A Jewish German Refugee in Shanghai

Heinz Schwarz’s father, Walter, fought in the German Army in World War I and was awarded a medal called the Iron Cross for his heroism. The family operated a successful clothing business frequented by Jews and non-Jews alike. Heinz had at first a typical German childhood. At age 8, his school photo was taken with a traditional Schultüte, or school cone. German parents traditionally gave the cone, filled with sweets and school supplies, to their children on the first day of school.

With Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in January of 1933, conditions steadily grew worse for the German Jews. In 1938, the Nazis took over the business that belonged to Heinz’s family. By 1939, all Jews were issued identification cards, each with a large “J” stamp. Their middle names had also been changed to “Sara” for women and “Israel” for men. Jews were prohibited from using state hospitals, parks, and libraries. The Nazis rapidly passed laws that segregated Jews and excluded them from daily business, social and political life.

During the 1930s, Nazi policy encouraged Jewish emigration out of Germany. Shanghai, China, seemed like an unlikely place to go, but more and more countries were refusing to allow Jewish people in. Until August 1939, Jewish people did not need a visa to enter Shanghai. At the end of 1938, nearly 17,000 Jewish refugees were living in the city.

In April of 1939, Heinz’s father purchased passage for the family to Shanghai and the family joined the Jewish refugee community there. Heinz turned 12 during the two-month journey. They arrived to find cramped quarters and unsanitary living conditions. Life was challenging for Jews in Shanghai, but they adapted – creating schools, small businesses, and social events. They also started a Boy Scout troop, which Heinz joined. Pictured above is Heinz’s Boy Scout membership card.

At the end of World War II, five years after leaving Germany, the Schwarz family tried to contact their relatives who had stayed behind, only to find that all had been killed in the Holocaust. In 1948, the Schwarz family immigrated to the United States and settled in Seattle. Heinz became an accountant and lived in Seattle until his death in 2005. Much of his estate was donated to the Holocaust Center and hundreds of artifacts, including the scouting card, became part of its permanent collection.

^Heinz holding a traditional schultüte, a large cone bearing gifts from family, on his first day of school.

Nazi Propaganda

Martin Metzon was born in Germany in 1920, but grew up in Denmark, a small country north of Germany. Denmark was invaded by the Nazis in April 1940. At first, daily life for Jews like the Metzons remained almost unchanged. The Nazis planned to make Denmark into a “model protectorate” where the Danes could keep their own government, if they cooperated with the Nazis. Some Danish people, like Martin, did not cooperate. He was involved in resistance activities such as distributing secret underground newspapers and bombing railways the Germans used. The German Nazis took complete control of the Danish government and armed forces in August 1943. A Nazi crackdown on the resistance movement sent Martin into hiding. Every day for a month, Martin called a telephone number and an anonymous voice told him where to sleep that night. He would arrive late and leave early, never speaking to his various hosts so they could not testify against him.

The Nazis proceeded with their “final solution” for Denmark’s Jews, but the Danish population and the police were largely unwilling to be complicit. The Danish resistance movement smuggled thousands of Jews to neutral Sweden, including the entire Metzon family.

Martin and his wife returned to Copenhagen, Denmark after the war ended in 1945, and found their home and belongings safe. Among their possessions was a collection of Nazi trading cards. These cards, depicting pro-Nazi propaganda images, were included in packs of cigarettes sold in Germany and Nazi-occupied countries such as Denmark.

Ironically, the cigarette cards were printed during the Nazi’s anti-smoking campaign. Hitler was the driving force behind the program – he believed that smoking would jeopardize the genetic superiority of the “master race.” Cigarette companies, in an effort to appease Hitler, began to include trading cards with images that glorified the Nazis. People collected the cards and tried to get a complete set. Martin’s set is titled “Kampf um's Dritte Reich,” or “The Struggle for the Third Reich.” Over 270 cards in the set depict various Nazi activities, including Nazi leaders and public and military events and gatherings. They portray the Nazi party as strong, mighty, and helpful. This was part of the Nazis’ huge propaganda campaign, spreading Nazi ideology throughout Germany and beyond.

Overall, more than 7,700 Jews and their non-Jewish relatives escaped to Sweden. Most of the 470 Danes who couldn't escape and were deported to camps survived, thanks to successful advocacy by the Danish government.

After his return to Denmark, Martin immigrated to the United States in 1953. He worked as an accountant, and also served as the Honorary Consul to Denmark in Seattle. Martin Metzon passed away in 2003, and his son Jorgen donated the card collection to the Holocaust Center for Humanity in 2008.

^Bild (card) number 17 titled “First German Day, 1923.” 
This was the first rally of nationalist political parties, 
later replicated by the Nazis numerous times in Nuremberg. 

^Bild 16, “Nuremberg 1923: Adolf Hitler and Julius Streicher.” Streicher was a leading Nazi and published the antisemitic newspaper Der Sturmer.

<Bild number 46, "The Braune Hause in Munich." This was a main building within Nazi Party headquarters.

^Bild 198, "Burning of the Reichstag.” The arson of the German parliament building in February 1933 by unknown perpetrators was exploited by the Nazi Party as a reason to halt constitutional protections, paving the way toward dictatorship.

Frieda Soury

Frieda Soury was born in 1929 in Ostrava, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic). She had a happy childhood with her family, and loved holidays and spending time outdoors. Frieda’s father was Jewish, but her mother was not. Frieda said later, “I grew up celebrating Passover and Christmas. I knew I was Jewish, but religion was not a central part of my life. When Germany invaded Czechoslovakia [in 1939], my religion came to define me.” After the occupation began, Jewish students were no longer allowed to attend public schools. Frieda, along with all Jewish students, attended a separate school and was forced to wear a yellow star on her clothing. 

In 1943, at the age of 14, Frieda was deported to the concentration camp Theresienstadt (Terezin in Czech). Frieda was designated a mischling, meaning half-Jewish, and she was assigned to stay in a room with more than 20 other girls. She remembers that the Jewish girls in her room came and went (later she learned they were deported to Auschwitz or other camps) while she and the other mischling girls remained. Frieda worked on the camp’s farm, planting, tilling, harvesting, and moving rocks. While it was back-breaking labor, this afforded her the opportunity to occasionally steal an extra piece of food. Of the 140,000 people sent to Theresienstadt, 15,000 were children, and only 1,500 of these children — including Frieda — survived the war. 

Theresienstadt was liberated by the Soviet Army in May 1945. Frieda’s father managed to acquire transportation for his family back to Ostrava. Upon returning home, Frieda found that she was the only survivor out of her group of former classmates. Other Ostrava survivors often had nothing left: no photos or mementos. Since Frieda managed to save this class photo, she cut out the faces of several children who were killed in the Holocaust, and gave them to their relatives and loved ones.

When she was 18, Frieda immigrated to Israel, where she met her husband Aaron. They had three children and then came to the United States. Frieda lived in California, and then Seattle for many years, and shared her story as a member of the Holocaust Center’s Speakers Bureau for years.  Frieda passed away in 2022.

  Frieda at age 9, circa 1938. >

Non-Jewish Rescuers

In the late Spring of 1940, life for the Kanis family – Christians living in Amersfoort, the Netherlands – changed irreversibly. On May 10, 1940, Nazi Germany invaded the small nation of the Netherlands and just five days later, the Dutch forces surrendered to the invaders. 

Father Jan Kanis was a postal clerk in Amersfoort, which allowed him to see residents’ returned mail and death notice. As the months under German occupation went on, he realized before others found out that the Nazis were killing Jews.  Jan encouraged local Jews to go into hiding rather than register with the German authorities – as they were required to do starting in January 1941. Jan helped Jews hide in Amersfoort or nearby Oldebroek, where he had grown up. The “hiders” would first come to the Kanises’ house, before being transferred to a safe hiding place. Jan’s wife Nel was unfailingly vigilant to keep the Germans from discovering the hiders.   

This sheet of paper contains food ration stamps for the period of October 1 to November 25, 1944. Dutch residents were subjected to the German occupiers’ rationing (limiting) of food and other supplies in order for material to be requisitioned for the German military. Each stamp on the sheet enabled purchase of a different item, such as brood (bread), or vleesch (meat). The stamps were torn away from the perforated sheet and exchanged with a shopkeeper for the desired food or other goods.

The Jewish hiders rescued by the Kanises could not legally exist. In order for them to have food to survive, the Kanises obtained identity and registration cards for fake people, who would then receive extra ration stamps and food. In turn, this food was distributed to the Jews in hiding. On one occasion, the Dutch Underground planned a raid on a distribution center to acquire more such ration stamps. Jan fled the scene, but was still arrested and sent to Dachau concentration camp in 1944. Shortly after, daughter Ali Kanis, just 17 years old, was found with incriminating receipts related to an anti-Nazi railroad strike and was also arrested. Ali spent the rest of the war in a women’s prison, forced to mend clothing for German soldiers.

The ration stamp sheet seen here was from just before the infamous “Hunger Winter” of 1944-45. While caring for her own family, assisting many hiders, and with her husband and daughter incarcerated – Nel Kanis was hard-pressed to make ends meet. Extra ration cards were the difference between life and death. 

Ingrid Kanis Steppic was born in 1941 to Nel and Jan Kanis, and later moved to the United States, ultimately settling in Seattle. Ingrid shared her family story with the Holocaust Center for Humanity and donated the ration stamp sheet above to its permanent collection in 2016. 

The Kanis family from left to right (top row): Ali, Ingrid, Kieki, Jan and Nel. (In front): Wilhelmina and Winfried.> 

Walter Schwarz 

Until Hitler’s rise to power, Walter, Elizabeth, and their son Heinz Schwarz enjoyed a normal family life in Berlin, Germany. Walter owned a clothing store and treated his diverse clientele with universal kindness. Heinz loved school, and played with Jewish and Christian children alike. Walter was a proud veteran; he had served in the German Army in WWI and was awarded an Iron Cross medal by Germany for bravery in combat. The Schwarz family was also Jewish – but like most German Jews, considered themselves full members of German society and loyal citizens. 

Heinz was only six when Adolf Hitler became German Chancellor in 1933. Germany underwent drastic change in the following year at the hands of the Third Reich; Dachau concentration camp was established, thousands of “un-German” books were publicly burned, and new laws excluded Jews from civil service positions and mandated the forced sterilization of the disabled. The Schwarz family was not unaffected; in the summer of 1938, Walter was forced to “give up” his business to a non-Jew. That same year, the Schwarz family was issued identification documents stamped with a large “J” to easily identify them as Jewish. The following spring, the last trace of normalcy disappeared from Heinz’s life when he was forced to leave his German school. 

Like many Jewish veterans, Walter Schwarz believed that his service to the fatherland in WWI would save his family from Nazi persecution. He saw his Iron Cross medal as a guarantee of his family’s safety. The tradition of the Iron Cross began with the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm III in 1813, during the Napoleonic Wars. Walter’s cross, embellished with Wilhelm’s initials and the year Iron Crosses were created, symbolized the medal’s history. However, as the Schwarz family cherished their protective medallion, a new generation of the Iron Cross was being forged, each carved with a sinister swastika. 

In April of 1939, Walter purchased passage for the family to Shanghai and the family joined the Jewish refugee community there. Heinz turned 12 during the two-month journey. In Shanghai, Jewish immigrants found themselves relying on charity and living in cramped conditions. Despite such hardships, the Schwarzes valued their freedom and became members of Shanghai’s Jewish community. 

In 1948, the family was finally legally and financially able to leave Shanghai for San Francisco. They became naturalized U.S. citizens and registered to vote. Walter only lived for five more years before his death in 1953. Heinz Schwarz lived in Seattle for many years, and when he passed away in 2010, his estate donated his father’s Iron Cross, along with other family artifacts, to the Holocaust Center for Humanity.

Walter Schwarz (seated) flanked by three members of the German military, possibly from WWI.

Jewish Star

The Star of David was a Jewish symbol co-opted by the Nazis as a means of easily identifying and isolating Jews across Nazi-occupied Europe during the Holocaust. In many places, the Nazis required Jews to wear a Star as a badge, armband, or even in button form. The consequences for not doing so were severe. 

The original bolt of fabric pictured above was four feet wide and six feet long. It was most likely made sometime in 1942 in Poland. Thomas Blatt, a survivor of the death camp Sobibor, found this fabric in Poland on a return trip in the 1980s and brought it back to the United States for conservation. In some places, Jews were actually forced to use their own money to purchase fabric or stars and sew them onto their own clothing.

Yellow stars were used by the Nazis to identify Jews in France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Czechoslovakia, parts of Poland, parts of Bulgaria, Hungary, Greece, Lithuania, Latvia, and Romania. White armbands with a blue star of David were used to identify Jews in parts of Poland. Yellow armbands were used to identify Jews in parts of Greece and Yugoslavia.

Below are several memories from Seattle-area Holocaust survivors regarding their experience being forced to wear identification marking them as a Jew. 

Noemi Ban, Hungary.  From her memoir Sharing is Healing:

“Members of the Arrow Cross [Hungarian Nazis] came to our house… They told us that in a few days large posters would be glued onto the walls outside the houses. We had to read and obey them. On them were the ‘Jewish Laws.’ 

The first law told us to wear the yellow star. We had to wear it whenever we went outside. Where should we get those yellow stars? The Arrow Cross told us. We had to march to the store. Soldiers were all around us. We had to use our own money to buy yellow stars. We had to sew one onto each piece of clothing we had on. Imagine how embarrassed we were… We knew in our hearts that something much more terrible would soon come.”

***

Henry Friedman, Poland. From a Holocaust Center for Humanity video: 

“One time my mother and my cousin got caught not wearing the armband. The reason you didn’t want to wear them was because anybody could throw rocks at you or hit you… Nobody was out to protect the Jew. So if people went to an area where they were afraid to walk with the armband, they might take it off. 

Well, the police did catch my mother and my cousin not wearing it. My mother they beat with a ball, a rubber ball, but inside was a piece of steel and her arms were beaten up…all swollen. My cousin was about seventeen years old; they made her clean an outhouse with her hands.”

^This star was worn by an unknown prisoner in the Lodz Ghetto in Poland. 

^Jood—Dutch for “Jew.” This star was worn by Elli Metzelaar, the mother of  local Holocaust survivor, Peter Metzelaar, and is on display at the Holocaust Center for Humanity.

^This “J” stands for Jood in Flemish and Juif in French, the two languages spoken in Belgium. This star was worn by Martha Schnabel-Bloch, grandmother of local Holocaust survivor Robert Herschkowitz.

Resistance and Partisans

During World War II and the Holocaust, organized groups and individuals alike used a variety of methods to resist Nazi rule. Resistance sometimes took the form of following Jewish traditions despite severe consequences. Another method of resistance involved sabotage: slave laborers in German factories sometimes purposefully misassembled weapons or ammunition, rendering them useless when deployed in the war against the Allies. 

In countless other situations, both Jews and non-Jews in Nazi-occupied territory physically fought back against Germany and its collaborators. About 30,000 Jews became what are known as partisans: guerrilla or paramilitary fighters organized into groups against a common enemy. Jewish partisans operating in Europe during World War II sometimes worked alongside non-Jewish resisters, but due to antisemitism, there were also specifically Jewish partisan groups.

The three men pictured in this photograph were active partisans in what is now Poland and Belarus. Ed Kaye, on the left, was born Mendel Kaganowicz in 1921 to a religious family living in Pruzhany, Poland. In 1939, Ed was preparing to travel to Palestine for university, but these plans had to be put on hold when Hitler’s army invaded Poland. By August of 1941, Nazi authorities had forced the Kaganowiczes and 10,000 other nearby Jews into the Pruzhany Ghetto – an area of less than one square mile. Shortly before deportations to Auschwitz began, Ed escaped the ghetto with 18 other men and women, determined to rise up against the Nazis. Ed lived in the Polish and Belarusian woods for the next four years, and his tenacity earned him a place within a group of Soviet partisans (called an Otriad) despite its rampant antisemitism.

Ed’s Otriad destroyed telephone lines and railroad tracks, attacked German garrisons for supplies and weapons, and sheltered other displaced persons. Ed often had to scavenge for food from nearby towns and farms, evading locals who might betray them to local police for a sack of sugar or bottle of vodka. By the end of the war, Ed had completed about 25 missions and was recognized by the Soviet government for his service.

The territory within which Ed’s Otriad had been fighting was liberated from Nazi occupation in 1944. Ed then returned to Pruzhany, only to find his home nearly destroyed, and learn that his whole family had been murdered at Auschwitz. Ed reunited with his teenage sweetheart, Ann, who survived Auschwitz. After living in various displaced persons camps, the couple moved to Seattle in 1950 and raised two daughters there.

Ed shared his story as a member of the Holocaust Center for Humanity Speakers Bureau, and donated several artifacts to the Center. He wanted people to know that “Jews weren’t sitting on their hands. Some of us fought, and fought dearly, and spilled our blood, and laid down our lives while we were destroying the Nazi beast.” Ed passed away in 2011. 

^Ed Kaye pictured shortly after World War II (standing in the middle).

For Stefan Adler

This passport was issued in 1939 in Germany to eight-year-old Stefan (later Steve) Adler.  Notice the large red “J” – this was printed on all German Jewish passports. A law was also passed in Germany stating that beginning on January 1,1939, all Jewish men must take the middle name “Israel” and all Jewish women must take the middle name “Sara.” 

Steve later shared his personal story with students and others often after he moved to the United States. Below is his description of the journey he took after receiving the passport. 

“In November 1938, the Germans initiated a violent pogrom [anti-Jewish riot] during which they burned all the synagogues, looted thousands of stores owned by Jewish merchants and arrested 30,000 Jewish men. My Dad was one of the men arrested. He was taken to Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp in Germany, not far from Berlin, for six weeks. 

After his release in late December, my parents began arranging for my brother’s and my emigration. My parents submitted applications for both of us to go on the Kindertransport to England. My application was selected, but my brother’s was not. In March of 1939, my parents took me to a train station in Berlin for the trip to Hamburg. From there, I boarded a ship to Southampton, England, along with hundreds of other Jewish boys and girls. I didn’t know then whether I would see my family again....

In England I lived in a small house with a new family. I slept in an unheated attic room. In the spring of 1940, I was reunited with my brother, and that summer we met our mother and father again before traveling by ship to the United States in November 1940.” 

-Steve Adler, born in Berlin, Germany in 1930, was part of the Kindertransport. Steph was one of the lucky few children to be reunited with their parents. Most children who were saved by the Kindertransport program became orphans. Steve lived in Seattle for many years and was a member of the Holocaust Center's Speakers Bureau. He passed away on April 3, 2019.

*Kindertransport—Children’s Transport. As the situation for the Jewish people worsened in Eastern Europe, Great Britain agreed to allow 10,000 Jewish children from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia to immigrate to England. Private citizens or organizations had to guarantee to pay for each child’s care, education, and eventual emigration from Britain. Parents or guardians could not accompany the children (USHMM).

Photograph of Unaccompanied Children

John Michael Rock (born Maximillian von Rochlitz) was born to a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria in 1922. When John was 16, the Nazis annexed Austria into the German Reich. Distrustful of Nazi control and angry about the changes he noticed occurring in his country, John escaped to England in 1939. The following year John joined the British Army, and later joined the British Navy. 

John’s mother and step-father were killed in Auschwitz. His brother escaped Jasenovac, a concentration camp in Yugoslavia, and joined a band of partisans – people who fought in small groups to resist the Nazis. 

Just after World War II ended in 1946, John began to work with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. He became a director in the displaced persons (DP) program, administering five different DP camps near Kassel, Germany, including one for unaccompanied – mostly orphaned – children who had survived the Holocaust. 

“Unaccompanied children, which was their official description…somehow got into our camps, or don’t know where their parents are. Some were there [when I arrived] and some came later... one group that came in when I was there…[was] very thin and undernourished. About eight to ten children, where the oldest child was 13, and they’d been in the woods for about a year or two, by themselves, and managed to survive.” –John Rock, in a 1996 HCH interview.

John collected many photographs from his time at the DP camps and arranged them in a homemade photo album. Throughout his life, John described his work with UNRRA at the DP camps as the most important work he ever did. He received many cards and letters of thanks and good wishes, all of which he kept until the day he died. 

John immigrated to Canada in 1949, and then to the United States in 1951. He was a long-time resident of Seattle and donated the DP camp photo album to the Holocaust Center for Humanity. John passed away in 2004 at the age of 82. 

^The cover of John Rock’s photo album.

 Photo from John Rock’s photo album.

Children During the Holocaust

Children were especially vulnerable during the Holocaust. Nazis and their collaborators killed 1.5 million Jewish children – plus tens of thousands more German children with physical and mental disabilities, Roma/Sinti, Polish, and Soviet Union-dwelling children. 

In the ghettos, Jewish children died from starvation and exposure as well as lack of adequate clothing and shelter. Because children were generally too young to work, Nazi authorities often selected them, along with the elderly, ill, and disabled, to be killed. Upon arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau and other killing centers, the majority of children were sent directly to the gas chambers. SS physicians and medical researchers used many children, including twins, for medical experiments that often resulted in the childrens’ deaths. 

Between 1938 and 1940, the Kindertransport (Children's Transport) was the informal name of a rescue effort that brought thousands of refugee Jewish children – without their parents – to safety in Great Britain from Nazi Germany and German-occupied territories. Across Europe, some non-Jews hid Jewish children and sometimes, as in the case of Anne Frank, hid other family members as well. After the surrender of Nazi Germany in May 1945, ending World War II in Europe, refugees and displaced persons searched throughout the continent for missing children. Thousands of orphaned children were in displaced persons camps.

Before victims were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, they were asked to remove their clothing. Much of this clothing was saved or recycled and sent back to be used by people in the German Reich. When Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated in January 1945, piles of shoes, clothing, eye glasses, and other items were found. The Holocaust Center for Humanity is one of only three museums in the United States to have artifacts from the Auschwitz Museum in Poland. One of the artifacts is a child’s shoe.

The Holocaust Center for Humanity is one of only three institutions in the United States to have artifacts on loan from the Auschwitz Museum in Poland. One of these artifacts is a child's shoe similar to the one depicted here. 

<Young children and women selected for the gas chambers at Auschwitz.