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Valuing every day after surviving war in city
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HELEN Bix was only 4 years old when her family fled Nazi Germany in 1939 to seek refuge in Shanghai.
At the time, the city was a melting pot of cultures and languages. Tropical diseases prevailed. In 1937, the Battle of Shanghai was waged and lost against a Japanese invasion. The subsequent occupation set the stage for civilian atrocities that Bix’s family had sought to escape in Europe.
Now 82, Bix and her husband, retired garment company owners, live in Southern Florida. They called their business Beco after the name of the small tailoring shop her mother opened in Shanghai.
“I value every day, and I want to do something every day to make my wartime survival meaningful,” she told Shanghai Daily in a phone interview.
Bix was living in Celle, Germany in 1938 when the family’s comfortable life came to an abrupt halt. Her stepfather was sent to a concentration camp. Her mother bribed officials to get him released, and the family boarded a ship to Shanghai early in 1939.
“Many people considered Shanghai as the Paris of the Orient before World War II, but it was a little known fact for many years that Shanghai saved about 18,000 refugees from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland,” she said. “I wouldn’t be alive today if it weren’t for Shanghai.”
At that time, the city was divided into sectors: an international settlement under British and American control, the then French Concession and a walled-off area for Chinese residents.
When they first arrived, Bix’s stepfather managed to rent an apartment in the French Concession for the family, which included her 10-year-old brother.
Her mother sold almost every belonging the family brought to Shanghai to finance the opening of the tailoring shop. Thanks to her mother’s business acumen, which Bix inherited, the small store became successful, hiring Chinese tailors.
The Japanese occupation of the city changed the family’s fortunes. They were forced with other Jewish refugees to live in the 1.5-square-kilometer zone known as the Shanghai Ghetto in the Hongkou District.
“We used to walk long distances through chaotic streets filled with rickshaws and beggars,” Bix said. “When I look back on it, I must have been a very brave little girl.”
Epidemics swept the city. Bix’s stepfather died of complications of tuberculosis and diabetes. Bix herself almost died of whooping cough, and her brother barely survived a bout of malaria. In the ghetto, the corpses of beggars were found on the streets every morning, and the water supply was full of bacteria. Air raids were common.
“There was a lot of bombing toward the end of the war,” Bix recalled. “Walking to and from school, I was really terrified. There was no place to hide. You never knew from one minute to the next whether you would be alive.”
The ghetto was presided over by a tyrannical Japanese administrator who called himself the “King of the Jews.” Getting a temporary pass to leave the ghetto for outside business was dependent on his mercurial moods.
One day, while walking to school in the international sector, Bix said she saw a Japanese sentry kill a man who didn’t bow correctly.
“I don’t know what was said between them,” she said, “but the Japanese soldier killed him right in front of my eyes. I can still recall the bloody scene to this day.”
She also remembered the day her mother asked her to check on the family tailor shop in the then French Concession. When Bix got there, she found the store looted.
Her mother struggled to raise the two children by selling fabrics and operating other small businesses. She had to pawn off a pair of silver candlesticks from her grandmother to send the children to the Shanghai Jewish School, where they could receive a British education.
They later got back the candlesticks, which Bix gave to her daughter, and who uses them still at important family gatherings.
In 1948, Bix went to the US and attended the University of Minnesota, where she met her future husband.
The couple opened their Beco clothing manufacturing company in Minnesota, turning it into a well-known brand. Bix visited Shanghai again in 1981 and 1986. “I still consider it my second home,” she said.
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