Margot Grünfeld Shafran: Escape from Nazi Germany Survival in the Shanghai Ghetto, 2015-09

Oral history interview with Margot Grünfeld Shafran.

Margot, born on January 10, 1924 in Berlin, Germany, discusses her early years as a treasured only child; growing up with an extended Jewish family in Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s; her father Reuben Grünfeld, a Polish citizen who in October 1939 was seized and deported to the Polish border where he languished for nine months until his wife, Lotte Secher Grünfeld, arranged for three sets of papers and passage to Shanghai, China on the half-freighter "Suwa Mauro;" arriving in the Japanese-controlled district of Hongkou in August 1939; living in crowded and unsanitary barracks and experiencing daily bombings; meeting a US serviceman, Richard Shafran in 1945; getting married to him in the Ohel Moshe Synagogue in Shanghai in March 1946; moving to Poughkeepsie, NY, where they began their new lives together; working for the family business; her altruism and her husband's generous support in providing affidavits for numerous extended family members to establish themselves in the United States after WWII; their pride in their work and children Ronald and Aynne; and their 67 years of marriage and pleasures of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.