“What is the point of having an important document buried in an archive for decades, invisible and out of reach to the public?”
That is the question at the centre of an emotional tug-of-war over a historic travel document between the National Archives of Australia and the descendants of a Jewish family who fled Nazi Europe.
The visa was unearthed in September after a decades-long search for the heirloom the family believed to be lost.
The archives did not even know it held the document, until Linda Royal paid it $127.20 to search previously unopened files it held on her family.
The discovery surprised Royal. She had not expected Australian immigration authorities to have taken a visa from the passport of her father, Michael Margolin, that permitted him to travel from Lithuania to Japan in 1940, as it had no relation to entering Australia.
For Royal, the document is of double importance. Not only did it save her father and grandparents from the fate the rest of their family met at Nazi extermination camps. It was also issued by Chiune Sugihara – a Japanese diplomat who repeatedly defied orders from his Nazi-aligned bosses in Tokyo to issue unauthorised transit visas to Jewish refugees – who Royal believes should be as well known as Oskar Schindler.
Royal is now determined to secure the piece of paper her family “owe our lives to” for permanent exhibition to amplify Sugihara’s standing in Australia, and the Sydney-based filmmaker is also working on a feature about Sugihara called The Saviour.
However, after discovering the visa, the national archives assistant director general, Louise Doyle, says the duty to preserve the document in its Canberra vault is “a bit like [the] Bladerunner” film series, where the memories of bioengineered humans can’t be relied on as historical fact.
“Memory is one thing, but evidence is another, because memory could be planted in people’s minds,” Doyle says.
The Oskar Schindler of Japan
In 1939, Sugihara was sent to Lithuania to establish a Japanese consulate in the city of Kaunas, as thousands of Jews in neighbouring Poland fled into the country following the beginning of the Nazi occupation.
While many Jews had temporarily settled in Vilnius, a hub of Jewish culture, word began to spread they could secure a visa to transit through the Soviet Union to Vladivostok and on to Japan by appealing to the sympathetic diplomat at the Kaunas consulate.
Japanese government records reveal Sugihara issued 2,139 handwritten transit visas over a period of six weeks in the summer of 1940, despite being rejected permission to issue the visas three times from his superiors in Tokyo.
It is estimated Sugihara saved 6,000 Jews, as children and spouses of visaholders were able to travel on one document.
Lithuania’s government declared 2020 “the year of Chiune Sugihara”, with exhibitions, stamps and statues planned to commemorate the diplomat. Sugihara was honoured as “righteous among the nations” by Israel’s Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem, in 1984, two years before he died.
Royal hopes her family’s story can help achieve similar recognition for Sugihara in Australia.
Escaping Warsaw
Before the war, the Margolins lived in Warsaw. In December 1939, Royal’s grandfather Mark was serving in the Polish army near the Lithuanian border.
Sensing a need to escape Poland, Mark’s wife, Felicia, organised for her and her son, Michael, to flee to the border, meet up with her husband, and live with a relative in Vilnius.
After being threatened at gunpoint by German soldiers on the border, who later reasoned not to waste their bullets on Jews, they travelled by rowboat with other fleeing Jews to Lithuania.
The family heard about Sugihara’s visas in July of 1940. Royal says that later in life, her father could vividly remember the “kind eyes” of Sugihara on the day in late July the family caught a train to Kaunas to plead for a visa.
By the end of 1940, the family had travelled to Kobe, Japan, and lived there until they were granted passage to Sydney in 1941.
Like many Jews who fled antisemitism in Europe, Royal’s father didn’t talk about the war, much less mention the visa, until 2008, when she began interviewing him late in his life (he died in 2017).
“All they were trying to do was build a new life. They just wanted to forget the past, and we’re talking about serious trauma,” she says.
Mark and Felicia’s parents were all sent to Treblinka, where they perished, except for one of Royal’s grandparents, who was murdered by a Nazi officer in the Warsaw ghetto.
After prodding her father for more information about the visa and Sugihara, she went searching for the document. While she did not find it, she discovered a community of others in Australia, and around the world, who were descendants of those saved by Sugihara, and who met regularly.
Royal said her father had no idea about the significance of the visa when he entered Australia. “The last thing on their mind was documents and who had what.”
But Royal is perplexed as to why her family’s Japanese transit visa is being held by Australia’s national archives.
“I have their passports, but why don’t I have the visa? The bottom line is they wouldn’t have ever bequeathed this document to the archives.”
“That piece of paper is the reason my family survived and why I’m alive.”
Royal wants the archives to release the visa to her, so she can arrange for it to be permanently exhibited at a museum.
‘It’s an extraordinary story’
Before Royal paid the archives to search for her family’s files, the visa had been sitting in a dark repository in Mitchell, in Canberra’s north, in a room maintained at a constant temperature of between 20C and 22C and humidity of 50-55%.
The visa came into the archives’ control as the result of the immigration department’s handover of files. Doyle acknowledges the majority of these types of records have not yet been opened or inspected.
Doyle believes it is important for the document to remain in the archives, though she cannot explain why the Margolin visa is in its possession while other families were able to retain their Sugihara visas after immigrating to Australia.
“The question is why do we have this one and not all of those,” Doyle says.
Since retrieving the file Royal paid for, the archives has acknowledged the significance of the visa to her family.
In addition to providing her with a high resolution copy of the visa, and uploading the scans to their website, the archives says it will explore options for the visa to be temporarily loaned to a museum for three months if they could assure proper care, but it would need to “come back as a property of the commonwealth”.
“It’s an extraordinary story and we’re happy to assist it being told … but we do hold millions of significant, extraordinary stories.”
However, they are unprepared to loan it permanently, and are themselves not prepared to exhibit the visa, out of concern for preserving its condition.
“Paper, if it’s held in a dark dry place, can last for thousands of years. But if you put a newspaper out in the sun it’s going to yellow and fade,” Doyle says.
And while Doyle understands the historical significance of the visa, she cannot guarantee that it will be kept in perpetuity as the archives’ requirement for space continues to grow.
“I would anticipate that these records could be held, but I can’t foretell what’s going to happen in 30 to 40 to 50 years,” Doyle says.
‘Behind the object you have a story’
Earlier this year Sugihara’s son, Nobuki, recalled to the Guardian how his father “started in the beginning [with] 10 or 20 people”.
“It suddenly became 100. I don’t think he imagined that 2,000 people would reach him but he could not stop. If they asked with such a face you can’t refuse,” he said.
Nobuki has struck up a friendship with Royal in recent years, and he wrote a supporting statement to the archives, pleading for the visa’s release.
Konrad Kwiet, a University of Sydney professor and resident historian at Sydney Jewish Museum, acknowledges Sugihara is not well known in Australia.
He says the discussion about preserving and exhibiting documents and objects from the Holocaust is happening as educators plan a future where the last survivors have died.
“Museums normally only love to have originals, so we are not interested in being sent a copy,” he says.
Kwiet says he believes there were 81 people who immigrated to Australia after fleeing Europe on Sugihara visas, and that his museum would be thrilled to exhibit it.
“To see an object from all that time ago, it’s marvellous. To have an object is so important because behind the object you have a story. A transit visa of Sugihara tells the story of someone who had the guts of saving Jews.”
Kwiet notes that as the final generation of Holocaust survivors die, exhibiting objects from the era creates an important connection.
“We record survivors’ stories because we have to, because they won’t be with us forever. But we don’t need to show a copy of this visa, why would you when you have the real thing?” Kwiet says.
Royal, for her part, is not giving up.
In a recent correspondence with the archives, she says “I hope you understand that I am most grateful to you but it’s too important for me to stop here and lie down”.