Jüdisches Museum Wien
Amalia and Josef Hochstädt
I first encountered Shanghai
refugees in my grandparents’ homes on a hospital grounds in small-town New Jersey.
Shanghai was not a conversational topic in their home or mine, although
evidences of Shanghai were everywhere. Prominently displayed in their house
were a view of Shanghai on the living room wall and countless figurines of
wood, ceramic, and jade. In my own home, I particularly liked a laughing,
seated wooden Buddha in our dining room.
I knew only the outlines of
Josef and Amalia Hochstädt’s stories, told in their Viennese accents as a short
series of facts about their previous lives, or gleaned from photographs proudly
displayed.
Josef served as a young
medical officer in the Kaiser’s army. Later his gynecological practice in
Vienna supported a luxurious and cultured life. Amalia played piano, her
brother Egon Peretz played violin, and some members of the Vienna Philharmonic
came over to join them. When the Nazis took over and latent Viennese
antisemitism exploded, they were unusually successful in rescuing their family.
My father, Ernst Hochstädt, who had become Ernest Hochstadt by the time I arrived
much later, left before Kristallnacht through Italy to Portugal, and sailed to
the US. Amalia and Josef managed to get their 13-year-old daughter on the
Kindertransport to England, and then they sailed to Shanghai on one of Lloyd
Triestino’s ships, which was run by the family of Amalia’s good friend.
I only heard scraps of
stories about their life in Shanghai, but I was surrounded by clues, especially
at their house. Not only my grandmother’s recipes, but also the furniture, the
dishes, the sculptures, and the silver had come around the world from Vienna,
along with fine Chinese art objects. As a Jewish child, I knew that my family’s
escape from the Holocaust had been remarkably smooth. I sensed early that their
modest life in New Jersey, where my 60-year-old grandfather had managed to find
a position as a gynecologist at a tuberculosis and mental health clinic,
represented severe social decline. I thought the small colony of Viennese
doctors there was a remarkable coincidence.
Under normal circumstances, I
would have learned a lot about my grandparents and the whole Hochstädt-Peretz
family in my own home. But there are no normal circumstances in refugees’
families. In my case, the sad circumstance was my father’s relationship with
his parents. It was always clear to me that he was gleeful at age 18 to land in
America, far from his own family. A few days after he arrived in 1938 with
virtually nothing, he visited the very distant relative of Amalia who had
supplied the financial sponsorship for my father’s visa. There he thanked the
man and encountered his 16-year-old tomboy niece, who played with her cousin
there all the time. My mother Lenore. By the time my father could visit his
parents in Shanghai in 1946, they had been married for 4 years. Despite that,
my grandparents expressed to my father their concern that his marriage to a
girl of the lower middle class was preventing him from pursuing further
education, so he could be a doctor. My aunt, who had been brought to Shanghai
from England after my grandparents settled in, was decidedly snooty to my
mother, a characteristic demeanor that she maintained her whole life.
Those slights to my mother
were fateful, but they fit into an amusing refugee story. At some point, my
mother’s parents, both employed in New York’s clothing industry, said something
like, “What? You’re going to marry that penniless refugee?” The social
derogation suffered by nearly all refugees leads inevitably to difficult social
situations. The amusing part is that they didn’t really care at all and
heartily accepted my father into their family.
So my father did not regale
me with Hochstädt family history. He was a dutiful son, taking our family to
see his parents in New Jersey regularly from Long Island where we lived, later
flying the whole family out to Santa Monica in southern California after they
moved there, and eventually moving with my mother to within miles of their
apartment.
My father represents to me
one typical refugee reaction to uprooting: he became American. Unlike virtually
every other German-speaking refugee I have met, he spoke English with no
accent. He learned to love baseball and he spoke to his parents in English.
My serious study of the
Shanghai refugees began informally with Amalia after Josef had died, not yet an
historical project, but a family history project, in the early 1980s. She
talked happily in front of my tape recorder and told stories which amazed me. I
interviewed her again in 1987.
As I learned how much fun it
was to talk with people about Shanghai and their whole lives of survival, I
found out by chance that a group of former Shanghai Jews, some refugees, some
not, were going to have a Seder reunion in Shanghai in 1989. That spring was a
fateful year for China and for me, as I decided to make the Shanghai refugees a
personal project. I saw the early stages of the protests that led eventually to
the Tiananmen Square massacre and met people who changed the direction of my
historical career.
Over the next ten years, I
interviewed 100 former Shanghai Jews, nearly all German-speaking refugees, who
lived in Vienna, Berlin, Israel, and the US. I wrote two books based on those
interviews, one German, one English, and many smaller pieces. I met the other
scholars across the world who shared my passion. But I never wrote about my
grandparents.
My initial impression that
becoming a refugee in China was easier on my grandparents than on others became
the realization that Amalia and Josef did not share any of the characteristic
experiences of other refugees: being made penniless by Nazi bureaucracy; giving
up their last possessions in order to leave; scrounging for survival in
Shanghai; being forced into the Designated Area in 1943; desperately trying to
find a way out of China after 1945. Instead they brought my grandfather’s
office and their dining room furniture with them to Shanghai, lived in an
8-room apartment in the International Settlement, had a cook who learned to
prepare Viennese dishes, and were inscribed on a list of mostly doctors who got
Japanese permission to avoid the Designated Area. In my efforts to establish a
rapport with the former refugees with whom I talked, I did not discuss the very
different and relatively privileged life of my grandparents.
Amalia and Josef employed
resources well beyond what most Jews could expend. They got their children and
themselves onto the best lists. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum says, “By
1938, you could expect to wait for at least two years for a visa,” yet they
managed to procure one for my father. The Kindertransport was designed to
rescue especially impoverished children or those with a parent in a camp, but
they found a place for their daughter. Only about 1% of refugees were
officially allowed by the Japanese to remain outside of the Designated Area.
Their resources included
determination. While they were allowed to remain in central Shanghai, they had
to give up their apartment to a Korean man working with the Japanese. An Indian
gentleman, who must have been a patient of my grandfather, allowed them to move
into his compound, which included an office so my grandfather could continue
his practice. When the War was over, Amalia went to see the Korean and told him
they wanted their apartment back. He initially refused, but Amalia said that
her son, my father, in the US Army was coming soon and would deal with him
forcefully. He left and they moved back into their comfortable lives. They
stayed until 1949, in no hurry to get out of decolonizing Shanghai until the
Red Army approached.
That’s what my grandmother
told me. My aunt told me that the story was not true, that her mother didn’t
have the bravery for such a negotiation. Again the difficult internal dynamics
of my family got in the way of fully understanding their refugee experiences.
I was nearly 40 years old
when I interviewed Amalia. Reading the transcript is embarrassing now. I knew
much too little about the Shanghai refugees to ask good questions. I had not
yet learned to jot down names and places that might be confusing later. I
interrupted too much. My grandparents seemed to have led a charmed life at
every stage.
When I first became aware of
my grandparents’ personalities, my grandfather was already 70, was not very
talkative, and expressed opinions as facts. I was not prepared for story after
story of how people with important connections made things happen for my
grandparents in Vienna and Shanghai, including the Japanese man who got them on
the short list to remain in central Shanghai.
Not everything, however,
turned out as they wanted. While Jews in Vienna after the Anschluss desperately
sought escape routes, Amalia arranged for a very distant relation in New York
to vouch for my father and for a job for Ernst in Washington with a
well-connected lawyer. Instead of following his fortune, my father followed his
heart, married my mother, got a job in the clothing industry, and earned a
scathing letter from Josef. Amalia and Josef were remarkably successful
refugees, but not such good parents.
They represent a second type
of refugee, like many who became refugees as adults. They retained many of the
attitudes they had developed in Vienna. Wherever they lived, they sought out
other Viennese Jews. They saved as much as they could from their former lives.
But much was lost forever. There was a piano in my grandparents’ homes, but I
never saw my grandmother play it.
As this exhibit at the Jewish
Museum shows, it is still possible to hear new stories from Shanghai refugees.
I believe there is no more important Shanghai document than an interview transcript.
Taken together, interviews with former refugees will write the history of their
unique experiences. There are limitations, however. The great majority of the
first-hand narratives in memoirs and interviews have been given by people whose
childhoods in Europe ended suddenly with their trip to Shanghai. Even the few
older interview partners tend to begin their stories with their departure from
a life in Europe which appears rosy in comparison with what came after.
My own family’s story suffers
from that disruption. My grandfather’s sister, Rosa Hochstädt, a dentist in
Graz, did not go to Shanghai. She was arrested and sent to Theresienstadt in
1942 and to Auschwitz in 1944, where she was murdered. My grandparents never
talked about her. Why? Why didn’t she go to Shanghai, too? Did she also suffer
from the discordant Hochstädt family dynamics? Was there guilt about her death?
Most survivors keep the most
difficult parts of their Holocaust stories to themselves. Former Shanghai
refugees are no exception. In my interviews, they talked easily about hygienic
deficiencies of Shanghai, the prevalence of disease, the abuses of the
Japanese, and the insufficiency of food. Although few of them had ever been
formally interviewed, those stories had been rehearsed before. The immense
family tragedies that form the foundation of every refugee’s life and may have
never been told, might erupt unexpectedly with bursts of emotion, revealing
hidden personal truths. More likely, they don’t surface in interviews at all. My
grandmother may have explained why Rosa was never mentioned, when she said,
“But you forget about, you, you don't want to remember this kind of things.”
Now everyone who can answer
those questions is dead. Interviews and this exhibit can recover a great deal
about the Jewish experience of surviving the Holocaust. But some people were
lost completely and their stories will never be told.
Steve Hochstadt
Professor of History Emeritus
Illinois College
