The Shanghai story starts here
Shanghai had been settled by Europeans in the 19th Century, around 1840, having gained a concession under Treaty from the Chinese Emperor after the first Anglo-Chinese opium war. It was largely a swamp which was then filled in, section by section, over the course of the next century. To this day the city expands by periodically reclaiming swamplands, as is the current Shanghai Airport across the Whangpoo River from the City proper. The rules of the city were British, and initially commerce was largely driven by the opium, tea and cotton trades. Prosperity of trade attracted many Sephardic Jews from the Middle East, particularly Iraq. The great merchant houses of Kadoorie, Sassoon, Mowlem, Joseph, Abraham and others started in these times. Portuguese from Macao, Japanese, Indians and others came to trade and prosper. The high and the low created a bustling port.
The demographics in Shanghai followed, to a great extent, the nationalities and culture of the original settlers. Thus the French Concession was better planned with wide tree lined streets and many public parks. A Lycée was available for all children, tuition was in French of course. The largest part of the city was called ‘The International Settlement’. Despite its name it was basically the British area. The Municipal Council was headed by the British with other delegates. The police were Sikhs, while in the French Concession the police were Annamites with black teeth from French Indo-China, now Vietnam. The International Settlement contained the commercial city, hotels, department stores and large areas of Chinese shops. The famous Bund stretched for 3 miles along the Whangpoo River, a scene depicted many times in photos and paintings and famous in the whole world. There were wide axial roads in a West to East axis with many side and interconnecting roads, some very narrow with just sufficient space for a rickshaw or bicycle transport. It was very densely populated compared to the French Concession. The Japanese controlled Hongkew after 1933, the area for many factories, ‘godowns’ and wharves which was reached by traveling over the ‘Garden Bridge’ spanning the Soochow Creek.
The Japanese arrived in 1937 as a result of the so called “gunboat diplomacy”, when the Japanese sank an American vessel in the Yangze River. There was no American concession as such, but they did have a school. The international settlement was actively British with several British schools.
Our arrival
We landed in Shanghai on February 7, 1939 with £114. Not a fortune, but more than most people had. My mother had contracted blood poisoning during the voyage and had to be taken off the ship on a stretcher. It was mid-winter and very cold. Mama was taken to the Embankment Building, a warehouse which had been allocated as a receiving point for refugees by the Shanghai Jewish community. The warehouse was known as the “godown” — vernacular from speaking to Chinese coolies: “godown to fetch the boxes”. There were other, similar godown refuges created for the 19,000 German, Austrian and other Central European refugees, the bulk of who arrived up to about mid-1940, some trickling in until mid-1941 via Russia. These godowns were converted into ‘Heime’ dormitories, divided into cubicles with cotton sheets and furnished with double bunks. People kept their belongings mostly in the large cabin trunks they had emigrated with. My mother was isolated in a little cubicle until she was transferred to a proper hospital.
On arrival, a family took care of my ill mother and arranged to put me up in their home temporarily. Their name was Jouravel and they had a little cottage on Rue Bourgeat in the French Concession. The father was Dutch, the wife Russian and they had 2 teenage girls. I was treated very kindly and taken to the Jewish School in Seymour Road almost immediately. Tuition was in English. My parents never got over the fact that when they visited me after a short interval, I was playing a game with some other children and chattering away in quite adequate English.
I stayed perhaps for a month with the Jouravels after which I was again taken to live with another family called Abraham. In the meantime, my parents had settled in a small room in a Chinese section of the city, my father had scored a job but my mother was still unwell. Sadly, I did not enjoy going home to my parents at the odd weekend. They lived at the poorer end of the French concession. The place was alive with lice and cockroaches. It provided a terrible contrast to the Abraham’s residence. My father had very quickly got a job with the Japanese importer of Noritake porcelain from Nagoya.
The Abrahams
I remember the Abraham house very well. It was a four storey red brick mansion in the French concession with a stable which had been converted to a garage. The Abrahams were an old Sephardi family who had emigrated from Bagdad in the 1890s. There were about 4,000 Bagdad Jews living in Shanghai and about ten percent of them were extremely wealthy, among them Sir Victor Sassoon and Sir Elly Kadoorie. They had acquired their wealth first through the opium trade and then through real estate. They formed part of a very cosmopolitan population composed of six million Chinese and 100,000 Europeans. The grandfather of the Abraham’s family was a truly patriarchal figure. He was very religious and prayers were said several times a day. I have vivid memories of the kindness of the whole family and of the grandchildren, Ezechiel, Chaim, Aziza and Isaac.
I cannot remember how many Chinese servants lived in the servants’ quarters away from the main house, but it was many.
The latter was particularly appointed to look after me and we were driven to the Western District Public School together in one of the large Packard motor cars. Aziza was also one of my favourites and I remember often sitting in her lap. During the weekend, many members of the community assembled at the back of the house, where there was an open space as large as two football fields, and everybody had a very good time playing football, tennis and croquet.
Isaac, the youngest son, was directed to look after me. Egon was older, by a year or two. We did not really have much to do with each other, except we were in competition to gain the attention of Azziza, the only daughter in the family, whose age I estimate at the time may have been in her early twenties. Isaac was 12 years old and resented the intrusion of this pesky foreign kid. Our contact was thus limited to the time we sat together in the chauffeur driven Packard when attending school, the Western District British Public School in Yuyuen Rd.
The grandfather and father left for the office in the blue car in the mornings and returned after work. Ezekiel, the №1 son, also worked in the family firm of stockbrokers. He was a very gentle man, my mother thought of him as a saint. We lost contact with the Abraham family after the war. They were interned, being British subjects, of Iraqi background and their business interests were varied, although I understood the office to be a stockbroking enterprise.
We heard Ezekiel never married. He followed in the family tradition and was a very religious Sephardi Jew. The second son was Chaim, a tall handsome man who married a Eurasian girl after the war and immigrated to the USA. Azizza was the object of my puppy love, competing with Egon. Regretfully I cannot recall her features properly, but I know she was dark and very kind to us boys. The youngest was Isaac, a hell-raiser even then. After the war he must have been in his late teens. He was virtually disowned by the family and left for the USA with a young Asian bride, not Jewish. Regrettably I have no idea what happened to all of them after Shanghai. This is surprising as somehow, in little items from time to time, news of people from those days trickles through.
Shanghai School
When my mother eventually visited the school, Mr. Bennett, the Headmaster, conversed with her in German beautifully and being a pucka gentleman was dressed in an elegant flannel tailor made suit, a handkerchief fluttering from the jacket pocket… Mama fell for him mightily, as she often mentioned. Otherwise he was the toughest Headteacher I was to meet anywhere, using a hard black cane nicknamed “Tickle Toby” to encourage swift learning by pupils.
Shanghai was very multi-cultural and the make-up of students was quite international. Soccer, cricket and boxing were the main sports. Billy Tingle, an Australian, and I think the grandfather of famous Australian political journalist Laura Tingle, was Sports Master in this boys’ school.
On the concrete playground during breaks the Junior School played a game named “Puree Boys”, a game of marbles. A boy stood up against a reserved stretch of wall, displayed his marbles, and calling out the name of the game, challenged all comers to aim, hit and deploy his marbles. Sometimes several boys used their marbles against the incumbent. Somebody always lost or gained marbles.
There was also the rough duel called “Spanish Fly” where a team of anything up to 15 boys bowed over the rear end of the boy in front and the aggressors jumped on the line formed by the bowed boys, landing as far forward as possible to where the ‘anchor boy’ leaned against a tree or pipe to try to stabilize the line. The rest of the team also piled up on the backs of the bowed line. The winners were either the boys who stayed on their feet under the combined weight of the jumpers, or the latter who crushed their standing opponents to the earth.
The time till December 1941 passed for me idyllically. While still living with the Abraham family I experienced the only religious period of my life. My parents and families had all been ‘secular’ central European Jews. I had a short period of religious instruction before Hitler’s Anschluss and nothing until I landed at the Abrahams. Grandfather Abraham was in his late eighties and he led prayers at table and later in the evening as well on Fridays. Saturdays we all attended Synagogue together. Although there were 4 motor cars in the garages, these were not used on the Shabat. Rickshaws were assembled twice, for morning and evening prayers to transport all of us to ‘shule’. I cannot claim today that at age 7 I was aware of any hypocrisy in that motor cars were not to be used as the spark plug was ‘fired’ up, yet human beings were hired to run to the house of prayers, the Chinese being our “Shabbas goys.” Money was not to be handled so the Head Boy, a servant of the house, came along in another rickshaw to pay the coolies at the other end.
Sundays were a joy. Behind the house as part of the property was a large field dedicated to sports. There was a soccer field, a grassed tennis court, and a concreted court where a scaled down version of Hai-Alai was played. This was a popular Asian game, often used as a gambling medium for men only. Two players secured curved wicker baskets on their hand. Resting in the curved basket, a small ball, like a golf ball, is thrown against a marked wall at an astonishing speed, caught in the basket and returned by the second player. Losing the ball, or bouncing it out of the marked court loses points for the inept player. Every Sunday the field was occupied by literally dozens of mostly Jewish players of all ages, served liberally with iced tea. Egon and I were not allowed to partake in the sports but happily tooled around on bicycles. When I subsequently moved back in with my parents after they had established themselves I often visited the Abrahams on Sundays. It was a wonderful community event. I do not know what happened to Egon. The only name and face I can recall well present on those days was that of Malcolm Chaikin, who subsequently became a Professor at the University of NSW in Kensington.
This period in my memory seems to last a long time, but could not have been more than 4–6 months. My parents moved from the Chinese section to Route Winling in the French Concession to a furnished room without bath. My father worked for a Japanese merchant who imported Noritake chinaware and also owned a retail store in the city town. My father worked as sales representative to commercial outlets such as hotels, nightclubs, and restaurants. One customer was a well-known Shanghai and international identity: Mr. Joe Farren. The nightclub carrying his name was on the outskirts of HungJao, a distance from the city such as might have been from Sydney Central past Hornsby. Pretty far in those days. I believe there were floor shows, dancing, gambling and bar girls for guests. Joe was Jewish and invited us to visit some Sundays when the club was closed during the day. I remember only the swimming pool.
Martin’s porcelain in Jaffi-lu
My father became friendly with his Japanese employer and by early 1940 had founded his own shop having made arrangements with the Japanese merchant to carry the Noritake range in the French Concession. My dad Leopold, or ‘Poldi’, was very competent and lucky to boot.
He was introduced to two elderly brothers by the name of Joseph, wealthy Sephardic residents of Shanghai since the start of the century. They lived in a palatial residence on the corner of Ave. Foch and Route Doumer, and were married to two sisters. Both couples were childless. They liked the Austrian refugee and we were invited for a meal several times to this house with the usual overflow of Chinese servants and many art treasures. Their classy apartment was different to that of the Abraham family, other than the servant population; the Abrahams had a large rambling family home well worn by 3 generations.
The Joseph Bros. were property developers apart from their large trading house. At the time of our introduction to the Joseph brothers they were building an eight story block of apartments plus penthouse. The building was modern, much like a multi-story Australian home unit block of top quality construction. The address was 1160 Avenue Joffre on a block of land adjacent to their beautiful private grounds. Along the road frontage there were 8 large shops. There was a drive to the rear garages building. A staircase in the middle of the garage series led up to the servants’ quarters. These were small and minimal in comfort. Bare rooms for two people. There was an ablution block at each end of the servants’ quarters corridor, one for men and at the other end for women. Nonetheless these quarters were part of an excellent job as servants to rich “nackoning” (foreigners in Chinese) who lived in the main building.
Before the building was finished, the Joseph brothers generously offered to incorporate a 2-bedroom flat with kitchen and bathroom in this rear building, but divided from the servant quarters by a separating wall and a private staircase to the ground floor. When finished we moved into the best area of Shanghai, employing a cookboy and his wife as servants. My mother ran the shop which was called ‘Martin’s Porcelain’ and father still represented Noritake chinaware to his customers. One of Pop’s best customers was the Emperor of Manchuria, the last Emperor of China who bought all the Bohemian glassware and fine cutlery the shop could supply.
My friends were the boys who lived in the building. There were two Dutch boys and two Italian Jewish boys. Naturally I was less privileged than they but at that age there was no overt distinction. Indeed, in the games we played in the extensive garden, beautifully kept by several Chinese coolies, I can remember usually being the pirate chief, or similar.
The five of us, the children of this prestigious apartment building in 1162 Ave. Joffre (Yaffee Lu) in the French Concession played in the garden in various combinations for and against. The garden in my young boy’s memory was very large, but on reflection must have just been in proportion to the size of the apartment block. It did have a little garden pergola, it had two built up islands which gave a country air to the space and on which a few bushes were planted. Well-tended grass surrounded the islands and flower beds surrounded the border.
I kept attending school as before. The British Public School was renamed the Shanghai Public School. The beautiful building and grounds were initially created as the Cathedral Boys High School. For a short while teachers and pupils of Allied nationality kept attending. As teachers and families were transferred to camps only neutrals remained. Quite a few Russian Jewish boys remained as pupils. The teaching staff shrank and also consisted of Spanish, Free French as the occupied Petain followers were called, and Lutheran Norwegians etc. Sports events like athletics and soccer did not suffer.
I was elected School Captain and proudly whistled the boys to march in to class after every break!
The misery of the Chinese poor became more obvious at an alarming rate as times became more difficult for the whole population. Rice and vegetables were earmarked for the Japanese military. The black market in food allowed the existing foreign community to live comfortably provided they had hard currencies to change such as ‘gold’ dollars as the US money was called. Foreign Clubs in the French and International settlement areas provided excellent venues for entertainment. Phillipino, Mexican and other bands thrived, and in some quarters Shanghai appeared outwardly unchanged. The Japanese treated most Chinese outside the foreign areas appallingly but in the main order was maintained by the Sikh police force which had been British trained.
The Avenue Joffre was referred to as the Jaffi-lu. The building was occupied by the strangest conglomeration of people often in the Far East. Compared with our house, the film Casablanca represented an innocent kindergarten. Mr Essig, an American from St. Louis who had a Sing Sing number tattooed on his shoulder, bought a Swiss passport and did a brisk line of business with both sides during the war through Zurich while living in this luxury apartment house. Another notable character was Shafik Matauk, a Lebanese merchant whose wife had a little poodle. He was active in the black market, opium and armament trade.
My grandfather and a trip to Japan
My grandfather, Richard Steiner, joined us in Shanghai after a few months. I distinctly remember that soon after he arrived we wanted to go out together, so naturally we took two rikshaws. A rikshaw is, as you know, a vehicle on two wheels which is drawn by a coolie running between two shafts. We bargained with him before we got in the rikshaw. I was already so settled in Shanghai that I took this mode of transport for granted and would abuse a coolie from the back if he wasn’t going fast enough for my liking, because that was the done thing. The coolie sweated. It was terrible. My grandfather got into this thing and as we moved along he started crying and couldn’t take it anymore. We had to get out and he never sat in a rikshaw again.
My father steamed across to Japan twice or three times a year to buy china. In July 1941, he sent my mother and me on a holiday to Japan. Most of the time we stayed in Kobe.
In Nagoya, I saw how the plates were manufactured. They are probably still made in the same way today. They took a pod of clay, threw it on a revolving lathe which has a mould on it and then moulded it. Beautiful, beautiful stuff. To this day, I still lust for a Noritake china service consisting of those cream plates with gold rims.
I remember a dining hall in Kyoto in the Miyako Hotel, where my mother and I holidayed a few days, which was allocated to a very large group of German women and their children, and they had long trestle tables with vases with flags of the swastika and the Japanese rising sun. I think the German women were expatriate wives who had been sent to Japan by their German husbands who were working in the Asian region. They obviously knew that something was going to happen and wanted their wives in safety. The hotel used to have big French windows which opened out onto a deer park. The tame deer used to come and nibble the food out of your hand. It was beautiful, absolutely beautiful. I have been back to the Miyako Hotel since just to have a look. Unfortunately, the deer park is all gone and it has been replaced by some high-rise building.
In May or June 1941, President Roosevelt issued a freezing order. The government of the United States froze all the assets in the USA of the Japanese Government companies and traders with disastrous effect. It could perhaps be said that this was the straw that broke the camel’s back and pushed them over the edge. This was a very provocative action on the part of the Americans because the Japanese were very aggressive traders. The freezing order coincided with our arrival in Japan and the Japanese secret serviced seemed to have nothing better to do than to shine their torches through the hotel windows into the Hanley’s bedroom.
My mother had to bribe the concierge of our hotel to get two berths in a cabin for $2000 U.S. on the Kamakura Maru on its last voyage from Kobe to Shanghai. It was one of the first ships to be sunk at the beginning of war. I remember that our two berth cabin was filled with about ten women who all had paid the same amount. At the age of ten, I did remark upon the fact that I had never seen so many naked women.
On December 5, 1941, the Japanese fired the first and only shot in Shanghai and subsequently took over. They closed many universities and schools, among them the one I had attended, and turned them into concentration camps. All Allied citizens were immediately rounded up and put into these concentration camps. The Abrahams family had all been interned in the same camp. Isaac, a very handsome man in his early twenties, had married a non-Jewish Eurasian girl, whereupon his family had cast him out forever. But they found themselves physically reunited by the circumstances. Ezechiel became a “Jewish saint”. In the late Seventies, when I was in Hong Kong with my son Michael, I heard that Ezechiel was living there, still renowned for his good works. I wanted Michael to meet him because he was such a remarkable person. Aziza never married, but looked after her old parents. Chaim later became a stockbroker in England.
After the Japanese had closed my school, I attended the Shanghai Jewish School in Seymour Road in the erstwhile British concession, which the Japanese allowed to remain open. Here, however, we had to learn either Japanese or Chinese. We could request to be transferred to the other class after three months. Many of us simply kept transferring because we could not stand either subject so that, in fact, I never learnt anything of those languages; a folly regretted ever since.
The period between December 1941 and February 1943 was relatively peaceful in Shanghai, because fighting was going on further south and kept the Japanese so occupied that they left Shanghai to its own devices. They had an army of occupation in the city which limited itself to supervision. Incidentally, the Japanese were much more violent and unpleasant to the Chinese than they ever were to any white foreigner, and certainly not to children.
The Japanese claimed to be setting up the “Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” and expended huge amounts of propaganda on popularising it. Today, they have achieved economically what they could not achieve then militarily.
Before Christmas 1942, on February 17, 1943, the Japanese issued an edict stating that all German nationals with a “J” in their passport — the “bad” Germans — were to move to Hong Kew in the Japanese concession industrial district, a Jewish Ghetto, within a few weeks. It was situated across the Garden Bridge away from the main city of Shanghai and was one of the poor districts. It eventually held 18–19,000 Jews and was cordoned off with barbed wire. No food was supplied and no other provisions were made for the inhabitants. They were still able to, in fact they had to, trade with the Chinese in order to obtain supplies; unlike the Allied camps, which were totally closed off and supplied minimal food, allowing their inmates to starve at their own leisure. The ghetto was not hermetically sealed, but we had to find our own food. These European refugees also continued to play their old trades; the shoemakers repaired shoes, the plumbers plumbed. Some Jewish people, who had been able to buy a passport from countries like Haiti and Nicaragua for a few thousand U.S. dollars, had a certain immunity and lived in Shanghai proper.
My father closed the shop, took all his goods and chattels and moved into an attic in Hong Kew, consisting of a living room and a tiny room for me, for which he had to pay a small fortune in key money. We created a kitchen out of the stairwell by nailing a board over the handrails. However, even in these straitened circumstances we still had a cook boy. Servants were simply not considered a luxury. Like a clean pair of underpants, everybody had one. The cooking was done on braziers and to save the charcoal the rice was heated to boiling point, after which it was put in a bed to keep it cooking. Servants were cheap, but charcoal was expensive.
Our building was situated in a lane about ten feet wide where all houses on the left-hand side were four storey walk-ups. They are there to this day. On the right-hand side there was a police station and the open space beside it was soon turned into a “Kaffeehaus”.
In the ground floor of our building a Mr Eisfelder established the Kaffee Eisfelder, and my father soon entered into partnership with him. He supplied the money while Mr Eisfelder supplied the expertise. I remember working in the coffee shop, clearing cups and taking orders, as well as washing up, taking deliveries and running errands. The Kaffee flourished for three years, despite the fact that Mr and Mrs Eisfelder argued endlessly and that it was an agonising partnership with my father. Mr Ehrlich, who participated in this catering business, also lived on the ground floor of our building with his wife. At the same time he was having an affair with a fourteen-year-old girl, who played marbles with me when she was not with Mr Ehrlich. I remember being puzzled by her frequent absences. She later became Mr Ehrlich’s second wife and they both emigrated to Adelaide, where he became general manager of the Australia Hotel. The first Mrs Ehrlich now lives in Double Bay. I also remember a Czech called Tomacek, a “foin”. He had been the largest canner of tomatoes in Czechoslovakia. After the war, he managed to retrieve his cannery, only to have it taken away a couple of months later by the Communists. We owned our house in common everybody having bought their own room. There was only one telephone in the lane and it was owned by a “faif tu vun vun vun”. A good friend was a boy called Ernst, whose mother, as I was later to discover, made a living as a prostitute. At the time, I only knew that there was a certain hush about the lady.
Ernst and I played spinning tops and marbles. The tops were made out of a machined piece of timber, sometimes painted, which came to a point at the bottom in to which a steel cone was screwed. We then would string around the cone of this top, upon which you threw it overhead and made it spin on the concrete. If you were very good at throwing the top, a circle was created on the floor and the idea was to push out the other people’s cones. You could do that either by hitting them with a throw or by picking up your spinning top and nudging the other people’s tops outside the marked circle. The idea was to be as “mean and nasty” as possible and to destroy your opponent’s top so that he could go home crying for money to get another one. This game kept us fascinated for hours, days and weeks. I wonder whatever became of that game and why children don’t play it nowadays.
Only about 3000 Jews in Hong Kew were able to provide for themselves. The remaining 15,000 had to rely on support provided by an organisation called ERU (Emigrant Relief Union??), which received money from American Jews via Switzerland from a well-known Jewish assistant agency [‘JOINT’]. My father, as well as other better off Jews, was on the committee of ERU. The poorer Jews lived in squalor, finding shelter in dilapidated warehouses and existing on a diet of lentils and rice. There were some who were literally starving. I have only recently been able to eat lentils again. For the more fortunate ones, however, amazing luxuries, like Russian caviar and French champagne, would also turn up occasionally. Shanghai still lived up to its international reputation and everything was available at a price.
ERU created a transportation system consisting of two-wheel trailers pulled by a bicycle. Mr Nachenstein, called Nash in Sydney, whose son is still living in Sydney, was one of the main organisers of this system. Every three months, all of the members of this organisation queued for passes at the nearby police station. They were issued by Mr Goya, the official in charge: a mad Japanese who proclaimed himself “the King of the Jews”. He was totally paranoid, slapped everybody around, including my father, but loved children and so we could obtain passes quite easily. There were several types of passes issued, enabling the bearer to exit the ghetto to Shanghai proper.
After first attending the Jewish Elly Kadoorie School, thanks to the passes and my father’s relative wealth, I was able to transfer to the St Francis Xavier College, an excellent school run by the Spanish Marist Brothers. They taught in English, which was the lingua franca. I was also taught French by a Madame Elters. At the college, I came first in Catechism. When I went to the podium to collect my prize, I kissed the Bishop’s ring, whereupon the whole school burst out laughing. I remember Brother George, who was bald and could not keep discipline. In frustration, he used to go red in the face and spit in the air. Then there was brother Henry, a proud Spanish with the look of a bullfighter. I was Brother Henry’s favourite and he was very disappointed when I left S.F.X. after the war to go back to the English school. When I wanted to speak to Brother Henry later, he snubbed me and I realised that I had not behaved well because I had not said ‘goodbye’ as I should have.
It was in this Catholic college that I learnt the best form of defence against anti-Semitism. There was a boy called Joseph Ho Tung, a Eurasian who kept needling me about being Jewish. After a few days, I just lashed out at him with my fists and after that we managed a peaceful coexistence. The same thing also happened with a boy called Berzin, a White Russian. The White Russians were traditionally fiercely anti-Semitic. In this context, it is interesting to note that when the Germans invaded Russia in spring 1941, the Russian Orthodox churches of Shanghai, which was full of White Russian refugees from the revolution of 1917, rang their bells and everybody went to mass to pray for Hitler’s victory, because they felt if Hitler won they would get Mother Russia back. Two weeks after the end of World War II, a Russian steamer came into Shanghai and delivered an invite saying that all Russians who wished to be repatriated could do so. Many of the young White Russians went back and the story has it that all ended up in Siberia. I hope Berzin was among them.
The school was full of Chinese-Portuguese half-castes with names like Riviero or Romero. They looked Chinese, but called themselves Portuguese. They were the descendants of the Portuguese sailors who had arrived in Macao and other places as early as the seventeen hundreds. They were all fiercely Catholic, but were not really accepted by either community. After the war, the Portuguese would not let them in. They gave them passports, but refused them entry, so most of them finished up in Macao or Hong Kong. They were actually wandering Jews not welcome anywhere. Some of them were very talented, pianists or musicians. I think the United States accepted them.
I was quite happy in St Francis Xavier College, or S.F.X. as it was called. We had Catechism and religious services, prayers and mass every day, but we learned a lot because they were dedicated teachers. I used to bring food as offerings and was thus given fairly privileged treatment by the brothers. Another lesson I learned was that the Jewish boys who became Catholics under peer pressure had a lousy time of it because they were neither flesh nor fowl. Ergo the lesson is: you cannot get out of your own skin.
I have a strong memory of the winters of 1944 and 1945, when poverty-stricken Chinese were lying in front of doorways hoping to be allowed into this Catholic school compound. Many froze to death, including pregnant women, and we as children would simply step over them to get into school. In Shanghai, we were all indoctrinated to despise the Chinese. There were just so many of them and the only way the foreigners could survive was by sticking together. There were even many instances of kindnesses by avowed Nazis to Jews, because of this factor.
We visited the road kitchens in Hong Kew and everywhere in Shanghai. They were carried by men and women on bamboo poles with a basket slung between them in which rested a brazier, a crock with oil in it, and the other basket held the goodies. They put coals in the brazier and set down a basket with food, so you could set up the business wherever you liked. For a copper, a small coin, you could get delicious twisted bread sticks called bapings, which were sunflower seed pancakes.
I celebrated my Bar Mitzvah while we were in the ghetto. My father asked me whether I wanted $100 U.S., which was a fortune in those days, or a Bar Mitzvah. I opted for the latter. For nine months I was taught the prayers by a very bald-headed, dedicated communist called Ratz, who tried to indoctrinate me into the Marxist credo, although most of the time I didn’t know what he was talking about. I was also taught the accordion by a fellow called Hansi. The piece of bread with butter and jam he received at our place was obviously really essential for him. He once told me that when he came home his parents would pretend that they had already eaten because there was just not enough food for the three of them. My Bar Mitzvah took place at the Elly Kadoorie School and the reception in the Kaffee Eisfelder. We were fortunate in having flour, eggs, sugar and all the goodies you need for cakes. My parents told me that about 30 were invited, but there were at least 200 people or more present at the party than had been invited. The place was totally overrun and many people who had not seen a cake for years raced off with one. People were just hungry. It was pretty chaotic, but I think I enjoyed the Bar Mitzvah.
During this time I also remember Elisabeth Berger, a Viennese whom I called Lizzie. She later married a blind timber merchant called Balog and now lives in Sydney. Her parents had a bar and they lived above it. That is where Hansi, who taught me accordion, worked as their bar pianist.
Our family doctor was called Marx. It was he who diagnosed vitamin C deficiency when I began to suffer from ‘Quinkisches Oedema’, which caused me to puff up regularly. Vitamin C was found in the ghetto in large jars and my whole youth was spent chewing hundreds of tablets.
Liberty Days
In retrospect, the 2 years after the end of WWII were two marvellous years for me, a 14 year old boy. We had moved almost instantly from Hongkew back to Avenue Joffre 1160/A after the American forces arrived. The Japanese surrendered: total discipline. In my memory, it could not have been more than a week for Shanghai to have recovered its old ‘verve’.
We moved into our little flat behind the ‘Hanray Mansions’ building (no relationship unfortunately) and as if from nowhere our three servants appeared, unbidden. Typical Shanghai phenomenon. There was ‘boy’, his wife ‘amah’ and ‘Chlapetz’, the latter being an all rounder, named thus by my parents. He did heavy work in the flat and everything else that needed doing in the shop. The shop was named “Martin’s Porcelain”, my name indeed. It had been shut down, closed, throughout the two and a half years we were in the ghetto and when we returned my father used the same key to re-open it. My mother claimed that Chlapetz was smart enough to run the place, though uneducated and yellow. (At that time, still a disadvantage.)
I started attending the Shanghai British School. This was an amalgamation of 3 pre-war schools, the Cathedral Public School, The Cambridge (something or other) School and another foreign English speaking school. The Americans and French also re-opened their own. Mr. Crow was our Headmaster, Billy Tingle (an Australian ex-Lightweight Boxing Champion) our Sports Master, Mrs. Hepburn and another lady, with wide hips, teachers of other subjects. I think there was a Mr. Stewart on Mathematics. I forget the name of the others. This little tale is about the afternoons I played hooky. Many boys did so, not in large droves but regularly.
One went to Bund, Shanghai’s famous waterfront boulevard. There one hung around the various landings where American “Liberty Boats” ferried shore going ‘Gobs’, as the US sailors were known. There was always a low ranking officer supervising the coming and goings. As the officer walked to one end of the landing, we boys slipped into the other end, feeling adventurous. Of course it was well known, but the officer, the sailors and the helmsman turned the other way. Off the very large landing craft sailed into the middle of the harbour, where I walked up the gangplank of a US Navy Submarine Tender.
This ship was a revelation, quite large. It looked like 2 ships, a distance apart, interconnected by the bottom. In other words, a “lock”. A submarine was able to sail or be dragged between the two sides, the “lock” was closed and the water pumped out, leaving the sub to be repaired high and dry on suitable chock supports.
The bell for ‘chow’ was rung and I joined the queue to be issued with the best meal complete with ice cream and Coca Cola. All sailors befriended me, but most lost interest when I assured them I had no sister.
This was a continuing source of conversation until I walked through the corridor of one of the ship sides. It had sailor quarters on each side, I estimate about 30 or 40 to left and right. Walking past one of them a door opened and a large black arm pulled me into the cabin. I kept looking up until I reached the face of an enormous black sailor with a physique equally formidable to that of Joe Louis, currently World Heavyweight Champion. I was afraid. But he only uttered the usual, “Hey Boy, have you got a sister?” Having assured him I had none, although in disgust, he let me leave.
When it came to Shore Leave about 3 or 4 in the afternoon I joined the queue again on the gangway to walk down to the outgoing ‘Liberty Boat’. Halfway down there was a landing where a sailor sat behind a little card table handing out packets. I put out my hand and he handed me one of the little packets.
It had been a lovely day. Sailors were happy to show me around, let me climb over the guns and tell me tales of submarine rescues.
When I got home I handed my mother the little packet. Great dismay, hilarity and amazing ignorance on my part. It was a packet comprising French letters, a cream and a toothbrush.
