Alone in Shanghai

Fred Marcus: Well, it—as I mentioned before in my litany of horrors, and I forgot to mention that I was penniless as well after my dad died. Jobs were very hard to come by. And so the Japanese had established a ghetto police—that’s also a German, or I should say Nazi, example.

And we were unarmed, but we had to mostly spend time in protecting food supplies, stores of food and coal, et cetera, that we had for the camps. Keep order in the camps. And at these soup kitchens that I mentioned earlier, I was the guy who used to pull out the little date stamp and yell at the cook, "Twice!" "Three times!" "Four times!" And then that's how many people would get.

I would get, at the end, if there was lots left—it was hard to gauge when you feed several hundred people or 1,000 people, maybe, in each kitchen—there was special, we got a special portion for the police. And I made extra money by selling half of my portion to my roommate, who did take the cash allowance instead of going to the camp, and then he would pay me for it, and—little bit of money, so I made a bit of extra money. It was a pretty poor existence.

And the fire department was a very honorary thing. Prior to Pearl Harbor, the Shanghai Fire Department had a reserve of 100 men who were all officers rank. And 95 or 98 of those were Britishers. And a friend of mine, who got me into it, and I, were the only refugee members who ever became lieutenants in the Shanghai Fire Department. It's still a great hobby of mine. I learned quite a bit about firefighting.

And then later, during the Japanese occupation, I still had my fire officer's pass. And when there were acts of terrorism, resulting in streets being blockaded and so on, I could always flash my red fire department pass and be let through the blockade. It didn't apply with the ghetto, but outside the ghetto, it was possible.

My dad started a business in clothing, men's clothing materials. We had a lot of refugees going to office buildings. Like your nut man comes around, or the candy man, a lot of refugees went into offices where all the British and the English and the French sat and brought clothing materials with them. They'd sell clothing materials. We were the ones who supplied them with clothing materials. So it was a takeoff from the shirt materials that we had in Berlin, my mother's business.

I worked with Dad there. And then, after the ghetto was established, we began, very strangely, an import business of mother-of-pearl buttons. We had one customer who was Chinese, American-educated Chinese person. And Dad imported those buttons—I didn't know how he got into this business—from Japan during the war and sold them to this one customer. And all his shirts—these were very famous, like Arrow brand shirts in Shanghai—had the buttons that we imported.

So when a shipment of buttons came in, we ate rather well for a few weeks. And then we had to—we had, I remember, long walks around the block before we decided to go out to dinner—we had to decide whether could we afford to go and have dinner out today, or could we not. "No, we better not." "Let's please go, Dad." "No, I think, you know, we've got...," and so on.

And then when the ghetto was established, that Chinese man gave me a fake employment and wrote the necessary papers, filled out the necessary forms. And with that piece of paper that I had to renew every month, I got a green badge which permitted me to leave the ghetto anytime during the daytime hours. I had to be back at night, but I could leave.

And the psychological—psychological relief that brought—gave me—is very hard to measure. It was tremendous, just to be able to get out of the ghetto, get among the people, be in town, and so on. It was wonderful.