Another character who really existed is Laura Margolis, the representative of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. She arrived in Shanghai in 1941, and of the approximately twenty thousand German and Austrian refugees then living in the city, eight thousand received at least one meal a day from the Joint’s soup kitchens. Despite being interned for a time by the Japanese, she managed to keep the soup kitchens running.
I have used some literary license in the dates of certain historical events outlined in the novel. The evacuation of Shanghai began in October 1948 （not 1947, as I suggested）。 The sinking of the steamer Kiangya during the evacuation happened in December 1948. An estimated two thousand to three thousand passengers drowned—a higher death toll than that of the Titanic.
The DP Act allowing refugees into America wasn’t passed until June 1948 （a year later than in my story）。 In October that year, the ship General Black arrived in New York Harbor—the first to bring DPs to the USA after WWII. Soon after, other ships arrived in Boston and New Orleans. It wasn’t until February 1949 that the first Jewish refugees from Shanghai arrived in San Francisco, to be transferred to sealed trains that took them to Ellis Island in New York.
It took a long time for the millions of people displaced by WWII to find new homes. There were still camps operating in Germany in the 1950s. The last one closed in 1959, fourteen years after the fighting had ended.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In addition to Kathryn Hulme’s The Wild Place, Ben Shephard’s book about the aftermath of the Second World War, The Long Road Home, was an invaluable source of information about Displaced Persons camps and the people who ran them. When researching the Kindertransport, I learned much about how it felt to be a child taken away from Nazi-occupied Vienna by reading Lore Segal’s Other People’s Houses. I also gathered vital information for the creation of the character Delphine from Anne Sebba’s fascinating book Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved, and Died.
Thank you to Jodi Warshaw and everyone at Lake Union Publishing for the great job they do. I’m also grateful to Christina Henry de Tessan for her perceptive suggestions during the editing process.
Huge thanks to my family for their unwavering support—particularly my daughter, Ruth, who made exploring Brooklyn so much fun, and Steve, my husband, for all the early-morning coffees and his unfailing good humor. Finally, thank you to my mum, my champion and my number-one fan: I’m heartbroken that you passed away before you got to read this.