Frankel Benjamin-Wolf

Frankel Benjamin-Wolf received transit visa no. 275 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 30 July 1940. The register records textiles, aged 31.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Age in 1940

31

Occupation

Textiles

Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list

husband of #282, child Berl Berchik (12), brother of #282

The journey

Reached Japan; aided by the Polish ambassador Tadeusz Romer; registered in Kobe for New Zealand.

Travelled with, and never given a number

• Berl Berchik — child, aged 12

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

• "List of persons arriving on route to New Zealand" — the arrival roster for the sailing from Japan, September 1941: 33 typed names, from Dr George Bluman’s own marked-up cop… — September 1941, not July; he had misread his own handwriting.
  Named on the list of persons arriving on route to New Zealand, sailing from Japan in 1941. The register spells it Frenkiel.
• Takayoshi Iwata, "Kobe and Jewish Refugees" (神戸とユダヤ難民), Kobe City history bulletin no. 26, March 2017 — English translation published by the City of Kobe
  He spent February to August 1941 in Kobe with his wife Perla, their son and her brother Berl, in a communal house at 1-85 Kitano-chō. His wife's memoir calls him Wilek. (Takayoshi Iwata, 'Kobe and Jewish Refugees', Kobe City history bulletin no. 26 (2017), English translation published by the City of Kobe.)
• 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…
  The Kobe Jewish Community's refugee register lists Benjamin Wolf Frankel, aged 34, born at Krakow, a textile technician, who reached Japan on 24 February 1941. Sugihara's ledger writes the name Frenkiel; the register writes Frankel.
• 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 has Benjamin Wolf Fraenkel, born in 1907 at Krakow. Sugihara's ledger writes the name Frenkiel; the list writes Fraenkel.
• List of Refugees, Vilna, 1940 — JDC Archives, New York, collection AR 33/44, file 00876. The contemporary register of Polish Jewish refugees in Lithuania, running to more than nine thousand numbered entries; the fullest independent check…
  The 1940 Vilna refugee list has, at entry 6816, Benjamin Wolf Frenkel, born in 1907 at Krakow, who came from Katowice.
• Papers Past — the National Library of New Zealand's digitised newspapers (Evening Post, the Dominion, the Press, Auckland Star and others, 1942–1955)
  The Dominion of Wellington, 28 April 1945, read on Papers Past on 20 October 2026, names Mr B. W. Frankel as president of the Polish Association at a party for Polish children, with Mrs Frankel present. Two things tie the report to him: the initials and surname, and Wellington, where the UNRRA papers of March 1946 name a B. W. Frankel as the contact for his sister Hinda Milgrom (No. 259). The report does not give his trade or where he came from.

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