“I wonder if you can help me.” She struggled to make her voice sound matter-of-fact. “I just need to send a wire.”
“Sure. Where to, ma’am?”
“Shanghai.”
“Is that in Japan?”
“No—China. It’s for one of my colleagues, Miss Bloom. She has Jewish relatives who may have gone to Shanghai to escape the Nazis. She has an address, but she doesn’t know if they got there.”
There was silence at the end of the phone. “Sorry, ma’am, I’m just checking . . .” After a long pause, he said: “I’m afraid there’s no wire service available at present. The US military has a presence there, but it’s early days. Maybe in a month or so . . .” He trailed off, sounding genuinely sorry.
A few minutes later the phone rang. It was the same officer. “I thought of someone who might be able to help you,” he said. “Have you heard of the Joint?”
“No, I haven’t,” she replied. “What is it?”
“It’s a relief organization for Jewish people. They operate in some of the camps in the American zone. But it’s international. If anyone knows anything about Jewish refugees in China, they will.”
As Martha scribbled the details down, she realized that she had come across it. Its full name was the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. She’d met one of its representatives during her time at the Henry Street Settlement in New York.
“I can reroute the call via central command if you want,” the officer said.
“We’ll put a call through later, if that’s okay. Thanks for your help.” Martha replaced the receiver. Kitty would want to make the call herself.
When Kitty arrived at the office, Martha stayed just long enough to make sure that she had gotten through to someone from the Joint. Then she went to deliver the list of supplies to the warehouse, returning when she judged enough time had elapsed.
Kitty was sitting at the desk, staring into space. She looked like someone in a trance.
“What is it?” Martha frowned. “What did they say?”
Kitty shook her head slowly, as if she was trying to make sense of something confusing. “That my parents might not have gone to China. They could be in Palestine. Or the Dominican Republic. Or Cuba.”
“What?”
“The woman I spoke to said that the visas for Shanghai were just transit visas. A Jewish person had to have a visa to get out of Austria, but once you were over the border, there were a few other countries you could go to that didn’t have a ban on letting people in.”
“But that address Clara gave you—why would your mother have asked her to send letters there if they didn’t intend on going to China?”
“That’s what I’m hanging on to,” Kitty said. “But the woman said travel to China would have been difficult by the end of 1940—which is when my parents left Vienna. They would have had to go all the way across Russia by train to Vladivostok, which was the only place you could get a boat for Shanghai by then. The Russians were still on the side of Germany at that stage, so traveling through the country with Jewish papers could have been dangerous.”
“But those other countries you mentioned—Cuba and Palestine and . . . where was the other place?”
“The Dominican Republic.”
“Wouldn’t it have been just as difficult to get to any of those?”
“Not according to what she told me. There was a Jewish underground organization running boats from the Black Sea to Palestine. Or you could go west, via Portugal, across the Atlantic. She said people who managed to get out of Austria and Germany went to Romania or Hungary and were hidden in safe houses until a boat was available.” Kitty spread her hands on the desk, palms up. “It’s not all that far from Vienna to the Black Sea coast—we used to go there for summer holidays. But it’s thousands of miles from Moscow to Vladivostok.”
Martha didn’t know what to say. Kitty had a stony, defeated look in her eyes. Hardly surprising. She’d come back from Vienna with a glimmer of hope, only to have it all but snuffed out by this latest news. “Did the woman you spoke to have any suggestions? Do they have immigration lists for the countries she told you about?”
Kitty shook her head. “She gave me the address of someone who was in Shanghai during the war—an aid worker who’s based in Belgium now. She said it might be worth writing to her.”
“Well, that sounds . . .”