Original subtitles

Thank you.

Well, I am an old China hand, a member of a dying race, one could say. I

belong to those who lived many years in China. In fact, I was born and raised in

China and belong to a Russian Jewish family.

The history of Jews in Shanghai started in the middle of the 19th century,

shortly after the Opium War ended, where China was defeated by Great Britain.

A treaty was signed in Nanking in 1842, and the Chinese were forced to open

five ports to foreign trade.

That's when Shanghai became an open port, and people from different

countries started coming to Shanghai to trade.

The history of Jews in Shanghai started shortly after in 1845, and there's

really quite an amusing story.

David Sassoon was a very powerful Jew living in Bombay, India, who came from

Iraq to India and made a lot of money on the cotton market, dealing in cotton

trade with England.

Around 1844, David Sassoon, who was the leader of the Jewish community

in Bombay, But he was a man who liked to do things himself, and one of the things

he liked to do was to go to the post office and pick up his mail.

Around 1844, he noticed that his competitor, a British gentleman,

was getting letters from China all the time, and he became curious. He thought

that there must be a reason for that, and that is how he found out.

that Shanghai had become an open port and trade was developing in Shanghai.

So he sent one of his sons to Shanghai.

And in 1845, his son, Ellis Sassoon, opened the first

Jewish office in Shanghai.

And that was the beginning of the Sephardi Jewish community or Middle

Eastern Jewish community in Shanghai.

This community developed and...

Several very important Sephardi Jews came there. They were the Harduns, the

Sasuns, the Kaduris, and they became tycoons in the Far East.

So this was the Sephardi community.

They were religious Jews. Their offices were closed on weekends, the Sasuns

especially.

They gave religious education to everybody who worked for them. They even

taught their different members how to slaughter chicken in a way that it would

become kosher. And their letterheads had writing in Hebrew.

The Sephardic community remained in Shanghai until the end of the history of

Jews in Shanghai, which really lasted 100 years, about, from 1845 until,

let's say, 1949, 1950, when the communists occupied Shanghai

and most of the foreigners fled.

The second Jewish community started in Shanghai.

They came from Russia. They were Russian Jews.

It's interesting to note that the Sephardi Jews were really the only ones

who did not come as refugees in Shanghai. They came to trade.

Jews started coming to China from Russia.

following pogroms in Russia. And these pogroms intensified in the beginning of

the 20th century.

There was a terrible pogrom in the Ukraine where over 100,000 people were

wounded and 20,000 were slaughtered. They also came to Shanghai after the

brutal Japanese war in 1904, 1906, when Russian Jewish soldiers did not want to

return to Russia. And they came to Shanghai.

Among the Russian Jews in Shanghai, there were many Russian Jews from

Siberia. And that is quite interesting to know, because Siberia at that time

was a kind of wild west in Russia. And people who lived in Siberia had

relatively more freedom than in other parts of Russia.

So Siberian Jews were known to be very independent, especially the women.

were very independent.

They often had to support the family when men were forced into military duty.

Later on, when Nazism raised its head in Europe and refugees started fleeing and

coming to Shanghai, first a few of them starting from 1937, and then large

waves of Jewish refugees ending in a total figure of approximately 20,000

people. the whole picture in Shanghai changed.

And Shanghai, in the 100 years of the existence of foreigners living there,

changed very much.

It was, first, there was the boom in business.

There were the colonial powers who had divided the city. The interesting part

was that they had enclaves, first the British.

had a British enclave, then the Americans followed, and later on they

joined with the British and formed what became the international settlement.

The French created the French concession. Later, the Japanese took a

part in northern Shanghai.

The British and the French and the Americans had their own system of

education, their own system of justice, they had their own police forces, and

they had their own army.

So it was really quite extraordinary growing up in the city. It was like

living in different countries at the same time.

The arrival of the refugees from Europe changed the picture again because they

brought European customs from Austria, from Czechoslovakia, from Germany, and

they brought the feel of Europe.

My mother was among the first very early Russian settlers in Shanghai with her

family. Her family arrived in 1910 to Shanghai.

She was six years old. Her family came from Siberia. Her father got a job in

Shanghai, and he had to supervise a stone quarry. They both got married when

my grandmother was 15, and he was 15 and a half. They had eight children.

He was taken into the Russian army. He was forced to join for four years.

So there were two groups of children, four children born before the army and

four born after the army.

When he came to Shanghai, there was a cholera epidemic, and he died within a

few days.

So my grandmother was left with all these children without any means

whatsoever and had a very hard time. She survived by cooking and selling

lunches to other people who were almost as penniless as she was.

My mother went to school until she was 13 years old, and her schooling was

quite interesting.

At one time she stayed in a convent, and until her last days she could recite

catechism by heart.

She was a very independent person with a great love of life and great

courage and energy. And it is her feeling of...

independence, and her courage that really pulled us through many difficult

times during our stay in Shanghai.

My father came later.

His name was David Rabinovich. He came to Shanghai with a group of people who

were attempting to go to Palestine, three or four people. None of these

people ever really thought about working for material gain.

So this was an attitude in my family towards money and material things.

No importance was ever attached to that.

My parents got married when my mother was 18 and my father five years older

than my mother.

They were a very young couple. They had really nothing.

Basically, my mother always had to earn money to supplement my father's income.

And during the war, she became the breadwinner of the family.

My father was always occupied with his literary pursuits.

never took money for anything.

So it was quite a big problem how to survive.

Shanghai Jews in general had a difficult time when they arrived, because, not

Shanghai, Russian Jews in Shanghai, because the lingua franca of Shanghai

was really English, and many Russian Jews knew no English. So it took them a

while to learn the language and to start working in different fields.

Some of them had become fur experts in Siberia and in Manchuria.

They had fur stores.

There were some jewelry stores.

The furriers were experts.

I don't really know whether some of the other stores, they were experts, but

they were in the business.

The main artery of the French concession was at that time called Avenue Joffre,

after the French General Joffre. It was really a kind of fun street. There were

many, many stores.

It was interesting because the signs were in different languages. Before the

war, it was interesting to see how many different uniforms there were in

Shanghai. You had the French in their uniforms.

You had the Annamite soldiers who wore the triangular hats.

You had the Sikhs.

with their pink turbans and their beards, and they were very tall and very

much feared by the Chinese.

You had the British soldiers, you had the Scotland Highlanders in their

tartans, you had the American Marines.

And it was a tremendous kaleidoscope of color. This created a great deal of

excitement. We also saw what we called Italian grenadiers.

They were very handsome boys, many of them very nicely dressed, very elegant,

and they paraded like roosters up and down the street flirting with girls.

This is a picture of the Shanghai Bund, and the refugees who arrived started

arriving in 1937 from Europe. This is probably the scene that greeted them.

Later, when they came in larger numbers, there were trucks waiting for them that

picked them up and took them to the different haimes, the different homes.

This is the Cathay Hotel, which was built by Sir Victor Sassoon.

It was his ambition to build one of the most fabulous hotels in the Far East,

and he succeeded.

Many important people lived in this hotel.

Sir Victor himself made parties there.

One of his most famous parties was one that reproduced a circus.

They had a whole circus manège there, and he himself was dressed as the circus

manager with a riding whip and a special costume, and other people came dressed

as trapezes, acrobats, and clowns. It was supposedly a wonderful party.

So Richard Sassoon used to enjoy going to the races, and he said that there

were two races that were very interesting, the Derby race and the

Jewish race.

When he went to the races, he usually appeared with a beautiful girl on each

arm. He always wore a fresh flower in his buttonhole. He was a vain man who

tried very hard to hide a limp, which he had after an airplane accident in World

War I. He was one of the first flyers in the British Royal Air Force.

During the war, he helped many refugees by advancing the money to open little

businesses.

The cultural and social life of the Shanghai Russian Jewish community took

place in the Jewish Club, which today is the Conservatory of Music.

They had a group in which my father was very active, which organized what they

called in Russian Usnaya Gazeta, oral newspaper.

And they would meet every Thursday and listen to poetry, to different articles

written by various members.

They also had what they called El Chaka, which are the initials in Russian of

Literary Artistic and Cultural Center,

where they had performances and songs by various musicians and so on.

I remember an evening an Austrian gentleman who came he came with his

daughter she wore what I thought of for the first time a dirndl and she played

an accordion which seemed completely miraculous and she sang songs they had

big Purim parties at the Jewish club, where all the parents dressed up in fine

masquerade costumes. It was a fancy dress ball.

I know that my mother went to the same ball, dressed in a gold lame Marquis

dress, which in time was passed on to me, made smaller, and which I wore to

fancy dress parties.

They celebrated New Year's Eve.

There was a very active and very pleasant social life.

Some people went to nightclubs. My parents were not among these.

But nightclubs in Shanghai were supposedly amongst the most exciting in

the world. We met a lot of fine people. We had evenings where people played the

piano, where people sang.

We'd put on the gramophone and danced.

When the refugees came, they brought in something different.

For me, the most wonderful thing they brought was the Viennese waltzes, which

I absolutely adored. And then we'd have dances with lots of waltzing, a lot of

young, homesick Viennese, a lot of young, homesick Germans, and we took

over some of their likes and dislikes in dancing.

The life of the younger generation was different.

Although we did attend all the parties to which our parents went and often went

to the Jewish club, we had our own groups of friends, our own parties. We

were influenced by several things. Hollywood movies, about which everybody

was crazy.

It was really fantastic because the Chinese are very, very gifted. As soon

as we saw a nice dress we liked in a movie, we went to our tailor and asked

him to copy it. They never needed a pattern. You could explain it to him.

And there was this man to whom we spoke Pidgin English, and he answered in

Pidgin English, and he knew exactly what you wanted, and it would fit. By the

way, it was also marvelous about Chinese cooks that they hated the food that they

cooked for us.

but they cook delicious food according to our faith.

You want that, you have to do that.

Thank you.

When I wanted to go for pleasure, I went to places that I wanted to see, where I

enjoyed myself, and I wasn't particularly interested in inspecting

the Chinese sections, for example.

And people like I and my friends, we went to movies.

Most of the movies were American movies.

At one point, it was all the Deanna Durbin movies, the Shirley Temple

movies. A Chinese actress called Anna May Wong, she was Chinese-American.

But in any case, there was a movie of her, Anna May Wong's movie, with a big

sign in front of the theater with her picture. And she came to Shanghai to

promote the movie. And she was not allowed to go to the American club

because no Chinese were allowed in the American club.

She wanted to go bowling, and she was not permitted in. The shocking thing was

that many of the places that we went to, really the Chinese did not go to. Of

course, they went to the movie houses.

So our social life consisted in parties and going to the club. I'm speaking of

the Russian Jewish community.

For example, the Russian schools had dances where they danced all kinds of

folk dances, like polka, babochka, and dances that they had danced in Russia

before the revolution.

Since I always had boyfriends of all nationalities, I could participate in

all these things.

The French school, we had the French children had their own.

type of parties, tangos were very popular.

The British school children were very much involved in sports.

At the French school, they told us that we have to be intellectual and only

stupid Americans are interested in sports.

Consequently, very few of us took part in sports and I was never interested.

In the British school, sports were encouraged.

And a lot of the social life was concentrated around sports. Everyone

played tennis. They had all kinds of races. They had hockey matches and so

on. So it was a very diverse type of social life in Shanghai.

What happened was that children going to different systems of school became very

influenced by the countries which were represented. The children going to the

British schools became, many of them, British patriots, and the ones in the

French school, French patriots. And I was a very ardent French patriot.

Until the day that France...

collapsed shortly after the beginning of World War II, and there was a change in

the political atmosphere.

Many, many French people in Shanghai became ardent pro-Pétainiste.

And there was a group, of course, of people who were for de Gaulle, but they

were in the minority.

In the diaries I tell about my feelings every day, about my friends, about what

is happening around me. And here is an extract written in December, shortly

after the French defeat, about the situation in the French school to which

I went.

Our philosophy professor came into class and I recorded what he wrote. It was so

clear in my mind that when I came home, I believe I wrote his words down

correctly. And he said, in French, with a sneer, Je tiens à vous dire que vous

avez au collège un professeur anti-français.

Votre professeur de psychologie est un de Gaulliste.

Anne Marie, the flatterer.

replied, Naturellement, Monsieur, nous ne viendrons pas demain.

I feel as if my heart will burst, tears come into my eyes, and I can't

understand a word of our teacher's cours.

So he is for Pétain, the scoundrel.

In an angry voice, I declare aloud, Moi, je viens demain.

When I became a medical student, I had to buy a skeleton. Each medical student

was expected to have a skeleton.

In a place where so many people were dying, it was no problem to find a

skeleton or body for dissection.

We would see a Chinese...

at the university, weaving bodies for dissection piled on a wheelbarrow. And

we could choose whatever body we wanted to dissect it. So seeing people dying of

hunger or of disease or whatever on the street was really very commonplace.

What?

My father was the editor of a newspaper, a writer, a poet

During Shanghai, for many years, he published a magazine in

Russian, English, Yiddish, and here is the cover of this magazine. It was

called in Russian, Nasher Rezin, in English, Our Life, in Yiddish, Unzer

Leben, and here you can also see Chinese characters saying that it was registered

in the Chinese.

in the Chinese office as a newspaper.

This is a special edition on the occasion of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish

New Year.

On the first page is an article about Jews being arrested by the British in

Palestine. This is a 1946 issue, and at that time, the Jews' activity against

the British was increasing.

Here's another article showing three young women, obviously belonging to an

agricultural settlement, and underneath there is writing in Russian that states,

our dear country, our beloved country.

And the purpose of the paper, it was absolutely apolitical. It was to

speak about Jewish culture, to interest the Shanghai Jews in culture in general,

and to reflect what people were doing.

At first, the newspaper was only in Russian, and then they added an English

section because the children of the Russian immigrants in Shanghai, many of

them did not know Russian and spoke English. And later, when the refugees

came, Polish refugees especially, they added a small Yiddish section.

The Russian Jews had in general more in common with... Polish refugees because

with the German refugees they did not have a language in common and very many

of the Russian Jews like my parents knew no Yiddish. The Polish refugees spoke

Polish which is a Slavic language like Russian and many of them spoke Russian.

So when the Polish refugees started coming to Shanghai they became a very

precious addition to the staff of the magazine.

With the German refugees, and the writers, and the journalists, my father

had much less contact because of the language difficulty.

He did meet the editor of the Gelber Post, whose name was Dr. Storfer.

And Storfer was, I believe, a student of Freud.

He had wanted very much to immigrate to London at the same time as Freud, but he

was unable to get the necessary papers.

And finally, in despair, like all the Jews who had no other place to go, he

left for Shanghai because Shanghai required no visa and no proof of

capital.

Before the formation of the ghetto, because there came a period in February

1943 where the Japanese...

separated all the new refugees that come from Europe into a segregated section.

But before that, they lived all over the city, wherever they could afford to

live, and they opened little businesses, whatever they could afford to open.

With the refugees, the situation was different because they had skills.

Many of the Russian Jews did not have these skills.

They came from different backgrounds in Russia, and they had mostly Chinese

working for them, doing the creative things.

But the refugees had skills.

They made blouses, they started having specialists' hats, gloves, and many

different items that they themselves created.

They also opened a few restaurants, they had bakeries, and they made their own

kind of bread.

There are certain things about the refugees that surprised us, because the

Russians, even if they don't have money, they bought food in big quantities.

We were amazed to see refugees buying a few ounces of very thinly sliced

sausage, for example.

The Russians couldn't understand that you buy always a lot of everything.

There was a very big difference. It wasn't only a question of money. It was

a question of customs and attitude.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Later on, when the ghetto was opened and the European Jews were concentrated in

the ghetto, they tried to reproduce some of the atmosphere in Vienna or Berlin or

wherever they came from.

Next to my mother's shop, there was a restaurant called Fiaker, a Viennese

restaurant. It was run by two gentlemen. I don't think either one of them was a

professional in this business.

One of them was a wonderful cook.

They were supposed to have made the best strudel in the world.

This one gentleman wore a high mushroom chef's hat.

The other gentleman used to greet the customers and was sort of in charge. And

very early in the morning, they used to go to the market to buy the food.

Because in Shanghai, the servants went very early in the morning, 5 o'clock or

so, to buy fresh food in the market.

And they produced...

Even today, people that I meet say that their food equaled the best food served

in Vienna.

I don't know.

Thank you very much.

After the Japanese proclamation in February of 1943, the refugees were

segregated in a northern part of Shanghai called Hongqiu.

This meant that we could visit them whenever we wished to visit them, but

they had to have special permits to go out.

Although we really could visit them at any time, the truth of the matter is

that I went there only once.

My parents would not let me go there on my own. What it involved was crossing a

bridge which was called the Garden Bridge.

On the bridge were Japanese guards.

Each Japanese guard was considered as a representative of the Japanese emperor.

Anyone passing a Japanese guard had to bow.

Whether you were a woman or a man, you had to take your hat off.

If the guard for some reason was not satisfied with the way you greeted you,

He could hit you, he could beat you, he could kill you, he could do whatever he

wanted. So people really avoided crossing the bridge.

There were tram tracks going across the bridge.

When the tram passed in front of the Japanese sentinels, the tram would stop

and everybody in the tram had to bow.

The Japanese proclamation came as really a terrible shock and surprise, and many

people were wondering why they had decided to do this.

Now, the proclamation stated very clear that this concerns all European

refugees, the word Jew was not mentioned, who had come to Shanghai

after 1937.

But for all intents and purposes, these were the Jewish refugees.

Now, why should they select the Jewish refugees? Because a person like I, who

was born in Shanghai before 1937, was not involved, nor were any of my friends

or any of my parents' friends.

Many people believe that the reason for that was pressure on the part of the

Japanese allies, the Germans.

At that time, there was a personal envoy of Hitler to Tokyo, whose name was

Meisinger, who later, after the war, was executed.

He was called the Butcher of Warsaw.

When he came to Shanghai, there was fear amongst the Jews.

Meisinger wanted to press the Japanese to exterminate the Jews who were in

Shanghai. They were the 20,000 refugees.

At the end of the war, there were only 13,000 because many had died. And then

about 5,000 Russian Jews, 4,000 Sephardi Jews. That was already quite a number of

people. And the Japanese did not want to do that.

And that instead of that as a kind of compromise, they segregated the Jews in

the ghetto.

But once I did ask my mother, and I went with her together to the ghetto, which

we never called ghetto, by the way. The word ghetto came up, I think, after the

war. We just called it honkyu.

And we went together because I had a friend, a German friend, whose name was

Heinz Bergman. He was a very nice boy. He was a refugee.

But I really had not seen such a mass of foreigners living in such miserable

conditions as the people did in the ghetto.

Either they had the Heime, where many people lived together, and I must admit

I haven't seen it, but I've been told about them, or people rented tiny rooms.

in Chinese houses where they lived without any toilets and without any

possibility to wash themselves.

They had to buy hot water and they had Chinese, I mean, they had toilets which

were actually buckets that were collected in the morning.

The interesting thing is when I went to Shanghai, they still have the buckets in

certain places where they collect what they call the night soil and they spread

them in the countryside.

as a fertilizer, and this of course spread diseases of all kinds.

The refugees came from European cities.

I imagine they lived in better or worse conditions, but this was certainly not

something that they were used to.

Many of them became very ill because of lack of hygienic conditions.

When we came there, we met Heinz, who was very happy to see us, and my mother

insisted that we go somewhere out to a restaurant.

I don't remember the name of the restaurant, but it was a tiny little

coffee shop on a small roof. It was like a small roof garden. There were a couple

of trees there, and it was very pleasant.

reason there was a great demand for razor blades and for toothbrushes for

toothpaste for the everyday things and they exchanged for that precious thing

but I'm sure that it would have been an opportunity to get perhaps a piece of my

some porcelain the atmosphere in the ghetto was it was both depressing and at

the same time it made you feel optimistic

Because in spite of all the conditions, the people had recreated some form of

cultural life. But it was people living in a restricted area under very bad

conditions, in a completely foreign culture, without any idea when and if

the entire thing would end.

I have met Chinese sins who told me that the refugees seemed rich to them in

comparison to themselves.

One thing the refugees were assured of was one meal a day. This was organized

by the other Jews in Shanghai and with the help of some funds that came from

the United States. Everybody had at least one meal a day, which the Chinese

did not necessarily have.

This one meal a day was not enough to keep somebody healthy.

So in addition to that, you had to find some way of getting additional food.

Small children were fed twice a day. They also had dinner.

Thank you.

I think that people's impressions are different according to their age and how

they lived there.

Heinz, at this time, was so happy to see us that I really don't know how he felt.

Besides, I think he was just a very fine person and did not want to share his

misery with other people.

That was my one visit to the ghetto.

Their advantage was that in spite of everything, they had a good education

because the Kadouri family, Sephardi Jewish family, founded a school in Hong

Kong for the refugee children where they had very good teachers and they got a

good basic education.

There was also a Volkshochschule founded by a German Jew, Professor Ton, and he

was one of the few people who was interested in Chinese culture.

he actually gave courses on Chinese culture there. So in a way, they had an

advantage that we didn't have because nobody among the Russian Jews that I

knew was interested in Chinese culture. They were interested in European,

Russian, Jewish culture.

When Americans bombed the ghetto in July of 1945, the refugees, they had a

clinic there, a hospital.

They took everybody in. The Chinese were also wounded, of course.

And it wasn't like before foreigners would give preference to foreigners.

Everybody was taken in. And that was, in my eyes, a very positive development.

In the summer of 1945, it became very obvious.

that things were very bad for the Japanese and that the war would be

coming to an end. It was a very nervous time because all the people trapped in

Shanghai hoped that they would survive these last days, and it was a terrible

feeling to think that perhaps just before the war ended, we would all be

killed.

On the 7th of August, there were reports in the local papers about a

new type bomb.

that had been dropped over Hiroshima.

At that time, everyone realized that something very serious indeed had

happened, and there were rumors that Nagasaki had melted.

It was a very tense period, and suddenly something very strange happened. We were

told to hang on to our radios to listen to an important announcement.

It was an announcement made by the Emperor of Japan, and it was the first

time, perhaps in history, that the common man heard the sacred voice of the

crane, as they called the Emperor's voice. It was a high-pitched voice, and

it was in a Japanese that few Japanese understood because it was a special

voice. classical Japanese used by the imperial family.

What we heard were reports in English and surprisingly in good English because

until then we had had very strange English in Japanese proclamations and so

on. And the war had ended, but it did not seem certain that the war had ended.

Suddenly, there was a declaration by one of the Japanese ministers, Anami, saying

that we have to fight to the end, we have to eat grass, we have to fight with

sticks. There were all kinds of contradictory reports.

And finally, of course, we found out that peace was declared.

And at that moment, there were celebrations all over.

Perhaps the most exciting moment, at least for me, after the war ended, was

when we saw the first Americans.

Suddenly we saw those boys in spotless uniforms.

They looked like semi-gods to us. And they stared at us, we stared at them.

According to them, they had seen...

never seen so many pretty girls, but they had been in the jungle for so long

that they couldn't distinguish.

And for us, certainly, we had never seen such a group of godlike creatures.

They were riding a very strange car called a jeep. First we thought it was

called a peep. We found out it's a jeep, and we thought, how strange that the

Americans invented this ugly car. Is that the most modern car that they can

have? And everybody started inviting them to their homes.

After the war, the situation changed, and actually the refugees were in a

better situation than the state was Russian Jews.

In order to get a visa to the United States, one had to enter within a

certain quota, which depended on your country of origin.

permissions or special permits were given to refugees from Austria, Germany,

and other countries. And very soon we saw them leaving for the countries where

we would have liked to have gone, but we were unable to go. In the case of my

family, my parents came from Russia, so they were on the Russian quota.

My sister and I were on the Chinese quota. The Chinese quota was almost the

hopeless case because directly or indirectly, whether expressed or not,

Americans tried to limit the immigration of Asians.

The solution for Jews like us was the creation of the state of Israel.

Because once Israel was created as a state, every Jew who wanted to immigrate

could immigrate. Not all the Jews wanted to go to Israel, but many went there as

a stopgap solution.

People like my father were very happy to go because he had always been a Zionist.

After the war, many, many things changed. The concessions were returned

to the Chinese.

It was really the end of the imperial system, imperialistic system.

Actually, war in China had not stopped at all. Civil war continued raging, and

the communists were advancing.

It was a very strange situation in Shanghai.

Everybody who could was trying to leave.

Ulrike, Sie haben mich gefragt, wie die Auswanderung vor sich gegangen ist.

Das war nach dem 10. November 1938,

ungefähr genau 57 Jahren, als die Synagogen in Deutschland in

Flammen aufgingen, als die Geschäfte

eingebrochen wurden, und meine Eltern

und jüdische Männer.

Special Jewish men were arrested in tens of thousands and brought to the

concentration camp.

My father and I ran away from our apartment and for 24 hours we were on

the street, from the underground train to the omnibus, to the street train.

Immer nach zwei Stationen sind wir umgestiegen woanders und so waren wir

für drei Wochen weg von zu Hause. Nach drei Wochen kamen wir nach Hause und wir

hatten uns versteckt in diesen drei Wochen, nachdem wir die ersten 24

Stunden, wie gesagt, rumgefahren waren bei einer Tante von mir, die

eine alleinstehende Frau war und wo wir gewusst haben, dass die Gestapo nicht

nach Männern sucht.

After three weeks we came back and my mother said one morning, we're leaving

today and we're coming back with business cards this evening. We don't

know where we're going.

Meine Mutter setzte uns an den Tisch und sagte, habe ich eure Einwilligung, von

hier wegzugehen, wo immer wir Zuflucht finden? Und wir haben gesagt, Mutti, ja.

Und so ist sie gegangen und kam nach Hause mit Schiffskarten nach Shanghai.

Und so sind wir nach Shanghai gegangen.

Und seinerzeit war das eine dreiwöchentliche Fahrt.

With an Italian boss.

We didn't know what was going to happen over there.

After the German conditions, we went out with 10 marks in our pockets.

We were lucky enough to take our house with us.

And so we had various furniture and various household items that

we still took out.

Nach drei Wochen kamen wir nach Shanghai an und da waren wir in einer großen

Stadt.

Ich werde nie vergessen, dass ich an der Reling des Schiffes stand, meine Mutter

stand neben mir und meine Mutter hat immer mit Berliner Dialekt gesprochen.

Sie dreht sich zu mir und sagt, kick dir doch das mal an, das sind doch

Hochhäuser.

My story is a little bit different from Ted's.

In Vienna, everything happened very suddenly.

We didn't have a lot of time to get used to the horror.

On the 10th of November,

had a lot of visitors, people who came to our house to try to hide there.

We lived in a large apartment that used to be a palais and

had secret passages and secret rooms.

And some of our friends knew about that and came to our house to hide.

Men came to our house to hide.

My father hid them all.

and they were all safe.

We had prepared food and drink in those rooms and they were able to

stay there for a week.

My father wouldn't hide.

He insisted, being a lawyer, that he had not broken any laws and he wasn't going

to hide.

When the Gestapo came to the house, they asked only one question, are you Jewish?

If you are, come with us.

Is there anybody else in the house?

He said, no.

You can look around.

He was so firm in the way he answered, and he was there ready to be

taken, that they never looked.

They took him, and he was brought to Dachau.

After that, my mother was very anxious to have me leave the country as soon as

possible and arranged for me to be on one of the children's transports,

Kindertransporte, which brought me to England.

I was extremely scared.

I'd never been away from my parents.

And I got on the train crying.

And the train brought us to Holland, first through

Germany and then to Holland. As soon as we crossed the border, dozens of people

boarded the train, distributing chocolate to all the children on the

train.

It seemed a little bit better then.

We crossed the channel in a boat overnight.

and arrived in England where we were billeted in what used to

be a summer holiday camp, except this was in December. It was icy cold, and we

were given, there was no heat, but we were given hot water bottles to keep us

warm.

After a while, the various kids were sent to various

places in England,

I had an aunt who had emigrated before I did and lived in London.

And I begged them to send me to London because at least I knew somebody there.

And they did.

I was taken in by a group of

people who belonged to a church.

who had rented a large house and had

opened it to probably about 10 or

12 children, young girls from Germany and Austria.

They stayed anonymous. They didn't want to be thanked. They hired a housekeeper

to take care of us.

sent us to school, allowed us to go to synagogue and treated us beautifully.

After a while, we were evacuated because the bombing started in England and my

parents were very upset about the fact that I was in great

danger.

In the meantime, my father had been released from

the concentration camp because he had a lot of friends in foreign countries who

started questioning his being

abducted. And at that time

the German government was still interested in the opinion of people in

foreign countries.

And he was one of the few people who were released in December. My parents

had to leave immediately, and the only place they were able to go to

was Shanghai.

I know that they had help from my uncle, who at that time lived in France, who

were later killed in Auschwitz.

But they saved my parents, and my parents got passage.

aboard a ship that left from Marseille to Shanghai.

It was Jewish organizations who helped me get a passage aboard a Japanese

ship where someone had canceled the trip, and I was put aboard the ship

on the way to Shanghai. I had to get ready in 24 hours and

had had no sleep.

When the train arrived in Liverpool, we were all herded onto this Japanese

ship, and about eight people shared a room, and it was

below the water level.

As soon as we boarded the ship, the engines started

up. They were quite noisy because we were so close to the engine room.

But I was exhausted.

And I crawled into my bunk and immediately fell

asleep.

I was awakened by air raid sirens.

I couldn't believe it.

An air raid?

Now we were aboard a neutral ship which was supposed to have left

the harbor, and I heard the engines going, and I was sure that we had left

Liverpool long ago.

How come there's an air raid?

Everybody around me was laughing.

I said, why are you laughing?

This is the all clear.

The air raid started.

Many hours ago, it was the worst air raid Liverpool had ever experienced.

Many ships around us were in flames.

We couldn't turn our lights on even though the ship was a neutral ship

because we were in the harbor and we would have illuminated everything else.

The all clear was the only thing that woke me. The bombs that dropped around

us. The horrible noise of this huge area didn't wake me, as only a

16-year-old can sleep.

For the next few days, we had to wear life belts around the clock.

And a pilot helped us get through the Irish Sea to Dublin and

then to Belfast. And finally, we were on our way to Lisbon.

and out in the open sea.

It took us three months to reach China because you couldn't pass

through the Mediterranean.

There were a lot of young kids aboard the ship, primarily college kids,

who had been sent by their English parents who were stationed

in India and in China.

had been sent to English schools, to boarding school in England.

And the parents were getting quite panicky and tried to get the children to

come and join them.

So there were a lot of young English kids aboard.

There were also some Japanese people aboard who were going home

to their nice, peaceful country, Japan.

This was in 1940, remember?

There were people who were from India and from Burma and from

South Africa.

Everybody who could leave England at that time tried to leave.

The only reason I was aboard the ship was that somebody cancelled or else I

would never have been able to get on there.

Life aboard the ship was not terrible at all.

Food was good. We played shuffleboard.

We talked to each other and exchanged our life stories, which were quite

short because we were mostly very young.

Because there were so many other young people aboard, it wasn't as scary as it

would have been had I been all alone among a lot of worried

adults.

Our first stop was Port Said.

We saw that. And from there, of course, through the Suez Canal, past the

Indian coast.

The only thing I want to discuss with you here about the trip is again, I come

back to my mother.

We got into a big storm in the Mediterranean.

And one table after the other.

We eat the

food up and down.

Stuart, bring us a bottle of Chianti.

Und wir haben uns so mulmig gefühlt. Nie hätten wir den Mut gehabt, unserer

Mutter das, oder meinem Vater, seiner Frau, das einzugestehen. Wir haben

gegessen, rauf und runter, und ein Glas nach dem anderen von dem Chianti

getrunken. Viel, viel später haben wir dann alle vier gesagt, dass wir

uns so schlecht gefühlt haben, aber kein Mensch hätte gewagt, das zu gestehen.

The second thing I wanted to tell you, I already said, as my mother said to me,

there you will earn something, man.

And then she looked at me and said, you know, Shanghai is the sin bubble of the

world.

And you are a young man.

If I tell you not to go to the bars and to start something with the girls, you

will tell me, yes, yes, and you will go.

The first port was Lisbon.

It was also the last port where I could go ashore, where they permitted me to go

ashore. I was stateless, I had no passport, and nobody wanted to allow me

to come ashore.

Lisbon was very interesting, but from there we went all the way to Cape Town,

then to New London, Durban, Bombay.

Colombo, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.

And today I can say that I've been to all these places and yet I've never seen

them.

I've never gone ashore.

When I met my parents, my first question was, How did you know that I was going

to arrive today?

You're here to meet me. How did you find out?

And they said, we never did find out.

We've met every boat that has arrived during the past two and a half months,

hoping that you would be on one. And today we can finally say hello to

you. And it was quite a reunion.

Everybody was crying and happy.

And I hardly noticed the city of Shanghai because I was

looking at my parents' faces all the time.

A ship goes to Shanghai,

over the sea.

With him a sailor,

she loves him so much.

Er sagte beim Aktien, noch lachen zu ihr,

mein Schiff fährt nach Shanghai, mein Herz

bleibt bei dir, dann hat sie gewartet.

Sein Tag um beinahe hat viel voller

Sehnsucht.

Thank you.

Okay? Then we arrived.

My mother...

I was of the opinion that we have to move to a good district so that I, as a

young man, have the chance to get a good job.

I spoke fluent English at the time.

I went to an English school in Berlin.

My grandmother was an American and was the first to speak English with me. So

I didn't have a problem with the English language.

And my mother completely hoped for it.

that I would have a good job, a good career, even in Shanghai.

We didn't have a lot of money, but we had our furniture.

We had household goods that we sold.

We also smuggled shares into a mattress.

which we took to America, to Shanghai.

And of course, as we arrived, my mother took the mattress apart, took the

shares out.

And I was a very young man and had a bit of inhibitions to talk to other people.

And I had a cousin, an uncle of mine, with his family came three weeks earlier

to Shanghai.

And so we went together with my cousin, my father, and I to a stockbroker, how

do you say that in German, a broker, to sell these shares.

I was Pete, and as it was called in Berlin, I opened my mouth.

And my cousin told the broker, we came here to sell you chairs, C

-H-A-I-R-S.

And the man said,

He doesn't want to sell you chairs.

He wants to sell you shares.

Then the clerk turned to me and said, where did you learn your English?

And I told him that.

And he said to me, do you already have a job? I said, no, you will have a job in

a few days.

We gave him the shares.

I went home.

And three days later I got a call and got a job with Edith's Restaurant

Company, one of the largest English companies in the world.

And so habe ich meine Stellung bekommen, weil ich meinen Mund aufgemacht habe.

Because we didn't have chairs, but we had chairs.

Es war ein wunderbares Leben.

Und wir haben in der French Concession gewohnt.

Ich habe ein gutes Gehalt gehabt.

Mein Vater hat auch gearbeitet.

Und aus dem Grund, weil ich in einer englischen Firma war, habe ich mein

Leben an und für sich in zwei Kulturen gelebt.

The English culture, and yes, we have not in Hongkiu, and Hongkiu was the

district in which the most immigrants lived, in shot houses,

in broken houses, which they built in homes, which the Jewish community

provided them with, where 57 men lived in a dormitory.

and 57 women lived in an extra dormitory.

I wanted to be known as a very young man, not as a German, so I wore the

Union Jack in my lapel, so that God forbid no one would consider me a German

immigrant.

And I also went to various English clubs, I am a volunteer in the English

SVC, Shanghai Volunteer Company Corps.

When I wanted to, I went to Hongqiu and spent time with the other people, with

my German compatriots, to be together.

When I first arrived, I found out that I was very lucky. My father was working as

a judge at an international court that had been established to enable

people who didn't speak Chinese to settle differences with each other.

So he was working, but I wanted to find out whether I couldn't find a job as

well.

I had done a lot of artwork.

studied dress design, and I took my sketches to various

places, salons.

Actually, there was not very much ready to wear.

Mostly people bought custom-made dresses and suits, and they

were made in various dressmaker salons. And one of them was probably the

fanciest one in town, in the Palace Hotel.

and I applied for a job there and showed the owner the sketches that I had

done, and I was hired.

And I was very proud of myself. I was extremely young, and I should have been

in school, but instead I had a very good job, one I really enjoyed.

This is the kind of stuff that I did there.

I sketched clothes,

usually using

fabric that they had in

stock.

Or I sketched clothes after looking at the customer and getting her idea of

what she really wanted.

After March closed, she gave me a beautiful letter of recommendation,

which I've kept to this day.

All of this came to an end when the Japanese decided that

we had to be interned. The war was on, and soon thereafter, they

confined us to Hankyu, where I hadn't lived prior to that time either.

My parents had an apartment in the international settlement.

So I, too, had escaped the environment of

Hong Kong until then. But now we had to move there.

In the middle of the night, my houseboy woke me up and said, Master, do you hear

the bombardment?

The war broke out and the Japanese sank the British boats.

I was a member of the Shanghai Volunteer Corps.

Because of a well-trained soldier, I put on my uniform,

put on my rifle and marched, as I believed, to our place where we meet

to defend the city.

The soldiers took my rifle and that they didn't shoot me in the night.

That was a great miracle.

That was the end of the great war in which I worked as a soldier.

I went back to my job, but then, a year later,

a Japanese military inspector was employed in my company. And here I

refused to work for the Japanese.

Then I had to move into the ghetto in 1943.

The Japanese had exchanged our good apartment in the French Concession with

a dirty little house where three families

lived together.

We had to move into a very primitive house.

We thought it was really terrible that we had to live in this designated area

and were unable to leave it, except if we applied for a pass and we had

to have a good reason to leave.

Or else we were imprisoned in what was definitely the worst part

of Shanghai, the part that had been destroyed.

in an earlier war by the Japanese and our living conditions were

absolutely horrible.

We had no running water, no toilets.

Let's be doing that.

Truck came around every morning to collect what was in the

buckets. We had no electric stoves and no gas stoves.

We cooked charcoal.

Had little containers, flower pots filled with charcoal.

that we had to heat up in order to cook, make tea, make anything, cook anything.

And mostly we tried to hurry up the fire, try to make

it work faster by fanning it with a Chinese fan.

It was a very primitive lifestyle.

We had a lot of mice and rats too.

For people who, until then, didn't have to live in this way. So it was

really a very difficult adjustment for us to make.

The poor people who had lived in this area right from the start, right from

the time they arrived in Shanghai, of course, had to put up with this for

much, much longer than we did.

Thank you.

Ulrich asked how we came out with the Chinese.

Fantastic. In the big picture, we were together.

We suffered together from the occupation of the Japanese.

They were their enemies, they were our enemies.

When I was a child, I used to go to school.

I used to go to school. I used to go to school.

I used to go to school.

I used to go to school.

. . . . .

. .

.

. .

. .

.

. .

. .

.

.

. . . .

.

That was the beginning of the Shanghai history, the ghetto of Shanghai.

Hongqiu was a history of which there was no second.

There were about 20,000 German immigrants without money.

A part of the city was built from destroyed houses in the small Vienna.

There was a small Breslau, a small Frankfurt and a small Berlin.

Restaurants were built, cabarets were made,

an opera was there, an orchestra, two orchestras were there.

It was a fantastic cultural life that the immigrants built with nothing.

We still had those little restaurants where you could get a glass of water for

50 cents because you couldn't drink the water otherwise.

And we still had the restaurants, we still had the little coffee houses, we

still had the theater, in spite of the fact that it was confined in a ghetto.

So anyway, I didn't have any money and I wanted to take her out.

There was a pawn shop.

I had one pair of pants that didn't have holes.

All the others had holes in the crotches, which nobody could see, but I

knew that they were there.

I had one suit, which was a Navy suit that had pants that didn't have any

holes. So I took my pants to the pawn shop and pawned my pants and put

on a pair of beigey, pinky type of flannel pants that I had, plus

my Navy for my suit, my jacket. And I came to her place.

And I said, we're going out somewhere for a drink.

She gives me one look, and she says, where's your suit?

You're looking like a clown. I'm not going out with the way you look.

And that was the lowest day of my life. There, I had pawned my pants to take her

out, and there she didn't want to go out because I didn't have the pants. So you

solved the situation.

However, I did decide to go out with him after all.

Because I loved him.

And this is now almost, well, it's actually more than 50 years ago,

because we'll be married for 50 years next June.

Thank you.

No, they don't make it.

One of the most famous magazines, the Yellow Post,

was started in Shanghai in 1939.

It was a magazine of a very high cultural level.

Der Herausgeber war A.J. Stoffer. Ich habe den Herrn Stoffer und

seine Mitarbeiter gekannt.

Es war ein fantastisches Magazin, das jedem kulturführenden Land zur Ehre

gereichen wurde.

I was also asked why it was called the Yellow Post.

I have no answer to that. Only probably that in Germany or in Austria a magazine

of a high level was published that the Yellow Post is.

Because we also had a newspaper, a daily newspaper, called the SZ am Mittag, the

Shanghai newspaper am Mittag.

Of course, it was modeled on the BZ am Mittag, the Berlin newspaper am Mittag.

that the Mittagsblatt was in the city of Berlin.

Not only that, we also published the Jewish Newsblatt, which was published

every week and brought news from the synagogues, from the Jewish community.

There was a daily newspaper that we had and there was also a Shopping News.

The family magazine, which of course

... ...

And I can also tell you, they also built an hour-long hotel there, because of

course different people had to do everything human.

And there was no other place, because 23, 24 people lived in each house.

Café Imperial, pleasant.

Kühler Aufenthalt, aufmerksame Bedienung, mäßige Preise, unsere

Spezialität, der gute Kaffee. Und so geht es durch diese ganze

Shoppingzeitung natürlich los.

Da war ein Palmengarten und ich habe das in Deutschland gefragt, ob das noch

heute gibt.

Aber zu meiner Jugend gab es Kaffee- und Biergärten, wo man seinen eigenen Kaffee

brachte und nur Wasser.

He bought the water that was poured onto the coffee.

And on all these, in Berlin and in Treptow and everywhere, there was a big

sign on it. The old need is not broken.

Here families can cook coffee.

I spoke of the great work that was done in Hongqiu,

namely that from the ruins of a shot-down Chinese district a German

middle town was built. Don't imagine that it looked like this in Weimar or in

Erfurt, because we finally only had to work with the shot-down houses.

And there we have...

All kinds of things were built up in the ghetto.

But we made it as nice as we could.

If it wasn't for the ghetto, I would never have met my wife.

One day I was in Berlin with a friend of mine on the street and I saw her on the

other side of the street.

I didn't know her because I couldn't get to know all 20,000 people.

And also not because she came from England quite late. So I asked my

friend, who's this broad over there?

And my friend said, that's the Lange.

Die Tochter von Dr.

Langer, dem Richter.

Und durch eine befreundete Familie haben wir uns kennengelernt.

Und eines Tages, und das hat sie mir nie vergessen, war ich in ihrem Haus, wie

ein Air Raid, wie ein Luftalarm kam.

Und da haben wir beide uns geduckt unter einer Treppe, die sicher war.

Und da habe ich zu ihr gesagt, wenn der Krieg zu Ende ist, und wenn ich meinen

Job wieder habe,

However,

at the time we moved there, The war was really getting serious.

And at times, Hong Kong was being bombed by the Americans because the

Japanese had put an awful lot of ammunition depots into that

area, hoping that it would be safe because all these white people were

living there, that we would be killed.

That wasn't a big deal for them. And maybe it would help and the American Air

Force would not bomb these places where they collected all the ammunition.

A number of people got killed by the bombs.

A larger number of people got killed by being put into jail for

all kinds of very tiny infractions.

Because you were invariably bitten by the life, etc., in the prison

that carries typhus.

And two weeks later, people got sick, and we didn't have medicine,

and they died.

People came out of prison after a two-day sentence and said goodbye to all

their friends because they knew they weren't going to be alive three weeks

later.

There were three Jewish communities in Shanghai.

Those were the old British and Sephardic Jews.

Then came the Russian Jews after the revolution in 1917.

And then came 20,000 German, Belgian, Dutch and Austrian Jews as

Hitler marched into Europe.

The English Jews, the American Jews, the Belgian Jews, the Dutch Jews were

interned immediately.

The German Jews were then locked up in the ghetto because the Japanese knew

exactly

that the German Jews had no sympathy for the Japanese.

And the rumor said that the gas chambers in Wusong, which was a suburb of

Shanghai, had been built into which they had brought us in earlier or later.

The Russian Jews were left alone,

because they worked with the Japanese.

The war was over for us in the ghetto. We had small radio devices with short

waves. We knew that the Japanese emperor had capitulated.

And then we all turned on the light, which we could not do until then.

And we all walked around and we all hugged each other.

And I immediately, the next day...

I didn't have a pair of shoes in which there were no holes.

I didn't have the money and I lived in the ghetto for two years. Two days later

we took a rickshaw and went to the first internment camp in

which various of my colleagues and British people were interned.

And they sat inside and chatted.

There were 20,000 of us, and we just didn't want to be

confined any longer.

And we just broke out of there as a group, while these people were a little

bit more isolated from each other, and in very small groups, and they were

afraid. There were a lot of children in there, and they were scared that their

children might be harmed.

And until we came and told them that they were safe and they could leave,

they were afraid to come out of those horrible camps.

American Air Force flew information over the city.

Hundreds of planes flew over the city and the whole

population cheered.

Everybody was cheering at the same time looking up and cheering. The same planes

that had bombed Shanghai were now welcomed because they were the

liberators. of the city, and it was a wonderful sight to see them.

People were laughing and crying at the same time, and screaming and yelling,

and the whole city was celebrating.

There wasn't a Japanese soldier to be seen.

I have no idea where they were hiding, but they were totally invisible after

having been everywhere.

They were nowhere.

to be seen.

I walked into the city the next morning. Now, to explain what we had, we owned

three of the biggest international hotels in the city. We owned about 60%

of all the high-rise real estate there. We owned the bus company.

We owned the electric company, all owned by E.D. Sassoon and Company.

And I was the only one who left, who came. So I came with my

shoes and holes, and I looked awful, and I took possession of all our assets.

And my Chinese friends were fantastic.

There was something that was called the bamboo telephone in China.

If somebody knew something, everybody knew it. It was immediately proclaimed

through the bamboo telephone. So they found out that Alexander from Edith as

soon as come back, one of the chefs of the Cathay Hotel, one of the finest

international hotels in the world.

Came back, they put me into a royal suite upstairs.

I brought Gertrude in, introduced her as my cousin, and they were very, very

surprised that I later on married my own cousin. Your sister did.

Oh, my sister? No, no. Maybe.

And we had a dinner like we, you don't believe it, with steaks, and we got

so sick because our stomach couldn't take it anymore.

how to celebrate, especially after the war was over.

Parties, parties everywhere.

A lot of us were very young, and we were so happy that the war was over.

And we had this wonderful New Year's Eve party in Ted's house, and we

decorated for it, and we brought in music for it, and we invited at

least 40 people.

who crowded into this small house, and we danced, and I made all

kinds of decorations, a couple of which I've brought along and kept ever since,

which show you how we welcomed 1946,

the first peaceful year after World War II.

At one time, right after the war was over, I worked for the U

.S. Forces, China Theater, as a civilian employee.

At first, I was a sign painter, painting the signs for the army that said, keep

out, do not enter, caution, etc., on nice big wooden

signs. When I left, That job, I got a very nice letter of recommendation.

Later, I worked for the United States Army Postal Service as a

searcher, which means that I had to try to trace soldiers

who had gone from one post to another. to another and were never going to get

their mail unless I could find them. And that was a very interesting job, and I

took pride in the fact that I wasn't going to let those poor people be

without their mail.

Again, I received a very nice letter of recommendation when I left.

Neither letter have I ever used again in my long

career. as a buyer and merchandising manager.

We were married in 1946 on June the 9th,

and this is our wedding picture.

And we look quite European on this wedding picture.

However, our wedding certificate

is in Chinese.

And to this day, I don't know what I find.

We both find it, and so did our fathers and some witnesses.

But, of course, we have no idea what it says.

For all we know, it might be a divorce.

However, we kept it anyway, and we also have a Jewish wedding certificate,

which doesn't look half as interesting, because at that time they evidently

didn't have those nice-looking ketubahs.

What are you?

Yeah.

Thank you.

Okay.

Sit down.

Sit down.

Sit down.

Okay.

go inside

Thank you.

Thank you.

There was terrible inflation in China right after the war.

When we booked our passage from Shanghai to San Francisco,

the cost was $720.

You were not allowed to pay the American president line in American dollars.

It wasn't legal.

had those illegal U.S. dollars anyway.

But in order to pay for a passage, we had to change the 740

U.S. dollars into Chinese dollars, which we did

on the morning of the day we were supposed to go and pick up our tickets.

We couldn't carry them.

Couldn't carry the money, which was bundled in hundreds. I think it was $27

million, and the largest nomination was a $10 note.

People didn't pay for things in single notes.

You always paid in bundles of hundreds, which were tied together and

stamped to show that they were a hundred.

We had to get a rickshaw and fill it.

with Chinese dollar notes and finally arrived at the American

president's line's office to pay for our tickets.

Between the time we had changed the money in the morning and the time we

arrived at the American president's line, the Chinese dollar had lost so

much value.

that we didn't have enough money to pay for the tickets, even though it was

enough money in the morning of that very same day.

And we had to go back and get another about 20 U.S. dollars and exchange them

and bring the money back so that we could finally pay for our tickets.