War-era mystery is solved
4/2/2005 17:27
Shanghai Daily news
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.
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