Eliasz Kupinski

Eliasz Kupinski received transit visa no. 874 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 2 August 1940. The register records farmer, aged 43.

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What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Age in 1940

43

Occupation

Farmer

Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list

brother of #873, wife Slawa (38)

The journey

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

Travelled with, and never given a number

• Slawa — wife, aged 38

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.

What is known

This is a Polish Legation certificate (Zaswiadczenie/Certificat) issued in Kaunas confirming that Eliasz Kupinski (born 1897, Warsaw), a farmer, and his wife Slawa Kupinska (born 1902, Warsaw) are Polish citizens, accompanied by their two children (a daughter, Sara, born 1931, and a son, Isaar, born 1933). The document bears a Japanese transit visa (No. 2345) seen for the journey through Japan to Suriname, Curacao and other Netherlands' colonies, dated 2 August 1940, signed by the Japanese consul in Kaunas (Sugihara).

Eliasz Kupinski, born 1897 in Warsaw and by profession a farmer (rolnik/agriculteur), received a Polish Legation certificate in Kaunas dated 2 August 1940, accompanied by his wife Slawa (born 1902, Warsaw) and their two children, daughter Sura (born 1931) and son Eliasz (born 1933). The Dutch consul issued a Curacao endorsement (No. 2345) and the Japanese consulate in Kaunas granted a transit visa on 2 August 1940 for the journey through Japan to Surinam, Curacao and other Netherlands colonies.

A 1998 letter from Clare Cronin of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to Dr. Jan Zwartendyk regarding color xeroxes of two newly found Curacao visas with high numbers, 2342 and 2345, both dated August 2, 1940. The letter notes these were the only two pages found and that there were no other visas apart from the Dutch and Japanese.

TRANSIT VISA. Seen for the journey through Japan (to Suranam, Curacao and other Netherlands' colonies.) 1940 VIII. 2 No. 2345 Kaunas, 2. VIII. 1940 accompagnes de leurs 2 enfants

TRANSIT VISA. Seen for the journey through Japan (to Suranam, Curacao and other Netherlands' colonies.) 1940. VIII. 2 Zaswiadczenie / Certificat KUPINSKI ELIASZ ... KUPINSKA SLAWA Kaunas, 2 VIII 1940

Susan Bachrach has asked me to send you color xeroxes of the two new Curacao visas we have found, with very high numbers, 2342 and 2345. They are both dated August 2, 1940.

Where this comes from

• 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…
  Entry 393 of the Kobe Jewish Community's refugee register: aged 44, born at Warsaw, a farmer, who arrived in Japan from Vilnius on 14 February 1941.
• JDC Shanghai migration file: KUPINSKI Samuel
  JDC Archives, New York collection AR3344, 'Complete Shanghai Migration Files' (NY_AR3344_00014), page 164: KUPINSKI Eliasz, file no. 7063. Match: register No.874 'Eliasz Kupinski', and the register independently records this person as reaching Shanghai. Both name parts agree. NOTE: the index carries
• JDC Archives, New York — Shanghai Migration Files, box index (AR 33/44, file 00014): the alphabetical index to the JDC's Shanghai emigration case files, 1946-1950 — some 2,640 case files covering about 5,400 persons, each family under on…
  JDC Shanghai Migration Files, case file no. 7063 — an emigration case file opened for the family in Shanghai after the war; the file itself can be requested from the JDC Archives
• 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 14 Feb 1941 (line 874)
• Curaçao visa No. 2345 — the highest-numbered Zwartendijk visa known to survive, issued at Kaunas on 2 August 1940 to Eliasz Kupiński and his family. Photographed on the Polish Legation certificate that carries it: the certificate itself,…
  The Polish Legation certificate carrying this family's photographs bears a Curaçao notation of 2 August 1940 — the same day as the register's visa for this line — and names him with his wife and their two children. The archive already held this Curaçao number from five other sources; this is a photograph of the document itself, reaching the archive from the consul's son through Akira Kitade. Whether Samuel Kupinski, on the same page of the register and the same date, is the relative the certificate does not name is untested.
• "California, San Francisco, Passenger Lists, 1893-1953", FamilySearch — index entry for Eliasz Kupinski, 1949: born about 1898, Poland. Digitised from NARA microfilm publication M1410 (passenger lists of vessels arriving at San Francisco…
  FamilySearch's index of the San Francisco passenger lists, read by the archive on 20 September 2026, has Eliasz Kupinski, born about 1898 in Poland, arriving at San Francisco in 1949 on the General M. C. Meigs. The register's compiled line gives 1897, and the two are 1 year apart, and the name occurs once on the register. The ship's manifest heading says she sailed from Shanghai, and a passenger born in Poland landing at San Francisco in 1949 from Shanghai is the route's end: the refugees who waited out the war there. So the entry is taken as this person's under the archive's rule of 19 September 2026 for records from the route. The sheet is NARA microfilm publication M1410, film 402, image 842, read by the archive on 20 September 2026.
• American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Far Eastern Office, Shanghai: the list of persons who left Shanghai on the S.S. General Meigs and the S.S. Breckenridge on 1 January 1949, sent to the American Consulate General on 10 January…
  On 10 January 1949 the Joint's Far Eastern Office sent the American Consulate General at Shanghai its list of the people who had left Shanghai on the S.S. General Meigs on 1 January 1949. No. 43 on it is Eliasz Kupinski, Polish, bound for Toronto. Samuel Kupinski, the line before his on the register, is on the same list. The name is matched to this line because the full name occurs once on the register, the list is the Joint's own record of refugees leaving Shanghai, and a Polish refugee in Shanghai in 1949 is where the move from Kobe in 1941 had left the people of this register. The list gives no age and no birthplace.
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum — the Kupinski family collection (accession 2017.513): object records with the family's biography
  Eliasz Kupinski was born at Lida, not Warsaw: the family biography that accompanies the Kupinski family collection at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (accession 2017.513, the collection records on collections.ushmm.org) says that he and his brother Samuel (No. 873) gave Warsaw as their birthplace in Kaunas in 1940 to obtain Soviet exit visas, and received the family's Dutch and Japanese visas there on 2 August. Before the war the brothers and a partner had bought land outside Lida in 1935, shipping lumber to England and selling milk and cheese to the Polish Air Force. Stranded in Kobe without a visa onward, the family was sent to Shanghai in November 1941, where the brothers worked for an import-export firm. They left Shanghai on the General Meigs on 1 January 1949 and settled in Toronto.
• La-karov ve-la-rachok, 11 April 1946 — the Far Eastern Palestine Committee's list of Jewish refugees in Shanghai (National Library of Israel, Historical Jewish Press)
  The Far Eastern Palestine Committee's list of Jewish refugees in Shanghai, printed by the Jewish Agency Search Bureau's bulletin La-karov ve-la-rachok on 11 April 1946, lists Eliasz Kupinski: born 1897 at Warsaw, a colonist, arrived in 1941 from Vilnius; the year and the town agree with the Kobe Jewish community's refugee register (National Library of Israel, Historical Jewish Press).
• The certificate of identity of Eliasz Kupiński and his wife Chawa (No. 874), issued by the Polish Legation in Kaunas, with the family's photographs, and the facing page with the Sugihara tra… — a greyscale photograph of the open document.
• The same open certificate of Eliasz and Chawa Kupiński (No. 874), photographed under violet light.
• Letter of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to Dr Jan Zwartendyk, Tucson, 30 July 1998, from Clare Cronin, Collections Coordinator, Division of Exhibitions, sending colour copies of two newly found Curaçao visas, Nos. 2342 and…
• Sugihara Database
• Jan Zwartendyk Jr., "Jan Zwartendijk — his activities as Dutch consul in Lithuania, 1940" (remember.org, updated 3 December 2005)

and 2 further records, shown on the full entry.

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