NS-Germany Children’s Passport: William Kaczynski’s Story

A Cup of Coffee, a Shared Obsession, and a Child’s Passport That Survived the Holocaust

I’ve spent years researching and writing about passports, and every so often that pursuit hands me an afternoon I will not forget. This was one of them. A mutual friend introduced me to William Kaczynski, and the three of us sat down together because we shared the same peculiar fascination: old travel documents and the stories trapped inside them. What started as a polite chat over coffee turned into hours of conversation, because William was not just a fellow collector. He was a witness.

William had recently published Fleeing from the Führer: A Postal History of Refugees from the Nazis, co-written with Professor Charmian Brinson and released through The History Press. The book is built around postal history, covers, postcards, censor marks, the paper trail of a refugee crisis. But it is also, unmistakably, his own family’s story.

William Kaczynski’s book documents his family’s escape from Nazi Germany through the postal artifacts and identity documents they carried, including his mother Edith’s German passport and his own Kinderpass, both stamped with the red “J.”

A Family Caught in the Machinery of 1938

William Kaczynski was born in Germany in 1936 to Martin and Edith Kaczynski. His father, a milliner by trade, was arrested after Kristallnacht and sent to Sachsenhausen. The family fled to England in 1939, and William, still a small child, was interned with his mother and brother at Rushen Camp on the Isle of Man as so-called enemy aliens, a quiet bureaucratic phrase for a family that had already lost everything once.

That afternoon, William let me hold two documents from that period: his mother Edith’s German passport, and his own attached Kinderpass, the children’s passport that traveled folded into a parent’s document rather than issued as its own booklet. Both carried the same mark. A large, deliberately placed red letter “J.”

I have written before about the bureaucratic origin of that red J, and holding William’s family documents made the paperwork feel less abstract than it had on the page. The order came down from Berlin on 5 October 1938: every German passport held by a Jewish citizen was declared invalid outright, and could only regain validity once marked with a sign designating the holder as Jewish. The Reich Ministry of the Interior specified the size, a 3cm letter, and roughly where on the cover it had to sit, but left the exact form unspecified, which is why collectors today find handwritten J’s alongside stamped ones, no two quite alike.

What makes William’s Kinderpass particularly affecting as a collecting subject is the detail that the mark made no distinction for age. A toddler’s travel document received the same red letter as an adult’s. The Reich’s apparatus of classification did not pause at the nursery door.

From Postal History to “People Who Made a Difference”

A letter from his cousin, Wolfgang Happ, interned in Canada, is what originally pulled William into collecting postal history connected to the Holocaust. He spent years afterward building a collection from auctions and from donations by surviving correspondents and their families, material that eventually became the visual backbone of Fleeing from the Führer.

One chapter of the book, titled “People Who Made a Difference,” steps back from the documents themselves to honor the individuals who intervened on behalf of refugees. I have touched on some of these figures in earlier pieces on this site, and William’s chapter belongs in that same company: a reminder that even inside an enormous bureaucratic machine built for exclusion, individual choices still mattered.

Why Collectors Should Care About Documents Like This

For collectors of German wartime travel documents, a Kinderpass bearing the red J is rarer than the equivalent adult passport, simply because fewer were issued and fewer survived the journey intact, often folded inside a parent’s passport and exposed to the same wear, loss, and destruction that claimed so much paper from this period. Provenance matters enormously here. A document with a documented family history, like William’s, carries a research and historical value that an unprovenanced example cannot match, regardless of condition.

If you collect in this area, I would treat any Third Reich-era passport bearing this marking as a primary historical source first and a collectible second. The Nazi bureaucracy’s own paperwork, preserved by families who survived to tell their story, remains one of the most direct physical links we have to how the persecution was administered, document by document, stamp by stamp.

William Kaczynski passed away in March 2019. A Jewish Care Bnei Mitzvah group later dedicated a graduation to him, and a separate donor gave a rare wartime leaflet attacking Hitler’s regime to the Holocaust Centre in Nottinghamshire, part of the same broader effort to keep this material in public hands rather than letting it scatter. I’m glad I had that one afternoon with him and his documents. It is exactly the kind of conversation that reminds me why I keep at this.

NS-Germany Children Passpor

 

Tom Topol | Passport Historian & Author
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