Holocaust survivor never stops praising Shanghai for its role

In 1939, Sonja Muhlberger arrived in Shanghai in her pregnant mother’s womb.

She went on to live a happy childhood in the city’s Jewish quarter, where she was sheltered from the awful abuse that Jewish people were enduring at the time at the hands of Nazi Germany.

“If we hadn’t fled to Shanghai, I would not be alive now,” says the 79-year-old. “I love Shanghai. It is my home.”

Muhlberger was one of 18,000 Jews who fled European countries between 1938 and 1940, to seek refuge in Shanghai and escape the horrors of persecution by the Nazis.

Muhlberger, who lived there until she was 8, recounted her story to students at the Confucius Institute within one of Milan’s universities. Last week, the university organized various events to remember Ho Feng Shan, the Chinese diplomat who issued thousands of visas to Jews in Austria.

Although the visa to Shanghai that Muhlberger’s mother obtained was issued by the Chinese consulate in the Netherlands, and not by Ho, she said she respects Ho as a man and what he did for so many others who were in a similar situation to her family.

Muhlberger went to school, played with other children, and lived what she called a “sheltered childhood” in Shanghai’s Hongkou district, together with many other Jewish refugees.

“My mother read and sang to me, my father answered all my questions and took me to kindergarten and to school everyday on his bicycle,” she recalled, adding that her parents also found happiness in Shanghai.

She recalls the excitement of seeing snow for the first time, which allowed her to truly understand the meaning of Snow White from the fairytales her mother had read to her. Her father took a wash pan to collect the snow from the roof of the family’s home and asked her to hold out her hand so she could feel it.

Among her valued possessions are the Shanghai visas that were issued to her parents, and a photograph of her parents running around together on the ship bound for Shanghai on March 29, 1939.

“After all the years of suppression in Nazi Germany, they were finally free and happy again,” she said.

Two years after the end of World War II, in 1947, the 8-year-old Muhlberger moved back to Germany with her parents, because her father wanted to contribute toward the building of a new post-war Germany.

But her childhood memories of living in Shanghai sparked curiosity in her about the importance of the city in the history of the Holocaust. Over the years, she has conducted research into the stories of Jewish refugees in Shanghai, and compiled the information into articles, and the book Exil Shanghai 1938-1947, which she co-authored, and which was published in 2000.

She said she felt a sense of responsibility to tell the stories, to do history justice. “Today, I’m so happy to be here and be one of those who never gave up telling young and old people what happened,” she said.