A refugee from Vienna who sheltered in Shanghai as a child during the Second World War has donated a library of over 8,000 books to the Chinese city’s Jewish refugees museum.
Kurt Wick, 82, travelled to Shanghai in 1939 to escape the Nazis. When he returned for the first time in 71 years in February last year, he visited the Jewish museum there.
“They wanted my life story,” he told the JC. “And whilst I was there I said: ‘I know you haven’t got many books. Are you interested in having a collection of Jewish books?’ They said they would love it.”
The collection will become a new Jewish history library as part of the museum’s expansion, after the books were shipped from London earlier this year, and encompass Jewish history, art, the Holocaust and the Nazis. The library will be named after his parents – whose original surname was Wickelholz – and his only request was a plaque expressing his family’s gratitude to the city for giving them sanctuary.
He hopes Chinese students will be able to learn about Jewish life using the books, and said he wishes it generates more interest in Jewish life. The Mill Hill resident has retained a further 30-40,000 books in his collection.
“I’ve always been a mad collector of books,” he said. “My kids aren’t all that interested in [them], and I want them to go somewhere worthy.”
Mr Wick travelled to Shanghai with his parents, Moritz and Josefine, his brother Sigmund and three other family members on one of the last boats before war broke out in Europe, arriving in the city’s port on 28 August 1939. Allowed only to take items of little value by the Nazis, they arrived with clothes and a sewing machine. The rest of Mr Wick’s family, save an aunt who came to Britain, was murdered in Auschwitz.
The Sephardi families that had already established businesses in the Far East such as the Kadoories and the Sassoons provided housing in the Hongkew district of the city. Mr Wick recalled staying in a warehouse where each family was separated by cloth dividers. Moritz, a handbag maker by trade, used the sewing machine to make leather bags to sell.
“We were just penniless people who came there,” Mr Wick remembered, noting it was the fact that the Japanese controlled half the city that allowed them to live there without documentation. “Life was passable.”
However, in his own words, Shanghai was “a place of refuge, not a place of settlement” and, following the end of the war his family looked to return to Europe. By 1948, they were able to secure jobs and a home in the UK.
The family moved to Priory Road in north London and Moritz was able to find work as a handbag maker in St John’s Street in the City. After attending Hasmonean Grammar School, and a very brief stint in a law firm, Mr Wick took after his father and trained as a handbag maker.
At the age of 19, he set up his own firm, Mondaine Handbags, with his brother (and later father), which supplied to Harrods and Mappin & Webb. Mr Wick retired from the business last year, and says his claim to fame was seeing one of the bags he himself had made worn by the Queen.
Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum curator Chen Jian told the JC the museum felt "deep appreciation to Mr Kurt Wick and his family for their generous donation.
"This is a very meaningful and important event in the history of our museum," he said. "The fate of the Jews and Shanghai forged a special bond during those difficult war years. We sincerely hope that the friendship between Chinese and Jewish people will not fade with the change of times."
