\nI finished reading Shanghai Diary within 24 hours of buying it. The memoir of an eleven year old girl who, in 1939, retrieves her father from the Gestapo and escapes Germany with her parents is a compelling read. In any Hollywood movie, the escape would have signalled the happy ending. However, most of the world had already closed its borders to Jewish refugees, and Ursula\u2019s family flees to the only port open to them, Shanghai. The Pacific War is about to erupt.\n<\/p>\n
\nThe contrast between their lives in aristocratic Germany and the slums of Shanghai could not be greater. Shanghai\u2019s streets are an open sewer piled with garbage, feces, corpses and even newborn babies thrown out with the trash. These facts are relayed simply, without bitterness or recrimination. Ursula and her family and their friends endure what we cannot imagine enduring for eight years. And she is aware that the suffering of others, those in German or Japanese concentration camps, is even worse. It\u2019s obvious she has taken the word of her friend, Yuan Lin, to heart.\n<\/p>\n
\n\u201cSo many people are afraid to release the pain and suffering they have experienced; to let go of the past, because that is all they believe they have.\u201d \u2014 p 255\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nUrsula, who in Germany had been tutored in French and English as well as German, quickly takes to Chinese. She is curious about everything. For awhile she is able to attend a Catholic girl\u2019s school run by French nuns. She often translates for her father\u2019s new business where she learns a lot of interesting Chinese vocabulary from the prostitutes whose house they\u2019re painting. She tutors a powerful Chinese general\u2019s three concubines in English. Mostly she hangs out with her friends. They talk and dream of a future in America where they can go shopping and have picnics and go swimming like \u201cnormal\u201d teens. And she dreams of solitude, a place to be herself alone.\n<\/p>\n
\nHer father tells her that it is people, not events, that make a life. This is the focus of the book. The events described are terrible and yet it is the people that one remembers. There is also the idea that art and music can elevate us in any circumstances\u2026an idea from Balzac which I\u2019d just come across in Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. \u201cthe savage has only impulse, the civilized man impulses and ideas.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
\nAfter finishing the Shanghai Diary, I was hungry for more information. Despite the title, this is a memoir not a diary. As such, the events are related in a voice tempered by time, experience and age\u2013and with the knowledge that diaries lack, the knowledge of where the story is going . What I\u2019d like to read now is the actual diaries. Do they exist?\n<\/p>\n
\nI enjoy reading letters and diaries as much as I do memoirs and biographies. What I love doing most is comparing the two. I\u2019m fascinated with the biographer\u2019s skill in taking source material and turning it into a narrative of a life.\n<\/p>\n
Related<\/h4>\n
\nIf you compare my WWII books to AJM\u2019s much larger collection the idea that men\u2019s history focuses on sweeping events, women\u2019s, on relationships and intimate details of daily life, holds sway in our library.\n<\/p>\n
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- Forbidden Diary: A Record of Wartime Internment 1941-1945. Natalie Crouter. Yay! This rare and wonderful diary is available on Google Books.<\/li>\n
- Nella Last\u2019s War: The Second World War Diaries of a Housewife, 49 Nella Last. I received this from AJM for Christmas.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I finished reading Shanghai Diary within 24 hours of buying it. The memoir of an eleven year old girl who, in 1939, retrieves her father from the Gestapo and escapes Germany with her parents is a compelling read. In any Hollywood movie, the escape would have signalled the happy ending. However, most of the world had already closed its borders to Jewish refugees, and Ursula\u2019s family flees to the only<\/p>\n