.

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What the register records

Nationality as recorded
Polish
Age in 1940
36
Occupation
Engineer

The journey

Reached Japan; registered in Kobe for Canada.

What is known

The health institute where he spent his last decades told his story in 2016: Stefan Golston left Warsaw on foot on 6 September 1939, walked between two armies for months, crossed into Lithuania on New Year's Day 1940, and carried a Sugihara transit visa to Japan in April 1941. The family he left in Warsaw did not survive. In Seattle from 1959 as a Boeing engineer, he married Lydia — a fellow Sugihara-visa holder — and their son became a cardiologist. The register's No.2118, Goldsztein Stefan of 22 August 1940, may be his line; the family's confirmation of his Polish surname would settle it.

He told his own story twice — to the Seattle Times in 1995, when a late-night television segment had just taught the couple their rescuer's name, and in the memoir he wrote for his writers' group. A divorced Warsaw engineer who walked out of the burning city on 6 September 1939; a refugee teacher in Vilnius who, when the consulate was closing, paid a man to carry his passport to the secretary and bring back the stamp; a passenger on the Heian Maru in May 1941 with a Canadian visa in hand. In Vancouver he married Lydia Fruchs — a Lwow economics student who had reached Kobe before him, lived on a Hyogo prefecture stay permit the USHMM would one day exhibit, and left Japan on the last ship b…

Where this comes from

and 4 further records, shown on the full entry.

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