A resolute spirit

To a Western European of that time, Shanghai was simply unheard of, and Lotte's mother Grete was horrified, she recalled. "Our expectations had been to migrate to a Western country — America, England, Australia, France, etc." Or even to neighboring Switzerland, Lotte said, until her mother learned that close friends had been murdered by the person they had trusted to guide them across the border.

Then, on Nov 9 and 10, the Nazis orchestrated Kristallnacht, an overnight anti-Jewish rampage in Austria and Germany, during which Jewish stores were looted, Jewish synagogues burned, and 30,000 Jewish males, including Lotte's uncle Alfred, were arrested and deported to concentration camps.

"In December, Alfred's body was sent to us. He died, we were told, of pneumonia, which he allegedly caught working in the freezing cold on road construction wearing the famed striped pajamas," Lotte recalled. "It was then that Shanghai no longer loomed as a distant possibility but became an immediate necessity."

In January 1939, Lotte and her parents set sail for Shanghai on the Conte Biancamano, one of the luxury liners of the Italian Lloyd Triestino Company which engaged in war profiteering by ferrying Jewish refugees to Shanghai and charging them for first-class tickets.

Arriving in a Shanghai ravaged by war and under brutal Japanese occupation could not have been a starker contrast to Vienna, or more shocking to European middle-class sensibilities, Lotte recalled, especially for her mother, who never recovered.