Editor's Note: During the World War II, more than 30,000 Jews, under attack by the Nazis in Europe, fled to Shanghai, China and 16,000 of them took refugee in this city. Meanwhile, the local Shanghai people were also in an abyss of pain inflicted by the Japanese invasion.  Though the time was difficult, gratitude and mutual friendship lived on in the heart of the Jewish and Chinese people. The Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum and Shanghai International Studies University (SISU) launched a initiative early this year to present those touching stories in Chinese, English, German and Hebrew. This is one of the selected stories in the project to commemorate the history of Jews in Shanghai.

y first contact with Michael Blumenthal was made through an e-mail with a few inquiries.

 I sent the email almost mid-night. I had not expected to get any reply soon, and I even had no idea where he was. He might be in Berlin or Princeton. You can imagine how surprised and excited I was the next morning when I saw his reply, and I discovered later that the reply came within one hour after I sent my inquiries and his answers were very careful.

That morning, I called a scholar specialized in Jewish studies, and I mentioned the correspondence between me and Michael. The scholar couldn’t believe his ears. He found his voice after a while, and said, “Ah … Michael does not usually reply letters.”

Then I came to know that Michael Blumenthal is one of the most distinguished Jews who once took refuge in Shanghai. In 1938, Michael fled the Holocaust in Nazi Germany together with his parents and his sister, and stayed in Shanghai from 13 to 21. He moved to the USA after WWII. In less than six years, Michael worked through community college, attended the University of California at Berkeley, and finally got his Ph. D. from Princeton University.

Fourteen years later, when he was 35, he was made Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Kennedy administration responsible for trade talks. On his first day in office, he met with an official of the State Department and offered to buy him a meal. The official asked, “Have we met?” Then, Michael pulled out an old piece of paper. It was a visa document. “Yes, we’ve. You signed this for me. It is not a disaster for the USA to let refugees in, is it?”

In 1977, Michael became Secretary of Treasury of the Carter administration, which is indeed a prominent official position. Although his annual income dropped from 473,000 US dollars to 66,000 US dollars, he looked around the enormous office in Washington and laughed, “It is not bad for a boy from Shanghai.”

Michael Blumenthal offers an example of the American Dream coming true, starting as an international refugee, a poor student, and then a scholar, a successful businessman and finally becoming a top politician in the US federal government.

In his reply, Michael told me that he was really a boy from Shanghai. He attended the Jewish school in Shanghai from 1939 to 1942, and the school was located on North Shanxi Road, near a Jewish synagogue about two or three blocks north of West Nanjing Road.

When they arrived in Shanghai, they could still afford to rent a house near Weihai Road. But after the Pacific War broke out, the situation worsened and Michael was forced to quit school and find a job. He sold bread for some time, and his pay was half a stick bread one day. He did not eat it; instead, he sold it too so that he could buy more, although coarser, foods for the family. In 1943, the Japanese military occupiers forced the Jewish refugees to move into a proclaimed restricted sector for stateless refugees, the Ghetto, in Hongkou. It was an area of 2 ½ square kilometers, but there were 180,000 stateless Jews. Michael and his family moved there too, and lived in an attic room at 39 Chusan Road (now Zhoushan Road).

I asked Michael, “I was told you vowed when you left China after WWII that you’d never come back. What changed your mind?” His reply was: “I began coming back to China in 1973, because it was a totally different country from when I left Shanghai. It had almost been ruined by the war.”

In 1973, Michael first returned to China as chairman of the National US-China Relationship Committee to discuss affairs concerning cultural exchange between China and the USA. He came in 1978 and 1979 again as Secretary of Treasury and met with Deng Xiaoping who was then deputy premier of China to discuss economic and financial matters as part of the bigger attempt to resume the diplomatic ties between the USA and China. Then, he unveiled the US embassy in China as the special envoy of President Jimmy Carter of the USA.

“I knew much less about China when I was there than after I left.” Michael said, “Now as an old man, I must say that I’ve learned a lot of valuable things back then in Shanghai. China is an important part of my life. My experience there has a far reaching influence on my career in the USA.” He also said in his memoir From the Land of Exile to Washington, “What I saw and came to know in Shanghai had impressed me deeply. I have never forgotten those moments when I sit behind the desk or give advice to the president.”

To Michael, the USA has his home, but China has his root. He had not valued his root very much during his early years, however. He had told many interviewers that he had been totally disappointed with Shanghai, a much hailed paradise for adventurers and Paris of the East. It had no law; it was poor and dirty; it was full of disease, corruption and prostitution; and there were beggars dying or lying dead on the street. Like most other Jewish refugees in Shanghai, Michael and his family thought they would not stay there very long, and they would move to another country soon. He also admitted that they had not developed any deep relationship with the local Chinese because, like many other Jewish refugees, they had been influenced by other foreigners, mostly English and American, who despised the Chinese, and distanced themselves from their Chinese neighbors. This is why he could speak only a little Chinese in the Shanghai dialect which he learned from boiler owners and rickshaw pullers. His impression of Chinese food was very bad until he could go to the Chinese restaurants on Nanjing Road after WWII was over and he could earn more. Of course, there were some other Jewish refugees who were interested in China and Shanghai. For instance, a boyhood friend of his was keen on things about China and later worked for the US embassy in China.

After the US embassy in China opened 36 years ago, Michael took two days off and came to Shanghai to relive his memories. In 1979, the old house where he once lived was still there in Shanghai, and his neighbors were still there, and the area was still poor and dirty. He saw a different China and Shanghai each time he came afterwards. The country and the city have got more and more beautiful and charming. He believed he had seen a miracle.

After he retired, Michael was interested in the history of German Jews, and published a book The Invisible Wall: Secrets of German and Jews which explores why Jews had been persecuted by the Nazis in the 1930s and 40s from the historical perspective. Later, his special experience made him Director of the Jewish Museum of Berlin. So he had travelled a lot between Princeton and Berlin.

The Jewish Museum in Berlin is the largest Jewish museum in Europe and has kept records of the history of Jews in Germany lasting over two thousand years, including their remarkable contributions to Germany in art, politics, science and business and their miserable suffering in the early 20^th century. The major exhibits of the museum, about 3,900 historical relics and daily life objects in which over 1,600 pieces are original, are about Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. The design of the museum is also very enlightening. It is like a time tunnel leading visitors from today to the hell of the past. I’ve visited the museum online, and I wondered how the curator feels about his childhood miseries and his escape from the hell in Nazi-controlled Germany.

One day in February 2015, Michael came back to Shanghai for the eighth time. He visited Shanghai Jewish Museum at 62 Changyang Road, and examined every face in the pictures on show, and found his own name and his parents’ and sister's names on the Wall of Names. An old man of 89, Michael seemed to relive his boyhood when he touched them, and his face shone with sweetness under the sun.