Sugihara Visa Archive

The Consulate of Poland in Shanghai registered its citizens in a single bound ledger across the years 1934–1943. It begins with the small pre-war Polish colony of the international city — traders, engineers, a few families — and then, from 1941, fills with people who had no business in China at all: the refugees Japan moved on from Kobe when their transit visas ran out and no country would take them.

The consulate that received them was Tadeusz Romer's responsibility. Poland's ambassador to Japan had spent a year in Tokyo finding real destinations for the people arriving at Tsuruga on Sugihara's paper — about a thousand of them, to the United States, Palestine, Canada, Australia and South America. When the embassy in Tokyo closed in 1941 and the rest were shipped to Shanghai with nowhere else to be sent, Romer followed them there to look after the Polish citizens who had been expelled. This ledger is the office record of that arrangement: the list of who turned up and was taken onto the consulate's books.

The original is held by the archive of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs (reference 43/2003). It has been digitised by the Library of Congress, and its names were indexed — 1,531 of them — by Polish Exiles of WW2. The archive holds that name index in full, and a copy of the scanned book behind it.

Most of the 1,531 are not Sugihara's people, and that matters: a book containing only refugees would tell us less than one in which they can be seen arriving among everybody else. 365 names in it agree with a name on Sugihara's register. They are listed below, each with the entry number that finds the line in the scanned book, so that anyone who wants to check the reading can go to it.

It puts a person in a place. The Kaunas list can say a visa was written; it cannot say the journey was made. A consulate clerk in Shanghai writing a name into a bound register can, because he was looking at the person when he wrote it. For 347 of the names below, the ledger agrees with a journey the archive had already traced — which is the check that the reading works at all.

It adds where the record stopped. For 18 others, nothing in this archive had placed them in Shanghai. Their line on Sugihara's register ends in Kaunas in 1940. The ledger is the first document to carry them any further.

It says what happened next. The comments column is the rarest thing in refugee paperwork — an outcome, written by someone who knew it. Emigrated to America. Returned to Poland. Died. Those readings are not transcribed yet; they are the next work this book is worth.

A name in one book agreeing with a name in another is where a match starts, not where it ends. The archive does not identify anybody on a matching name alone, and it has not done so here: every line below is recorded as a mention of that register entry, not as a proven identification of that person, and it stays that way until something else agrees — an age, a birthplace, a family member, a destination.

Two limits are worth stating plainly. The archive holds the ledger's name index, not a transcription of its columns, so nothing on this page yet uses the professions, the addresses, the birth dates or the comments — the very fields that would turn most of these mentions into identifications. And the ledger has its own spellings, made by a Polish clerk hearing a name aloud, which differ from the spellings a Japanese clerk wrote in Kaunas. Where the two differ, both are shown above; neither is corrected into the other.

If one of these names is your family's, the archive would like to hear it — a date, a place, anyone else who travelled with them. Tell us and the mention can become a record.