Oswald “Valdik” Holzer arrives in Shanghai, China, July 5, 1939

RARE EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT  IN OLD LETTER DETAILS

MY FATHER’S ARRIVAL IN SHANGHAI, CHINA 80 YEARS AGO – JULY 5, 1939 

After escaping Hitler’s growing threat in his occupied Czech homeland, and traveling nearly 10,000 nautical miles from Marseille, France, Oswald “Valdik” Holzer, on July 5, 1939, reached Shanghai.  My father was a 28-year-old physician in a very foreign land.

(Watch award-winning MY DEAR BOY book trailer here.)

During 1937-1941, some twenty thousand desperate European Jewish refugees arrived in Shanghai.  While traveling the globe as an author for research and speaking engagements, I’ve learned this illustrious Shanghai history is well known among Holocaust scholars but little known to others.

Echoing the immigration turmoil of today’s world, during the late 1920s and 1930s, in the shadow of a global economic depression and the threat of war, many countries, including the United States of America, refused to increase their visa quota numbers. According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center on Holocaust Studies, Shanghai took in more Jewish refugees than Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, and South Africa combined. This little known truth makes “Shanghai” synonymous with “haven” and “rescue” in the narrative of the Holocaust era.

On this 80th anniversary of my father’s arrival in Shanghai as a Czech Jewish refugee, I share my dad’s eyewitness account via a letter he wrote (preserved with a carbon copy), to a close friend, Frantisek Schoenbaum, trapped with his wife Andula and young son Honza (John), in Prague under Nazi-control. The letter from the Holzer Collection was translated in 2008.

Shanghai, 7-20-1939

Franta, don’t be angry with me that I am bothering you, I have had no news from home for a month already. Please call my family and tell them to write to me airmail at Hong Kong POB 370 c/o Leo Lilling as that is my address. If something would happen, God forbid, with the family, write it to me, please, so that I can possibly help them somehow if it would be possible.

I am also including a letter for {Pavel} Koerper. He wants to come here, so I must work him up a little so that he would not be surprised. If some of you are in a lousy way perhaps, come here, it is better here, despite all that misery, than in Prague or in Europe in general. Notably, one can work here, and I will be already sitting {meaning probably in a place with medical practice} by that time so I could help you. Eventually, one would not stay here forever, and a man can get to some other place somewhat easier from here.

Thank you for your lovely letter.   In the meantime, you received undoubtedly my chattering from the ship.   We must stay in writing contact all the time.   You have no idea how happy you made me with that letter of yours.  You know, when a man does not hear that dialect of ours anymore, at least one can have something for enjoyable reading again.   To tell you the truth: that distance is not so big, and it does not seem so huge, but I am damnably homesick for all and for everything, mainly when a man is almost entirely without news and when he does not know when, and if at all, he will return. Such thoughts would develop in your head only after some time.   Do not be angry that I am responding to your cheerful letter with such sentimental jabbering, but it is called here “S’ai depression,” and supposedly everybody is going through that during their first time.  After all, you know that is not my nature.

I hope that in your literary ass {meaning: forgotten area, away from the center of action}, you will also mention the good physician Osvald who left his mother country to treat poor little Chinese.  In order for you to elaborate on this topic better, I am sending you the following contribution:

So already for three days, I have been partially pummeled with malaria. I caught it someplace in Saigon, such an idiotic French Indochina, but it is better than tuberculosis.   Hey, one must always be content.   I am curing it by myself, chiefly with whiskey, which is dreadfully cheap here (1 liter 7.-Kc [crowns]).   Otherwise, it is possible to catch in this beautiful but strange country everything from measles to leprosy.   Hey, so that I won’t forget, if you happen by any chance to talk with my family, do not tell them anything about these lovely things, they would be unnecessarily afraid.  It is not so bad.

As you had read “Chuan in China,” approximately 20% of it describes things well; otherwise, everything is yet crazier by far.   In a week here, you set aside all European social prejudices, you let yourself ride in a rickshaw, you are cursing Chinese, in Czech of course, you start to booze.   In short, you become a white shadow; it is somehow a matter-of-course situation.

Franta, there are 20,000 emigrants here, 98 % of them without money, so the society gave them housing in a quarter almost entirely destroyed by Japanese shooting, from where the Chinese fled.   And those Jews, Israelis, etc., built from those ruins their houses, opened businesses, coffee houses, even Jewish prostitutes are there.   But of course, who will guarantee them that the bombing of the area would not start tomorrow again?    Those who do not believe in that place and have a little money, live in the French Concession, it is first of all safe.   Like in a circus created for adventurers, you can make so much money here in a day that you don’t need to do anything else in life ever, and in an hour, you can have all of that go into a toilet.   The dollar dropped yesterday, and today by 30 %, that has been talked about here for a week already, so some people became wealthy, and others lost their shirts in the process.   Even the weather is so crazy:  I get out nicely in the morning in a white suit, with a towel around my neck as is a fashion here to have something for wiping when one is sweating like a pig, I sat on a bus and started moving.

However, a typhoon came in the meantime, and I had to get off the bus only with extreme difficulty, then I was running down the street until I exquisitely fell.   For a while, I was rolling in mud, and when I looked around then, I found out that numerous gentlemen are lying there in the same manner and that they have a good time looking at the mess.   So I had a good time, too.   Once in a while, some gentleman crawled over me with the necessary…” sorry.”  Oh, but all of a sudden, there was a loud sound beside me, a roof fell there.  I don’t know where because surrounding houses had none already anyway.   Under the roof, there were lying some rickshaws and an overturned car.    Therefore, I told myself again: safety first, and I slithered with the crowd into a nearest passage-way, where I waited for six hours till it was over.   One cannot distinguish now what was destroyed by Japanese and what by the typhoon.

For me, as a physician, there are some possibilities here.   I have some acquaintances here, and I feel that I would not get lost here.   However, I would not like to stay here as I lack some such feeling of home.  When I make some money here, I will rush farther inland immediately.   Otherwise, one can manage to live beautifully here, for 77 pounds a week, you are a big gentleman.  You can furnish a luxurious apartment for 5 pounds, and for 1 shai. Dollar, you can have a beautiful Miss for a week with everything.  And yet, I envy you those strolls along the river Luznice when there is a sweet fragrance of hay near us…

P.S. Write on airmail paper, you naive man, who are you paying the postage?

Valdik    {Oswald “Valdik” Holzer}

©2008 From the collection of Joanie Holzer Schirm.  Reproduction only with permission from Joanie Schirm: joanie@joanieschirm.com

www.joanieschirm.com

Dad’s story in MY DEAR BOY came to life via revelations from a treasure trove of four hundred letters he preserved after the war. Seventy-eight friends and relatives, along with Dad’s own seventy carbon-copied letters and journals written during his 19 months in China, detail the emotions, circumstances, and revelations encountered by displaced persons along with those trapped behind under Nazi-occupation. Former USHMM archives director, Henry Mayer, called the Holzer Collection “one of the most complete personal collections of WWII correspondence seen in years.”

The timeless letters remind what it’s like to be forced penniless from home, losing native land, family, friends, possessions, livelihood, and identity.  I exist because my father made it to China. My paternal grandparents, Arnost and Olga, and forty-two other relatives were not so fortunate. All hope-filled futures were lost as they perished in the Holocaust. Dad’s only tangible connection to his lost world were these old letters.  He hid them away in old Chinese boxes, moved to America and served as a family physician in Melbourne, Florida. The letters were discovered after his death and in 2008. Upon translation, they revealed a universal, timeless story relevant to today’s world.

MY DEAR BOY: A World War Story of Escape, Exile, and Revelation                        by Joanie Holzer Schirm

Book trailer

Available anywhere books are sold. In all formats: Hardcover, eBook, Audiobook

Through my publisher, Potomac Books, use a discount code 6AS19  https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/potomac-books/9781640120723/

MY DEAR BOY: Lesson Plans soon available at www.joanieschirm.com/teachers

Photos from the Holzer Collection. (Photo reproduction restricted without permission from author Joanie Holzer Schirm joanies@joanieschirm.com )

Now showing at the Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education  Center of Florida:
DISPLACED PERSON: Oswald Valdik Holzer’s story with audio, featuring WWII letters, documents, photographs, vintage film, and clothing currently on exhibit. Upon the 2023 opening of Orlando’s new museum —Holocaust Museum for Hope & Humanity—the DISPLACED PERSON exhibit will become a permanent reminder of the ongoing struggles of displaced humanity throughout our world and what together we can do to diminish this plight.

Joanie Holzer Schirm    joanie@joanieschirm.com   

www.joanieschirm.com     For speaking engagements: joanie@joanieschirm.com

Inspiration for my fateful journey

When you’re an author of nonfiction, reader feedback inspires when you learn you’ve touched a personal chord within someone’s life.   Lately, a couple of heartwarming book reviews of Adventurers Against Their Will, remind me the day-in, day-out grueling research and study is well worth this fateful writing journey.

From Judith Lavitt in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada:

“I was born in Shanghai in 1941 to Jews that had managed to escape the horrors of Europe. My parents were one of the lucky ones in that they were able to leave when they did. They were on the last ship to get out by way of Genoa, Italy on the Conte Verde.  Pavel Kraus, a cousin of Joanie’s she includes in her book, was on this ship along with my parents (Abraham , Adi and Liselotte nee: Stein, Schaffer). Learning this fact alone made me want to continue learning more and more. This book gave me a better understanding of what my parents must have gone through in order to find a haven in Shanghai. As difficult as life was, they were much better off than the people who they left behind.   Shanghai was the only port in the entire word that would accept people without papers. These letters helped me to understand better what went on. After the war my parents as many others wanted the memories to fade so they never spoke about this time in their lives.

My grandparents along with aunts, uncle and cousins all felt that they would be safe staying in Germany. They had lived in Germany for a few hundred years and felt they were Jewish, but German first. They were a well-established family.  Could these horrors be true? Only my parents and one brother survived.

We left Shanghai and arrived in San Francisco on July 22. My brother Bert was born as an American on the 23. At that time no two people in our family had been born in the same country. We left by train for Winnipeg, when Bert was six weeks old.  Life has been good after such a bleak start.

I think this book should be a very important reading for the young. It could happen again.”

From Charles Ota Heller, Annapolis, Maryland, USA: 

“As a Holocaust Survivor–one of Czechoslovakia’s “hidden children” during World War II–I was intrigued when I found out about this book. What I discovered inside the covers of “Adventurers Against Their Will” was a series of remarkable stories. Author Joanie Holzer Schirm discovered an amazing gift left by her father: brightly-painted Chinese boxes which contained a treasure trove of letters. They are letters to and from her father’s friends and family–those who escaped Czechoslovakia from the Nazis and scattered around the world, as well as those who stayed behind and eventually perished at the hands of the Germans. It is one thing to be in possession of such correspondence and to have had the benefit of one’s father’s stories. It is another to write an interesting, coherent, dramatic, exciting story which keeps the reader turning pages.

Ms. Schirm does this beautifully. With so many individual tales, so many characters, and so many places, it would be easy for the reader to become confused. But, she uses skillfully a “Dramatis Personae” at the beginning of each chapter, along with a timeline at the end of the book, both of which allow the reader to remain engaged and informed. I know from personal experience how difficult it is, when writing such a book, to mix personal stories with historical events. The author does this masterfully, writing with emotion and feeling–informing, educating, and creating suspense. “Adventurers Against Their Will” is a must-read. It is for anyone who embraces inspirational stories of people who expect to lead ordinary, happy, lives, but end up having to overcome hardships and calamities thrust upon them by forces of evil.”

The photo is of my father’s 1939 ship ticket from Marseilles to Shanghai – his place of safe refuge until early 1941 when he made his way to America.   The high drama I write about in my books can’t be made up. These two book reviewers also lived early lives filled with life-threatening danger. Luckily, as with these two reviewers, the stories I write about end with rebuilt lives in a civilized society. May we remember civilized societies, as was Germany’s in the early 1930’s, are often fragile.  We must never forget the importance of honoring our differences and championing human rights.   

As an author who started to write books after six decades of ‘not’ writing books, I’m a good example to think about when you want to step off the sidewalk, turn a new corner, and follow your dreams.  I’m proof that each day offers the opportunity to get ready for your next nonfiction chapter in life.  Start now by getting your next cup of coffee at a different café. Write me a note if you want to know more about how to go about becoming a writer “later in life.”  It’s an epic saga but still fun.

With English to Czech translation by Jana Gigov, TRITON publishing house brings to life on September 1, 2014 the WWII stories of my father and his Prague friends. Adventurers Against Their Will – published in my dad’s native tongue – is a dream come true! Unlike any other, these stories of forcibly displaced persons just before and during WWII remind us to be guardians of human rights and dignity.

From TRITON, please order the print version of the 2013 Global Ebook Award Winner for Best Biography for your Czech-speaking friends! http://www.tridistri.cz/dobrodruhyprotisvevuli

For the English version, go to www.joanieschirm.local/order-books/

Next, go get your coffee.

Joanie Holzer Schirm signing Prague’s Triton publishing company contract for Adventurers Against Their Will to be in Czech language. March 2014

As I held my pen to sign this Triton publishing agreement, words from my 1992 Walt Disney World Dreamers and Doers Award came to mind:

Somehow I can’t believe there are any heights that can’t be scaled by someone who knows the secret of making dreams come true. This special criteria, it seems to me, can be summarized in Four C’s. They are curiosity, confidence, courage, and constancy…and the greatest of these is confidence. When you believe a thing, believe it all the way, implicitly and unquestionably – Walt Disney

Unquestionably, my father’s life story and the contents of his treasure trove of WWII letters are a hymn without sentimentality to the magnificence of the human spirit.  The evergreen lessons they relay about protecting human dignity are meant to be heard across the globe. From English, to Czech, to who-knows-where next – we must keep and preserve all that is known in trust for those who come after us.

The small beginnings of this story began some seventy-five years ago when my father was displaced in 1939 from his Nazi-occupied Czech homeland to China. There, he sat at various desks in Shanghai, Tsingtao (Qingdao), Tientsin (Tianjin), Ping Ting Hsien (Pingding County), and Peking (Beijing), writing letters to his friends and family about what was happening to him. On occasion, surrounded by raging typhus epidemics, he observed bloody battles between Chinese and Japanese armies. Next, he found himself in the midst of cultured conversations at the finest hospital in the Orient. As a physician serving Chinese patients, he worried about his own family and friends who were trapped behind in Nazi-territory or displaced like he somewhere in the war-torn world. His gripping experiences throughout China seemed endless.

Somehow in the midst of turmoil, he saved 400 letters from 78 friends and relatives. He kept them safe to store away after the war – only to be discovered upon his death. So now it seems fitting that Adventurers Against Their Will, about seven of his correspondents and the magnificence of the human spirit, would be published in my dad’s native tongue.  Sometime in 2015, Triton Publishing company of Prague will display the results of this foreign rights agreement to produce the book in Czech.

A special thank you goes to Prague’s Jana Gigov and Lenka Svobodova for elucidating what I’ve written in English to make this Czech-language publishing dream come true.  Na zdraví!

And to all you writers who wish to have your book reach a global market… this serves as a reminder to pay homage to Walt’s secret “Four C’s.”  Big dreams can come true!

Six years ago when I sold my engineering firm to begin my life as a full-time writer, I got some great advice from my friend Dr. Sandy Shugart. Known in Central Florida for his leadership of extraordinary accomplishments among the nation’s 1200 colleges, as President of Valencia College in 2011, his school was named the top community college in the United States.

What is less known about Sandy is he’s also a very talented singer, song-writer, and an acoustic guitar player who creates urban folk music well worth seeking out. Sandy’s a quintessential multitasker. He’s someone who can whip an academic program in to top gear, read a book, while at the same time download his own music on to his iPod. I’ve always admired the guy.

Our conversation was a brief one that day; a chance encounter between his multitasking and my retirement party. It started with me relaying the mission that lay ahead as I transformed myself to an author.

“I know I have my hands full. I have to learn not only how to properly write words that will entice some future reader to offer up hours of personal time to read my stories, but I also have to learn about the business of book publishing.”  As he politely listened, I gave him a brief synopsis of the revolution going on in ‘the biz.’

As a nonfiction writer of history, I told Sandy “my job is to bring the dead back to life again.” He seemed intrigued.  “But first, I need Czech translators who can bring 400 multi-page WWII-era letters in to English so I can read them and understand what I’m dealing with so I can then write these meaningful stories.”  His eyes glossed over.  I tried to bring it back to his vocation.

“I need to do a lot of research so the stories unfold with the historical context they deserve.  Trouble is I’ve had quite a break in time since my college days when I last poured over history books.”

“And, oh by the way, I’ve never written a book before.”

I must have been droning on and on when Sandy looked at his watch and simply said:

“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”

And then, he walked away. I knew right off it was brilliant advice. From one multitasker to another, he’d set me off on the right path to my life’s second chapter vocation with a reminder of the importance of focus.  If you are going to write a book, there are a multitude of activities which will distract you from the main thing.

The main thing was to complete the book; and to do that I had to: write, write, write. The rest will all fall in place. Somehow it did. I finished my debut book, Adventurers Against Their Will, and won the Best Biography of the Year in the 2013 Global Ebook Awards.   Thanks Sandy for the advice I bet you probably don’t even remember giving me.