Goldsztein Stefan received transit visa no. 2118 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 22 August 1940. The register records engineer, aged 36.
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…
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… 230, 37, Warsaw, Ing., arr 2.8
hunt/familysearch: US arrival manifest: Stefan Goldsztein, Seattle, 1941 "Seattle Passenger Lists", FamilySearch, entry for Stefan Goldsztein, 1941. Ship: Heian Maru. Matched from the Heian Maru's Polish-born passenger list (198 people, of whom 57 matched the register). Register No.2118 'Goldsztein tefan' records age 36; the manifest gives born 1904, arriving 1941