Fremdenpass, alien's passport issued by Nazi Germany. Issued in Hamburg, June, 1939 (inked stamps dated 1939-49).
The passport photo and personal details of the bearer, Emma Bachurski, appear at the beginning of the passport. The subsequent pages bear two groups of inked stamps, separated by a decade in time (and with no stamps dated to the intervening period): stamps documenting departure from Europe in June, 1939 (exit permit from Germany, entry permit to Italy, entry stamp to Italy by train, and exit stamp from the Port of Genoa; and stamps documenting immigration to the State of Israel in the years 1948-49. Details of Emma's whereabouts in the missing intervening years appear only briefly in a handwritten comment added underneath the Italian visa, where it is noted that the entry permit to Italy has been issued for the purpose of travel to Shanghai from the Port of Genoa, aboard the ship "Gneisenau."
Emma Bachurski's name and personal details appear in documents kept in the German Federal Archives, as well as in the listing of survivors from Shanghai from the archival records of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC). An examination of these documents helps fill in some of the blanks in Bachurski's story; evidently, she was a non-Jewish woman married to Jacob Bachurski, a Polish-born Jewish man with no citizenship, incarcerated in 1938 in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in western Germany. Just prior to the outbreak of WWII, he was released from internment and escaped to Shanghai along with Emma. The couple remained there until the end of the war, and together they immigrated to the then recently established State of Israel.
15.5 cm. Good condition. Few stains. Minor blemishes. Minor wear to binding. Handwritten notation on front of binding.