In March of 1939, German Jew Fritz Marcus and his father Samuel traveled to Genoa and set sail for the long, arduous journey to Shanghai.
For the next 10 years, Fritz later called Fred struggled to acclimate himself to Shanghai, an exotic and overpopulated city that was a demanding sanctuary for thousands of Jews fleeing the Nazis.
Fred Marcus, who came to the US in 1949, married Audrey Friedman in 1974.
When Audrey learned that Fred had kept several diaries in Shanghai, she urged him to translate them.
Although he promised to translate his journals upon his retirement as a Jewish educator in Denver, Fred Marcus passed away in 2002.
Survival in Shanghai: The Journals of Fred Marcus 1939-1949 is Audrey Friedman Marcus tribute to her husband, the Jews of Shanghai, historians of Jewish survival and a reading public hungry for Holocaust narratives.
Survival in Shanghai was translated by Rena Krasno, a Russian Jewish author who grew up in Shanghai during the war.
Krasno spoke at Denvers Temple Emanuel in 2003.
Friedman Marcus, who attended the lecture, learned that Krasno was fluent in six languages including German.
When Friedman Marcus approached Krasno about translating her husbands diaries, she readily agreed.
The result is a fascinating journey not only through Jewish refugee life in Shanghai but also the perceptive mind of Fred Marcus.
His diary is not the stuff of high drama, Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt writes in the books forward. Fred was not, after all, the center of any major negotiations. He was not a leader of the ghetto. He was a young man on his own, who knew that he had no one to lean on no one but himself.
His loneliness is palpable.
But Fred epitomized the notion of survivor. He does not succumb but manages to overcome the myriad obstacles facing him. One feels him always trying to find ways to better his situation.
Fred and Samuel (Semmy) Marcus arrival in Shanghai is already shadowed by grief because Freds mother had died in 1938 in Berlin.
Relieved to be out of Germany, father and son find themselves adrift in an unfamiliar sea. Conditions are tenable but grim. Their first residence is a schoolhouse that has been converted into a refugee center called the Ward Road Heim (German for home).
Semmy wants to get out of the Heim and rent a room, so he begins selling personal family possessions. He and Fred move into a room in a bombed-out house that affords more privacy.
Although Fred began his diary in 1937, he evidently destroyed entries detailing the first seven years in Shanghai.
Friedman Marcus reconstructs events with historical accuracy, powerfully descriptive language and anecdotal accounts she gleaned from her husband.
Freds diary resumes on May 5, 1944.
He writes that his father came down with a high fever in April and was hospitalized.
Mr. Alexander tells me that he has the sad duty to inform that my father passed away in the hospital on Monday, May 1, 1944, at 3 p.m. A horrible pain goes through me, but I can weep no tears, he writes.
The room seems to turn around me. I have to close my eyes in order to grasp the full meaning of the news. A feeling of helplessness overcomes me. I dont know what will become of me. I cannot place myself at all in this new situation. I feel only one thing: loneliness.
My Pappi, with whom I had shared every thought, from whom I had no secrets, who was the backbone of my entire life, I would never see him again. From now on, I have only myself, myself alone, on whom I can depend. This demands from me a moral stand. But, I believe that the way I was raised does give me this strength.
After this singular traumatic entry, Fred focuses on survival.
His life obeys a predictably frenzied rhythm as he tries to obtain income to purchase food and medicine.
He regularly suffers from pneumonia, malaria and other ailments.
Sometimes a nice lunch or a musical event makes him forget the persistent hunger in his stomach but never the hunger in his heart.
Tuesday, June 13, 1944: Library. Borrow a copy of the map of France for the third time [in order to follow the progress of the invasion]. In the evening listen to radio: From the World of Opera. Wonderful. Lonely. A little too much Wehmut (melancholy).
From the mundane to the significant, Fred captures a world in constant upheaval: blackouts, bombings, enormous fires in the sky.
When Japan surrenders, American soldiers bring not only economic relief but their music and language.
Its not long before Freds longtime friends pack their bags and board ships to new lands. Again, he feels alone.
At this point, the diary becomes almost self-analytical. Short passages yield to lengthy introspection that offer astonishing glimpses into the man himself.
When Fred Marcus began his diary, he never intended any eyes other than his own to read it.
Readers are fortunate that Audrey Friedman Marcus and Rena Krasno understood the vital importance of sharing this mans private writings with the world.
We know that Fred Marcus, who devoted his life to Holocaust education, would be proud.
