August 1939: Kurt Wick & family leave Vienna for Trieste and Shanghai:

Unfortunately, quite a few high up Jewish leaders said, ‘It's not a good country for you. Lots of crime, lots of opium, drugs, criminality, brothels. It's dangerous.’ It put quite a few people off. My mother's mother, sister & brother stayed behind. They didn't want to go. Unfortunately, they were all killed, like most people.

Kurt was two when he arrived in Shanghai.

We didn't have any homes. We had no food, we had no money, we had nothing. Luckily for us there was a Sephardic community there from the 1850s. The Sassoons, the Kadoories & the Hardoons, about 700 Jewish Sephardim there. They owned most of the Bund, a lot of the properties, they had palatial houses. They decided to help. So, they bought up empty warehouses in an area of Shanghai called Hongkew, bombed in ’32 by the Japanese. Cheap primitive properties known as 'Heime'.

Families lived separated by blankets, very little privacy. But at least they were safe. They set up food kitchens. I remember the rows of taps for washing. We had the basics of life & we had the Jewish Kadoorie School & 6 synagogues. Gradually, they set up committees to help as well. So we survived. As far as I remember, I was never hungry in Shanghai.

It was difficult though: the Japanese were in charge of that part of the city. Why did the Japanese allow us to come there with no documentation, no money, nothing? One reason: they had no idea about Jews. They thought we were all rich bankers & it's good to have us on side. Another reason: the Japanese have never been antisemitic. There's never been any antisemitism in Japan or in China.

Things went quite well. People started founding businesses, coffee houses. They called it Little Vienna. My father started making handbags. He managed to get a little shop in East Yuhang Road. He made masks: the Japanese all wear masks. They made bomber heads for the Japanese in leather. They managed to make a bit of a living. They used the sewing machine from Vienna.

Gradually, people started to move out of the Heime because of no privacy. The committee lent people money to buy houses. We just had one room. Four beds next to each other, a big table with the sewing machine. A bathtub in the courtyard. Next to that, what was called the honeypot: a non-flush toilet, where they pick up the waste every morning at 6 o'clock. Next to that: a little stove. Very basic, but we were alive. No fridges, nothing like that. You had to go every day to the market for fresh food. You had to boil everything because of typhoid, cholera, dysentery.

The next big thing that happened was war between Japan & America, the attack on Pearl Harbour. That changed things radically. The Sephardim could no longer help us because they had British passports & were interned in a camp called Lunghua.

The Nazis sent over a top Nazi from Tokyo called Meisinger. His idea was to put all the Jews on three big ships, blow them up & sink it in the Yangtze. The Japanese said ‘We're going to think about this first.’ Luckily for us, they said ‘We’re really not interested in this. What we will do is will confine them in a smaller area, a kind of a ghetto.’ So, they gave us 6 months to go into a slightly smaller area.

In ‘44 they started bombing in Shanghai. In early ‘45, there was a Japanese radio station near where we lived. The Americans wanted to bomb this radio station. One of the bombs went astray & hit a Jewish old people's home. 33 Jews were killed that day. That was the worst part.

But generally, the Japanese were as decent as you could—don't forget, it was wartime. It was wartime. I would say probably looking back & having studied history, it was the safest place for Jews on Earth.

Emigration To Shanghai

Memories

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