Shanghai Daily news

Gerti Waszkoutzer

A passport lost sometime around World War II and found a few years ago in Shanghai is finally being returned to a 71-year-old woman who now lives in Australia.
The owner of the document has been identified as Gerti Waszkoutzer, born on December 9, 1934, in Vienna, Austria.
She may have been among the 30,000 European Jews who found safe heaven in Shanghai from the Nazi Holocaust.
But confirmation will have to wait until her son comes to town in April to pick up the passport.
The document was bought at a flea market near Yuyuan Garden six years ago by a local collector, Zhu Peiyi. Zhu stumbled across Waszkoutzer's passport and another similar document at the flea market.
Zhu decided to track down the owners of the documents a few weeks ago after hearing that the city is planning to build a Jewish cultural heritage site along the northern Bund and that many Jewish people are returning to the city to remember their past.
Zhu contacted the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Memorial for help, and the group posted the documents on the Internet. A quick response came from Waszkoutzer's son, who mailed his mother's childhood picture as confirmation of her identity two weeks ago.
Qin Siquan, who works for the memorial group, said the son sent an e-mail explaining that his mother married in Australia in 1954 and has remained there ever since then. Other details were not available.
The owner of the other Jewish passport that Zhu found is Manfred Lichtenstein, who was born on August 24, 1932, in Halle, Germany. No one has claimed ownership so far.
Both passports were printed in old-style German typeface.
Each contains 28 pages and includes a prohibition that kept Jews from changing all their money into foreign currency to make it more difficult for them to leave Germany with their savings intact.
"The holders of the passports were very probably among the refugees to Shanghai during the 1940s." Xu Guohua, a scholar of Jewish culture at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, said in a previous interview.