Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Prologue: Jewish Women in Nazi Germany Before Emigration
- Part One A Global Search for Refuge
- 1 Jewish Women Exiled in France After 1933
- 2 Arrival at Camp de Gurs: An Eyewitness Report
- 3 Women Emigrés in England
- 4 England: An Eyewitness Report
- 5 Women Emigrés in Palestine: An Eyewitness Report
- 6 “Naturally, many things were strange but I could adapt”: Women Emigrés in the Netherlands
- 7 Refugee Women from Czechoslovakia in Canada: An Eyewitness Report
- 8 Women in the Shanghai Jewish Refugee Community
- 9 Shanghai: An Eyewitness Report
- 10 German-Jewish Women in Brazil: Autobiography as Cultural History
- 11 A Year in the Brazilian Interior: An Eyewitness Report
- Part Two Refuge in the United States
- Epilogue: The First Sex
- Index
9 - Shanghai: An Eyewitness Report
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2013
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Prologue: Jewish Women in Nazi Germany Before Emigration
- Part One A Global Search for Refuge
- 1 Jewish Women Exiled in France After 1933
- 2 Arrival at Camp de Gurs: An Eyewitness Report
- 3 Women Emigrés in England
- 4 England: An Eyewitness Report
- 5 Women Emigrés in Palestine: An Eyewitness Report
- 6 “Naturally, many things were strange but I could adapt”: Women Emigrés in the Netherlands
- 7 Refugee Women from Czechoslovakia in Canada: An Eyewitness Report
- 8 Women in the Shanghai Jewish Refugee Community
- 9 Shanghai: An Eyewitness Report
- 10 German-Jewish Women in Brazil: Autobiography as Cultural History
- 11 A Year in the Brazilian Interior: An Eyewitness Report
- Part Two Refuge in the United States
- Epilogue: The First Sex
- Index
Summary
Born in Berlin in 1923, Illo L. Heppner fled with her parents to Shanghai, China, in 1940. Interned by the Japanese occupation forces in 1943 and liberated by American troops in 1945, she worked as a United States War Department civilian for the Shanghai Port Command and the United States Military Advisory Group to Chiang Kai-shek's government in Nanking. She emigrated to the United States in 1947, settled in Indianapolis in 1954, and worked in the real estate department of a major insurance company for twenty-six years. Since her retirement in 1984, Heppner has focused her volunteer activities on helping Russian immigrants to settle, learn English, and acculturate to life in the United States. She is married and has a daughter and three grandchildren. This report was written in 1991.
The subtitle of this book, “Women Refugees of the Nazi Period,” has a special meaning for me: I was sixteen years old when I emigrated to Shanghai and a married woman when I left. The Shanghai years were the years during which I was transformed from a teenage girl into a woman.
First, I will give a brief personal background. I was born in Berlin into a thoroughly assimilated family. My father was managing director of a bank, a decorated disabled veteran of World War I, and active in Jewish causes. His family had lived in the same house in Halberstadt since the 1690s.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Between Sorrow and StrengthWomen Refugees of the Nazi Period, pp. 139 - 146Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995