New York exhibition highlights Jewish refugees' stories in China

NEW YORK - Eighty-nine-year-old Betty Grebenschikoff was born in Germany and spent most of her life in the United States, but she always tells people: "I grew up in Shanghai."

Two days before the Gestapo of Nazi Germany would approach her father, Grebenschikoff and her family boarded a ship in May 1939 heading to Shanghai, China, the only place in the world taking in Jewish refugees at that time. In the following 11 years, she lived in the Hongkou district, where a majority of over 18,000 European Jews settled through the 1930s-40s.

Despite hardships inflicted by World War II, local people still opened their arms to their new neighbors, helping them maintain the Jewish lifestyle and feel at home. Grebenschikoff attended Jewish schools, went to the synagogue, and even met the love of her life - a Russian who taught sports at her school, and married him in the late 1940s.