Israel Spira

Israel Spira received transit visa no. 96 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 29 July 1940. The register records lawyer, aged 34.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Age in 1940

34

Occupation

Lawyer

Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list

wife Felicja (32), son Ludwik (6)

The journey

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

Travelled with, and never given a number

• Felicja — wife, aged 32
• Ludwik — son, aged 6

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 5441, Israel Spiro, born 1906 at Wieliczko, who had come from Kraków; the year agrees with the register's age.
• 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…
  Entries 229 to 231 of the Kobe community's list of refugees and their relatives abroad: born 1906 at Wieliczka, with a wife and son; relatives abroad: a cousin, Braczewski, New York.
• Leonard Spira, A Lucky Story: How a Polish family came to Australia in 1941 (Sunshine Beach, Qld, 2008; 53 pp.) — summarised on the Holocaust memoirs pages of Monash University's Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation
  The family's journey is told in the son's memoir, A Lucky Story: How a Polish family came to Australia in 1941 (Leonard Spira, 2008), summarised by Monash University's Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation. It describes a lawyer's family from Kraków — the author, born there on 1 January 1935, the only child of Jurek and Felinka Spira — who fled by way of Lublin, Kovel and Lwów to Vilna, crossing the border on the last night of 1939; Chiune Sugihara issued the family's visas for Japan; they left Vilna on 27 January 1941 for Vladivostok and Tsuruga, were cared for in Kobe, and sailed in late July 1941 on the Kasima Maru, reaching Sydney on 9 August 1941. The register's Israel Spira, a lawyer, with his wife Felicja and a son Ludwik of six, bound for Australia, matches in trade, family, ages and route; Jurek is the everyday name under which the memoir knows him.
• JDC Archives, New York, collection AR 33/44 file 53 (the Jewish Community of Kobe's returns to the JDC, 1941; Set I, item 00761) — Set I pp. 5–7 — "List… — "List of persons who left Japan for Shanghai in the month of July 1941", Nos. 1–15
  He left Kobe on the Kasima Maru on 6 July 1941, bound for Australia (the Jewish Community of Kobe's list of departures, July 1941 (JDC Archives, AR 33/44 file 53)). The list reads: "Spira Izrael, ″ Felicja, ″ Ludwik". (Kasima Maru, Kobe, 6 July 1941, destination Australia.)
• 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 Izrael Spira, aged 35, born at Wieliczka, a lawyer, who travelled from Vilno, with his wife Felicja Helena, aged 32, born at Wadowice, on the next line. Sugihara's ledger lost the first letter of his surname; the register has it in full.

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