Forensic DNA work identifies ‘Alcove Man’, ending 22‑year mystery

He was issued passport No.150472 in Bagnoli, on August 18, 1949. His photo showed a neat, well-dressed man, with a slightly receding hairline and an optimistic smile.

He sailed to Australia in October 1949 on the Anna Salen, a refugee transport ship that was a pre-war cargo vessel later converted to the Royal Navy aircraft carrier escort HMS Archer.

It made six trips to Australia, bringing thousands of migrants. This voyage was its third. On this journey, many disembarked in Fremantle due to illness brought with them from the camp. Some died on board.

Chemia continued to Melbourne. “We found it was a long, tough journey for Mr Kwiat to get to Australia,” Daniel says.

It took him 10 years and he travelled 2225 kilometres by land and 30,000 kilometres by sea to reach his new home.

He arrived in Melbourne on Tuesday, November 1, 1949. An overcast day that cleared for the running of the Melbourne Cup in front of a crowd estimated at 110,000. Foxzami, a 16-1 chance, won the race from a field of 31 and won $25,000 in prizemoney.

As an International Refugee Association “displaced person”, Chemia Kwiat owed the Commonwealth government two years of compulsory labour and was sent to migrant camps in South Australia, where he spent months living in army Nissen huts, before returning to Melbourne. He was released from compulsory work on Wednesday, November 7, 1951, the day after Delta won the Melbourne Cup.

Kwiat applied for citizenship in 1954, was approved the following year, and settled in the suburb of Balaclava. He was no longer a tailor but a storeman working in Little Bourke Street.

On August 30, 1959, he married a woman of Greek Orthodox faith and, according to the forensic institute team, stopped practising as a Jew. They had one child.

“This is why we found no leads from the Jewish community here because he was not known,” Daniel says.

The trail became narrower when the forensic team discovered Kwiat’s brothers, Izrael and Yitzhak, had died in Israel.

Yitzhak had wanted to maintain links, writing to the Jewish organisations in Melbourne wanting to find his brother. Yitzhak’s relatives said they corresponded for years until Chemia stopped responding to letters.

Daniel says they conducted many “wild goose chases” but scouring public records helped find individuals to build the family tree. One lead came through an ad in Israel promoting a man selling tomatoes.

The 1972 and 1977 Australian electoral rolls, showed Kwiat and his wife lived together in Carlton North. In 1980, their child was recorded on the same roll.

Then there is a blank. Disengaged from his relatives overseas and no longer seeing his wife and child, Kwiat re-emerged in Nicholson Street. His child said they had lost contact 25 years earlier.

Was he there because he was familiar with the area or to be close to the wife he no longer saw? His alcove was 350 metres away, a four-minute walk from what had been his home when he lived another life.

“We thought there must be a reason why he was living there,” Hartman says.

The neighbour, Trevor Lithgow says, “I always felt he felt this was his place.”

For the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine team the years of international effort were justified when a coroner was satisfied the unidentified man was Chemia Kwiat. “We lived and breathed the case,” Daniel says. “The neighbours were grateful that he wasn’t forgotten.”

“Everyone deserves a name,” says Hartman. “It was nice to see a [passport] photo where he had a smile on his face.”

The institute team found that Kwiat’s wife died on May 12, 2004, and was laid to rest at the Melbourne Cemetery just up the road.

Eleven days later, Kwiat was found dead in his alcove. The autopsy showed the cause of death was pneumonia, but was it a broken heart?

John Silvester lifts the lid on Australia’s criminal underworld. Subscribers can sign up to receive his Naked City newsletter every Thursday.