The emotions among us are so mixed, Mama, so hard to describe! Relief. Sorrow. Anger. Fear for the future. Horror and disgust, as we hear whispered stories of brutalities perpetrated in Germany. Can it be that Austria, now that we have lost our independence, could stoop as low? None believe it, but Mama, guard your tickets! If you and Uncle Horst cannot find an earlier ship, then train it must be, and please take great care until you depart. Urge Uncle Horst to rein in his temper and live in a way so as not to be noticed—oh, Mama, I’m serious but I laugh to see what I’ve written! The very words you spoke to me! And here I repeat them to you for Uncle Horst, as though you need them.
I can’t wait for the day when we’re together again! In Shanghai Paul and I will ready a home, and when you arrive we’ll rush to meet you. Perhaps, in years to come, bedtime tales of the Chinese adventures of the Gilder family will be told to wide-eyed children, who will then dream wonderful dreams.
Paul sends his love, and promises to write though I think he will not. But no matter; I will faithfully correspond for us both. Please, please, Mama, come soon!!!
With all my heart,
Your Rosalie
In the silence I became aware of comings and goings in the Waldorf lobby. A bellhop pushed a luggage cart across the carpet. Well-dressed men and women read newspapers and sipped coffee. If you ignored the taxis beyond the doors, this could be the saloon of a great ocean liner itself.
I looked at Alice Fairchild. “I don’t understand. These were Jews escaping the Nazis? But—they were going to Shanghai?”
“It was their only choice.”
“What do you mean? I thought they went to other countries in Europe, or came here.”
“Survivors did, after the war. But as the Nazis rose in the thirties, countries all over the world closed their doors. Everyone knew what was happening, but no government was willing to deal with a flood of desperate refugees.”
“Even the U.S.?”
“The U.S. had small quotas by country and looked at the Jews as Germans, Austrians, Poles, wherever they were from. All the normal paperwork was required.”
“This is a surprise?” Joel asked me. “There were Chinese quotas, too, you know.”
“I know that. But I thought—”
“It was just you? Wrong.”
I sipped tea to hide my annoyance that Joel had caught me out being ignorant, and in front of the client, too. “Well, but Shanghai? It seems so . . . unlikely.”
“I’m sure it did to them, too,” Alice said. “But visas were relatively easy to get, and often passengers off ships weren’t asked for papers in any case. Anyone who could get there could stay. It was the only place.”
“How many refugees went?”
“Twenty thousand.”
“Twenty thousand?” Where had I been during world history class?
“The story’s not well known.” Alice read my mind. “It’s been eclipsed by the war, the concentration camps. They began arriving in numbers in 1937. By 1942, fighting in Europe and the Pacific had closed the routes.”
“But 1937—that’s when Japan invaded China.” I hadn’t slept through world history completely, after all. “The Japanese let them in?”
“Shanghai’s open port was what made it wealthy. That early, Japan wasn’t planning on war with the West and saw no reason to change anything.”
Alice looked at Joel, then at me. “Rosalie Gilder was eighteen, her brother Paul fourteen, when they fled Salzburg by train for Trieste, to board the Conte Biancamano. Their mother, Elke, a widow, and her brother, Horst Peretz, had tickets to Shanghai three months later by the overland route—Trans-Siberian Railway to a ship at Dairen.”
I asked, “Why didn’t they all go together?”
“Germany had annexed Austria a month before. Extermination wasn’t yet the Nazis’ plan for the Jews; they meant to force them out. They’d arrest Jewish men, and only let them go once their families produced travel documents. That happened to Horst. Elke was able to get train tickets, so he was released, but three months was a frighteningly long time to wait. She moved heaven and earth to get berths on a ship leaving sooner, and managed two. She sent her children. She hoped she and Horst could follow on another ship.”
“Did they?”
“No.”
“So they went by train?”
“They never got out.”
My gaze fell to the photo again, sister and brother smiling on a windy day. I looked at Joel. His face was carefully blank. It occurred to me he must have grown up hearing countless tragic variations on