- Good morning.
- Hi, you must be Peter.
Very nice to meet you.
I'm Linda Levi, the director of the archives.
- [Narrator] The JDC's fundraising efforts
helped 190,000 Jews escape Nazi Germany before 1939
including Peter's family.
- So many people wanted to leave
and so few countries were ready to take them
so that it was very difficult
for people to find places to go.
- [Peter] But Shanghai was distinct
because it was this open port.
You did not need a valid.
- So, Shanghai became in a sense a last resort
for people who by 1938
still didn't have a place to go.
- [Narrator] Though his family
had escaped the Holocaust in Europe,
in 1943 Peter was one of 20,000 Jewish refugees
rounded up by the Japanese
and forced into the horrendous conditions
of the Shanghai Ghetto.
- [Narrator] Half starved, homeless, sick,
in daily fear of an epidemic.
- [Narrator] Life there was tough.
- [Linda] This is housing for 700 refugee families.
- [Peter] This is one of these warehouses.
- [Linda] Look at this man.
This is his home.
Very close quarters.
- My mother tells the story,
the first few nights
after arriving, my father was sitting there
and crying into the soup.
- [Linda] It's hard to suddenly turn into
a welfare recipient.
- Yes, oh, Shanghai Millionaire.
Is that what's it's called there?
Yes, sure.
It was the American Monopoly.
You know what?
I had one of these for a while.
Golly.
I remember that so well.
(laughing)
I'm getting a bit emotional here.
- [Narrator] The ghetto was patrolled
by the Japanese military.
A curfew was enforced.
Passes were needed to enter or leave
and food was rationed.
- [Peter] The quality of the food was pretty dismal.
Primarily rice and fish
and the only fruit I can ever remember was watermelon.
- Is it true also that you were exposed
to some pretty grizzly sights like?
- Yes, well, not at all unusual
to see, get up in the morning,
go out into the street.
There's a dead infant lying in the street starved to death
and on Thursday they were cremated
and we could smell the smoke from a cremation.
The medical care was non-existent
and lots of people died.
The summers are brutal,
so people just perished from the heat.
We accept that that's the way it is.
It never occurred to us that this will some day end.
- [Narrator] For more than two years
the JDC helped thousands of Jewish refugees
survive the ghetto.
And when the war was over,
it helped them resettle.
The committee kept a case file for every family it assisted.
- When the Joint left Shanghai for good
it packed up its records
and sent a list to New York.
This is just the list of the files.
The files never got to leave China.
They were confiscated by the communist authorities.
- Oh, they were?
- And we cannot find them.
So, these lists are arranged according to countries
of end destination
so far as we have been able to determine
from the migrants' plans at this end
and I have a list that includes the Adler family.
- Oh.
- That was destined to Australia.
But again, the files are in Shanghai
as far as we understand.
- [Narrator] This is Peter's first lead.
He now knows for certain that the Adlers emigrated
to Australia but with the files missing in Shanghai
the trail has run cold.
- Did they have any relatives?
- [Peter] I don't know.
I don't even know what Stella Adler's maiden name was.
- It's worth getting some genealogist onto this case,
someone who is a professional Jewish genealogist.
- [Narrator] Peter now needs a specialist
if he's ever to find out what happened
to Margaret Adler and the family that helped him survive
the Shanghai Ghetto.