Cambridge author’s first book portrays Jewish family’s flight from Nazi Germany to Shanghai

It’s late Sunday morning and I’m off to meet Rachel Meller, author of The Box with the Sunflower Clasp, at the Gonville Hotel for coffee.

The Town and Country Fair on Parker’s Piece is warming up as I make my way to the hotel’s garden. I’ve been reading Rachel’s just-published astonishing debut book, which criss-crosses the historical with the personal, and wrenches new perspectives from the history of 1930s Austria and Germany.

Who knew Shanghai had been a place of refuge for 20,000 German and Austrian Jews in the 1930s? It’s a mind-boggling adventure, full of drama and emotion like nothing else.

The book is sub-titled ‘Uncovering a Jewish Family’s Flight to Wartime Shanghai’. The box in question was bequeathed to Rachel by her aunt Lisbeth, and contained documentation and photographic evidence of the family’s increasingly desperate efforts to escape Vienna as Nazi rule became ever more vindictive in the late 1930s.

Rachel’s mother, Ilse, was the first to flee. She went to France and from there to London, where she met Josef, another Viennese Jew. They married and had two daughters, Claudia (born 1947) and Rachel, who was born in 1953.

Back in pre-war Vienna the jaws of hell were clamping shut. Arnold was next to leave, sailing for Shanghai in 1938. In March 1940, Lisbeth and Edith were given last-minute visas to sail to Shanghai. This section reads like a thriller. It’s as noir and claustrophobic as it gets. Around 20,000 Jews escaped Europe using this route. The Chinese city was one of the very last places to welcome Jews as the 1930s world the author describes divides into two parts: “Those places where Jews could not live and those where they could not enter”.

The second part of the book relates to the way the reunited trio survive in Shanghai and, post-war, their departure for San Francisco.The group then was Lisbeth, her dashing and somewhat larger-than-life husband Bruno, and Edith, Arnold having died in Shanghai in 1942.

Meanwhile, Ilse was struggling in London. Having suffered post-natal depression after Claudia was born in 1946, she took her own life three months after Rachel’s birth.

The book is also very much about this journey of discovering her mother through the letters in the family treasure trove.

I sit in the garden at the Gonville Hotel as Rachel arrives and coffee is ordered, I thank her for writing the book, especially for the descriptions of the way life changed for the worse for Jews in Vienna in the 1930s.

This wealth of new detail from this period, it turns out, was almost not written.

“I was thinking of jumping straight into the Shanghai story,” says Rachel, whose Cambridge journey took in medical writing and pharma consultancy after gaining a PhD in neuroscience at the university. “And my husband said ‘you need to set the scene’ and I hadn’t, because I thought everyone knew. I thought people would get bored.”

Such beliefs were part of the post-war landscape. Everyone assumed everyone else knew all about the horrors of the war – and didn’t much care to relive it. The stories weren’t retold until much later, when it became apparent they would be lost if they were not recorded. ‘The Box’, though a latecomer to the genre, nevertheless leaves a deep impact.

Rachel’s iced coffee is here and it seems like a good time to ask a question about something I’ve never fully understood. Why hadn’t the Japanese, who had captured Shanghai in 1937 and were on the same side as the Nazis, adopted the Nazis’ genocidal methods when it came to the Jews?

Shanghai was known as ‘the Paris of the Orient’, she explains, because the British, French and Americans “had sort of colonised it – though they didn’t call it that – in the opium wars of the 19th century: they’d set up an enclave”. It was into this enclave that the European Jews went but, as she writes: “Not once did the proclamation [after the Japanese took control of Shanghai in 1937] ever use the word ‘ghetto’. Instead, it preferred the less emotive ‘designated area’.” Such are the fine margins separating life as a refugee from inevitable death.

“One theory of why that is,” Rachel continues, “is that the Japanese had great respect for Jewish people since 1905, when a New York Jewish banker bankrolled the war with Russia and helped Japan win.

“There’s an author called David Kranzler who wrote Japanese, Nazis and Jews. He says the Japanese didn’t really have anti-Semitism until they picked it up from the Russians, but it was overridden by the overwhelming respect the Japanese had for the Jews.”

Rachel has been to Shanghai twice.

“2017 was the last time,” she says. “The local Chinese government seems to be trying to promote its history now – it’s a staggering place, a space-age city, but there were some cafés and signs in German.

“They’ve revived the connection through concerts and the promotion of cultural links, and the museum is nice.”

She adds: “Virtually all the 20,000 German, Austrian and Polish Jews who escaped to Shanghai were gone when the Communists took over in 1947. They suddenly realised they couldn’t stay on. It had only ever been temporary.

“Virtually none went back to Europe. By then they knew what had been happening with their relatives, because news had dried up during the war. Most went to Canada and the West Coast of America, or Australia or Palestine. There were quite a few Jewish nationalists among them.”

It’s time to go before the lunchtime crowd starts filling the garden up. The whole heroic resilience of surviving is mixed in with enduring images conjured up by Rachel as she reimagines the situations she portrays, even her mother’s state of mind – “Ilse was struggling after the birth of her first child” – before she brought the curtain down on her own story, to be lifted a little so many years later. Rachel admits parts of the journey have been “traumatic”.

“My sister said two or three weeks before she died, ‘you ought to have Ilse’s suicide note’ and I was quite beside myself because I had to take it back with me on the train.”

And so a precious cargo from the past finally made its way to the present day – much like this book.

• The Box with the Sunflower Clasp: Uncovering a Jewish Family’s Flight to Wartime Shanghai is published in hardback by Icon Books, priced £25.