Michal Wejland

Michal Wejland received transit visa no. 861 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 2 August 1940. The register records manufacturer, aged 51.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Age in 1940

51

Occupation

Manufacturer

Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list

wife Estera (52), child Marceli (18)

The journey

Reached Japan; reached Shanghai; registered in Kobe for Australia.

Travelled with, and never given a number

• Estera — wife, aged 52, born Kalisz, 1888
• Marceli — child, aged 13, though the ledger says 18, born Łódź, 1927

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 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 6130, Michał Wajland, born 1889 at Zgierz, who had come from Łódź; the year agrees with the register's age and Zgierz agrees with the archive's other records.
• 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 27 of the Kobe community's list of refugees and their relatives abroad: aged 52, born at Zgierz, a manufacturer, Polish; relatives abroad: a cousin, H. Hershfield, State Normal Place, Jersey City, New Jersey.
• Letter from Prof. Andrew Jakubowicz (University of Technology Sydney), 28 August 2026, with three screenshots of the 1940 Vilna refugee list: the Wajland household at lines 6128–6132 (Icek Dawid, Sura, Michał born Zgierz 1889, Estera bor…
  His letter supplied the Vilna list lines that give this entry's household (6128–6132) and corrected the archive's reading of Michał's birth year: 1889, not 1859.
• Letter from Prof. Andrew Jakubowicz, 2 September 2026, written from New Caledonia to Chaim Jaskoll and Arlette Liwer-Stuip: the two differently spelled Weylands of Zgierz are likely brothers or cousins, the spellings varying because Tsar…
  The family's name, he writes, was spelled by Tsarist-era scribes as they heard it — Wajland in Vilna, Wejland at Kaunas, Weyland in Australia — which is why one family appears under three spellings across the lists.
• 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 6128, Icek Dawid Wejland, born 1875 at Piotrków, who came from Łódź. It is the first of five consecutive lines for the family (6128–6132), all from Łódź, and Michał's own line, 6130, is among them; the family's letter gives these five lines as the household. The document does not say how Icek Dawid and Sura (6129) are related to Michał.
• 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 6129, Sura Wajland, born 1875 at Proszkurów, who came from Łódź. It is the second of the five lines for the family, which the family's letter gives as the household; the document does not state her relation to Michał.
• 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 6131, Estera Wajland, born 1888 at Kalisz, who came from Łódź, on the line after Michał's. The register's family note gives his wife Estera as 52, and 1888 makes her 52 in 1940; the year agrees.
• 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 6132, Marceli Wajland, born 1927 at Łódź, who came from Łódź, the last of the five lines for the family. The register's family note names a child Marceli; it gives his age as 18, but 1927 makes him 13, the age Skotnicki's book gives Marcel on the family's visa of August 1940.
• Aleksander B. Skotnicki, Chiune Sugihara. Konsul, który ratował Żydów. Żydowscy obywatele Krakowa uratowani z Holokaustu przez konsula japońskiego w Kownie (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Aromat Słowa, 2021), p. 241: the Japanese transit visa of 1…
  Page 241 of Aleksander Skotnicki's book on the Kraków Jews saved by Sugihara (Aromat Słowa, Kraków, 2021) reproduces a Japanese transit visa of 1 August 1940 and, in its caption, assigns it to Michał Weyland, aged 51, travelling with his wife Estera, 52, and their son Marcel, 13. The register has his visa a day later, 2 August, a difference of a day that the visa image itself may settle; the age is the birth year the Vilna list gives him, 1889. The book's family details come from the family, whose son-in-law Bolek Jakubowicz appears on the same page; his son Andrew Jakubowicz corresponds with this archive. The plate is shown here under the archive's rule on book pages, credited to the author and publisher.
• The Australian Jewish News (Melbourne), 21 January 1977 (National Library of Israel, Historical Jewish Press)
  Michał Wejland's family made its home in Sydney under the spelling Weyland. When his wife Estera died there, peacefully at home, on 18 January 1977, her death notice in The Australian Jewish News (Melbourne), 21 January 1977, called her the beloved wife of Michal, already deceased (National Library of Israel, Historical Jewish Press).
• The numbered Sugihara visa list, the page of 2 August 1940 carrying Nos. 795 to 865 (among them No. 805, Szaps Jaskolka), photographed beside a ruler.
• Prof. Andrew Jakubowicz (University of Technology Sydney), email of 11 August 2026 to the archive, introduced by Arlette Liwer-Stuip — four answers: (1) Josef Kamien… — a belief he withdrew in his letters of 28 August and 2 September 2026

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