China Erases Its Jewish Past

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1. My paternal grandfather, who was a Jewish Austro-Hungarian prisoner of war in Russia during WWI, I think early on, escaped, swam the Amur river to China and walked until he came to a house that had candles burning in the window. It being a Friday night, when they opened the door, he spoke the only Hebrew words he remembered, being a mostly secular Jew, my father described him as a three days a year Jew, “Shalom Aleichem,” I think, definitely, shalom something, and they welcomed him, took him in, and helped him start a new life there where he learned the local dialect, and lived and worked as a custom tailor until 1921. They were a family of Chinese Jews recognizing and assisting a fellow Jew in distress. I regret never asking my father if he knew the name of the family or the town. No chance of asking my grandfather. He would be murdered at Auschwitz in 1944.

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