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…But first—a morning, 7:00 AM, my Father’s face was half shaven, half still lathered—a knock on the door! Four uniformed men, each at least six feet tall, with bayonets fixed on their rifles, came into our flat. My Father and I had to go with them now. I was sent home because, at that time, they did not yet take children. (I still remember the dress I wore!) I ran all the way to be with my Mother. She was near collapse. That night, and for the next three days, we went from place to place, looking for him, starting with the place where he and I had first been taken, each time being told curtly to go someplace else. On the fourth day, miraculously, he came home. With forty other men, he had spent three days in a cell meant for one person. In came an SS man, pointing at random, “You, you, you, run. If you make it to the door, you are free; if not, Dachau!” My Dad carried an old man, and they only barely made it. That is how close we were to joining the Six Million.

A few days later, with the unbelievable total sum of $4.00 US per person, the maximum we were permitted to take, we took a train to Budapest to say goodbye to relatives (whom we never saw again) and then, on to Genoa, Italy, to board the first ship to leave Europe with Jewish refugees. It took three weeks on the ship “Conte Bianca Mano” to get to Shanghai. As we approached the Yellow Sea, we saw a startling sight: the water changed from blue to yellow on a line as sharp as if drawn with a ruler. This was the outpouring of the Yangtze River, mightiest in China, at the mouth of which lies Shanghai. We had to transfer to a tender to go ashore. After fifty years, I still remember dropping my purse into the mucky water, only to have it scooped up by a coolie in a sampan who returned it to me. This was my introduction to China!

It was its location, directly on the Yangtze, which made Shanghai such a major world trade center. From the tender, we disembarked directly into the heart of the city. Once there, we were greeted by members of the HIAS and of the JOINT. A few people had come before us, arriving in small, scattered numbers, via the Trans-Siberia Express; and these recently arrived “early settlers” were already helping us to get settled. Since we were the first large transport, we were lucky enough to be quartered in private homes, owned by White Russians, who, incidentally, needed the money they got from the rent we paid to supplement their meager incomes. Ex-Russian aristocrats housing Jews! One room to a family—Paradise. There was also a large number of Russian Jews established in Shanghai after the Russian Revolution, who, as I understood, were not too thrilled by our arrival. For years, there had been a number of synagogues in Shanghai. Now one of them is a warehouse, the façade of which is still decorated with menorahs and Stars of David.

The next group of refugees was housed in abandoned schools. There were bunk beds; each family was assigned the necessary number of beds, and only a curtain was drawn around them for “privacy.” Not exactly a morale-building situation. There were soup kitchens, and we all availed ourselves of them. In a way, it was easy. If you were a doctor, you could hang out your shingle—no questions asked. Dentists, lawyers, beauticians, dressmakers, black marketeers—we had all of those and more. Some of our “nice” Jewish girls plied the oldest trade in the world. Sometimes, even, their husbands or fathers procured for them.

HIAS gave loans to establish businesses. My father and another man pooled their loans and opened a restaurant, the “Colibri,” the German word for Hummingbird. Theoretically, they shared the management, but it was really my Dad who ran the place, although his partner did his share of the work. My Mom cooked; I waited tables. The kitchen staff included one Frau Faltishchek and a Chinese cook whose name was “Flitz,” the closest he could come to managing “Fritz.” I can still see the big burly fellow, with his round face and button nose. Eventually, we did well enough so that we could, and needed to, hire more help, but it was still a lot of work. Boy, was it ever! I used to peel apples at 6:00 AM, so my mother could make apfelstrudel when she came down, and I took care of all the bachelors for breakfast.

Meanwhile, there were bars and nightclubs with music, dancing and entertainment. The roof of one four-story building was turned into a roof garden, where there were both five o’clock tea dances and nightly dancing. I often went straight from work to a dance and directly back to work at 6:00 AM. NOBODY was going to cheat me out of my balls, not even Hitler—and I didn’t turn into a pumpkin, either. Hospitals run by our own doctors and nurses were also established, of course, and all of that confined in a tiny district called Honkew. Honkew was a part of town that was ravaged by the Sino-Japanese War of 1937. In no time at all, our industrious Jews built it up and made order out of shambles. We had become 20,000 strong, with Jews from all over Europe. Some of us got jobs with English, French, or Italian companies. Somehow, all businesses were thriving.

There were quite a number of people whose parents had converted and brought their children up as Christians. These people did not know what hit them when Hitler suddenly pronounced them “Jewish Vermin.” They, too, blended into our society. Unfortunately, there were quite a number of people who came out of concentration camps and were so totally demoralized that they never go on their feet. One example I remember is a doctor who was reduced to foraging from garbage cans and talking only to himself. To the end, people called him ”Herr Doctor.” On the other hand, there was an opera singer…but I will tell you about her later.

There were a number of huge dance halls with Chinese big bands playing all the latest American swing. The floors of these places were on springs, and you were bouncing while you were dancing; it was a fabulous sensation. Cinemas showed all the latest American movies. There was one Casino named Farrel. If you spent an evening there and lost all your money, they wined and dined you and sent you home in a chauffeured limousine. That was class! In the middle of town was a huge race course, which contained within its track at least six tennis courts and a full-sized soccer field, if not more (I think there were actually two soccer fields there, but I’m not sure.)

In our first quarters, we had reasonably modern sewage facilities. That luxury did not last, and we were introduced to one of several delightful aspects of Chinese life I will mention to you briefly. In the little court yard by our quarters was a small lean-to with our washing and toilet facilities. We had to go to the landlord’s water tap for our water (by now, our landlord was Chinese), and on the way frequently saw, unavoidably, he or members of his family sitting on the pot in the open. In the mornings, we had to chop through the ice of our water supply to wash ourselves. As for our waste disposal, there was a coolie with a cart who came every morning to collect the accumulated “nightsoil,” as the Chinese delicately referred to it. If, for some reason, he didn’t like our smile when we saw him, he threatened to dump his entire cart load in our courtyard. It never happened, however, because the stuff was too precious. What did he do with it? All the accumulated nightsoil of the great city was loaded onto barges and taken to the countryside for fertilizer for the crops we ate. In order to take a bath, we went to a water shop on one of the main roads, where we bought little wooden sticks with which we paid for boiling hot water which was brought in to our house by a coolie in buckets suspended from a bamboo pole on his shoulder.

The Chinese are really very industrious people by nature. Whatever the family enterprise—tailor shops, grocery stores, whatever—the whole extended family worked (the grandmother took care of the small children), and the shop was kept open seven days a week, 24 hours a day. An extra ceiling was put in above the shop, and there the family took turns sleeping, in the old hot-bed turnover manner. (In countless little stores in Hong Kong to this day, that is still the practice.) Walking down the main drag of Shanghai, Nanking Road/Bubbling Well Road, one could witness another enterprise: Amahs were selling the favors of little girls—“Masta, wantchee little girl?” On every sidewalk, you could see “barbershops”—one chair right out in the open, barber-cloth-swathed customer in full view, getting his hair cut, the services of which included having his ears cleaned with a swab on a long bamboo stick.

In the International Settlement, there was a lovely little park, called the Bridge Park. At its entrance, in typical British style and wisdom, there was a sign: “Dogs and Chinese not allowed.” There was a Shanghai Volunteer Corps made up of Europeans of every persuasion, which was a sort of guard-force militia. The International Settlement was connected to Honkew by the Garden Bridge. Honkew was populated mainly by Chinese, in addition to which were the poorer Russians and us. A Chinese needed a pass to cross the bridge. One day, my cousin Kurt was stopped and asked for a pass. I’ll never know why; he certainly doesn’t look Chinese. He had a hell of a time getting permission to pass. Bear in mind that up to this point, we refugees, although we lived in Honkew, were free to travel anywhere in Shanghai. Our mode of transportation? Coolie-pulled rickshaws of course, later followed by pedicabs for the coolies who could afford them.

All of this, and more was “our Shanghai,” or rather, a tiny part of it, the “Paris of the Orient,” a sprawling metropolis teeming with a pre-World War II population of ten million people, and growing. Then came December 7, 1941, and with it THE EDICT. Once again, our whole world turned upside down.

Early in the morning of December 7, “Pearl Harbor Day,” we were awakened by a thunderclap of a sound, and later found out that the Japanese had sunk an Italian ocean liner named “Conte Verde” in the Harbor. Very soon after this infamous day, the Japanese decreed that all people who came to Shanghai after 1937 without a valid passport had to move into a designated area of very restricted size within Honkew, in other words, a ghetto. This was “THE EDICT,” and, of course, it applied to us. British offices and businesses had to close. If the owners were lucky, they were permitted to leave Shanghai, but most of them were put into prison camps. We could not leave “Our District” unless we could prove that we had a job outside, and then we needed a special pass to go back and forth each day. Believe me, if you did not have to, you did not put yourself through the agony of standing in line for hours, and then being mentally and, yes, physically abused by the Japanese, most specifically, by a Mr. Goya, a five-foot high sadist, who had to stand on a chair and he, indeed, did so, to slap six-foot-tall men, who had to take this degradation without reaction or protest. Women were not exempt: Goya didn’t care whom he slapt; he enjoyed it.

But, even in the ghetto, life went on, despite all. There was, for example, an opera singer from Basel, whom I mentioned in passing earlier, who was not too proud to work with a group of very good amateurs to put on operettas and serious theater. They would rent a movie house for a few days and put on their shows. Believe it or not, we had a lot of fun. Sleep was secondary, but we worked very hard. Our little amateur group became very well known throughout Shanghai, and even the Germans came into our ghetto to get a bit of culture. If you had the money, there was nothing you couldn’t buy during the war, and you could live on seven US dollars per month. We could even buy nylons—if you could afford $18.00 US per pair. With care, they lasted three years, however; they were not made with out current built-in obsolescence. There was, of course, staggering inflation in the Chinese currency we used, the yuan. Bus fare would reach 300 yuan, a pair of shoes two million! Then we would be told to turn in our bushel baskets full of money on “new” yuan of lower denominations, only to replay the same cycle. My husband, Carl, would bring his salary home in a suitcase full of bills; and he was not that well paid. A friend of ours then, now a friend of ours in Denver, Paul Kolitz, spoke a fair Chinese, and, therefore, became the spokesman for the tenants of the building in which he lived. He tells of making a deal with the landlord to fix the rent for a full six months, for which the tenants wanted to kill him. After four months, the landlord could only buy a loaf of bread for one person’s rent, after five months, a book of matches.

Toward the end of the war, the Americans were bombing Shanghai. We hid under stairwells, and my Mother would throw herself, not over me, but over my husband, to make sure nothing happened to him. After things would quiet down, there was a lot of looting by the Chinese; for some reason, our shop wasn’t touched. My father and I would “join the looters,” going into the shops of our neighbors to collect furs, sewing machines, and other valuables, which we took to our shop for safekeeping for their owners.

I have mentioned my husband, Carl, twice. During the bombings I just mentioned, he was my intended. We were married in June of 1945—the war ended in August. There were cars in Shanghai, but no gasoline. Like a proper Jewish Queen, I went to the Synagogue in a borrowed horse-drawn carriage. I am probably the only Occidental in Denver with both a Hebrew and a Chinese Ketubah, as well as an English one. You’ll be welcome to see it.

We had a sit-down-dinner in the one room where my parents and I lived; and after that, half of Jewish Honkew came—to the same room—for our reception. We had a record player for music, and we danced into 9:00 PM. Unlike Cinderella, our coach did not turn into a pumpkin at midnight—everyone had to be off the street and in their homes by 10:00; otherwise, jail, or worse. A double minyan of our friends walked us to our home, and Lizzy Berger’s father, Herr Salzman, put up our mezuzah. Lizzi and her husband, Y’chiel, now also live in Denver, but West Denver. The Kolitzes and the Bergers were the only people I knew when I first came to Denver, except for Paully Kasztl, whom I knew in Shanghai, but didn’t know lived in Denver. Shirley and Paully made all the difference.

In the meantime, unbeknownst to use, ovens had been built in the Ward Road jail, and plans had been made to put us either in them or in ships which were to be scuttled in mid-ocean. This was the infamous “Fugu Plan.” Fortunately, the Japanese authorities were divided on this issue; some blindly followed the Germans, and were ready to do their bidding, others did not. Perhaps that was what saved us.

And then, one day, after many bombings of the city, there was a peculiar hush, it was early evening. People walked out of their homes to see what was happening. The Japanese had stealthily left in trucks, and Shanghai was without anyone in authority or to police the city. Although there was looting during the bombings, now everyone was on their best behavior until the Americans came and restored our lives to a semblance of normalcy.

Sometime later, the victorious Chinese army marched through Shanghai in straw thongs, with umbrellas and blankets slung over their shoulders. They looked like ragamuffins. People who had visas to immigrate somewhere began to leave, and the Jewish population dwindled. My Father and Uncle were the only two people born in Yugoslavia, though of Viennese parentage and brought up in Vienna; and they were able to leave early, thanks to a relatively free quota and a friend in the US who sent them an affidavit enabling them to come to the United States. My mother, of course, went on my father’s quota with him.

My father was very resourceful. He managed to get an interview with Senator Javits. Together they got through a bill: children to parents, parents to children. Whichever was in the USA could send for the others. And so, after 2 years it was our turn. Meanwhile I became pregnant. We were told we would be put into a concentration camp in Manila. My husband persuaded me to go to my parents without him. I went by myself in my 9th month, on a propeller plane—52 hours from Shanghai to Tokyo—Wake Island—Midway—Honolulu—San Francisco and then by train to NY. There I had my baby, and 6 weeks later Karl could also come. Our long ordeal was over, and another Odyssey to the Orient later in the future began—but that is another story.

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