During the years I was writing Quest for Eternal Sunshine, I was grateful to have many generous early readers whose insights helped me shape the book. One of them was Joseph Jedeikin, a retired lawyer from Oakland, California. At 93, Joe just published his own book, focused on the first thirty years of his remarkable life: Shanghai Sanctuary: Growing up Jewish During the War. Joe’s book taught me many historical facts I’d never known before, and I found it especially thought-provoking regarding prejudice—how it’s developed, passed on, and the many forms it can take.

Joe’s story is unlike any I’d ever heard. Joe was born in Japan to Jewish parents. His father, Louis, was raised in Latvia and moved to Yokohama as a young man to build a watch import business. His mother, Vera, emigrated with her family from Russia during WWI to flee the Communist revolution. Joe’s parents met and married in 1920, and lived in Yokohama until the 7.9 magnitude Great Kanto earthquake struck on September 1, 1923, destroying the entire city. Joe’s mother was buried under debris for hours until rescuers finally heard her screams.

The rescue ship the Jedeikin’s were on left the burning city and discharged all of its passengers in Kobe, which became the couple’s new home. Although they’d lost everything, Joe’s father had good credit, so he was able to rebuild his business. After their first year in Kobe, Joe’s parents had their first child, Mara. Joe was born three years later, in 1927.

Mara (Joe’s sister) and Joe at six, circa 1933

In 1930, Joe’s family moved to Zurich so his father could manage the Swiss end of his import business. They traveled to Switzerland on the Trans-Siberian railroad, stopping to visit Joe’s father’s family in Riga, Latvia for several days. Joe left Latvia with warm memories of his entire large family there, especially his loving grandmother, Jenny, who kept kosher, spoke Yiddish, and called him and his sister, her “gold stuecken”—pieces of gold.

In Zurich, Joe’s family lived less than 30 kilometers from the German border, so they received radio broadcasts from Germany. Joe was six in 1933 when Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, and he grew up listening to his frequent speeches.

“Hitler’s talks were mesmerizing,” Joe recalls. “His voice was soft and he paused frequently. He would start out speaking about Germany’s historical accomplishments and future hopes, before turning to the recent past, saying that Germany had been betrayed by the Treaty of Versailles. Invariably, he would begin to blame the Jews for all of the German people’s’ hardships. Jews were the bankers. Jews were the leaders in communist Russia. Powerful Jews in capitalist countries were plotting against Germany. As Hitler spoke about the Jews, his voice got increasingly loud and angry. He always ended with an uncontrolled scream, such as, ‘If the Jews start another war it will mean their destruction!’ Everything Hitler said was greeted by thunderous applause.”

Joe’s family from Latvia: grandmother Jenny, uncle Samuel and aunt Rosa, circa 1930.

In 1937, when Joe was ten, he traveled back to Latvia to attend his Aunt Rosa’s wedding. Rosa had gone to dental college in Switzerland, so Joe knew her well and adored her. The Jedeikin’s travels took them through Berlin, where Joe saw flags with swastikas flying everywhere, as well as countless uniformed officers with swastika armbands. There were leaflets on the street that said: Die Juden sind unser unglueck: “The Jews are our misfortune.” The windows of Jewish stores were covered with signs telling people not to patronize them. “I had an indescribably horrible feeling walking along those Berlin streets.” Joe recalls, “Not only did I feel despised, I knew that the whole country looked upon me and my family as mortal enemies.”

When he left his beloved family in Latvia after Rosa’s wedding, Joe had no idea that he would never see them again. He later learned that his entire Latvian family—including his grandmother, Rosa, Rosa’s husband and their 4-year-old son—were murdered in the most horrific way during the two-day Rumbula Forest Massacre along with 25,000 other Jews.

Joe was eleven when Germany annexed neighboring Austria, extending the Nuremberg Laws to that country. Joe’s mother showed him the newspaper headlines so that he would know what happening in the world and understand the Jews’ predicament. From that day forward, Joe read the newspaper every day. “It is as difficult now as it was then to figure out how Germany— a country with an impressive history of culture, literature, science, music and many more notable accomplishments—could select someone so out of control and violent as their leader.”

In Zurich, Joe had encountered “anti-foreigner attitudes” because he wasn’t Swiss born, but it was nothing compared to the painful experience he had with a German boy at summer camp when he was twelve. Joe looked up to the older boy and they had become very friendly, but the moment the German teenager learned that Joe was Jewish, his attitude changed and he became verbally abusive. Joe vividly remembers the boy speaking in a loud voice so all the other kids could hear, so certain of himself, as if he knew that every word he uttered was undisputed fact. “He informed me that I was inferior to him because I was a Jew. I didn’t know if what he was saying was true or not. I had never thought of myself as inferior before, but doubt began to creep in.”

Joe’s friend had acquired his knowledge from the Hitler Youth, an organization that all young Aryan Germans were expected to join. The Nazi’s strategy was to indoctrinate its upcoming generation with hero worship for Hitler and to create a fanatical force for the Nazi agenda. “I heard stories about kids turning against parents they viewed as insufficiently committed to the success of the Third Reich. They would actually turn them in to be disciplined or arrested,” Joe recalls.

When World War II broke out and Joe’s parent’s application for visas for the entire family to go to America was refused, their best option was to move to Shanghai—an international city that didn’t require entry visas.

Joe’s approved application to the Japanese army for an exemption from moving to the Jewish ghetto, May 18, 1943

Soon after the Jedeikin’s arrived in a city that welcomed foreigners, they discovered that native Chinese were viewed as second-class citizens. Labor was so inexpensive that Joe’s family had two household employees and a chauffeur. Joe recalls, “Servants that cleaned were called ‘boy’ no matter their age. I hated calling these men ‘boys’ when they were forty or fifty-years-old and I was just a teenager. It felt demeaning and I knew it wasn’t right. But eventually I accepted that the Chinese were treated as inferiors and it stopped disturbing me.”

On December 8, 1941—the same day (but different time zone) that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor—the Japanese army occupied Shanghai. In 1943, under pressure from its German ally, the Japanese created a ghetto for “stateless refugees”—a so-called code word for “Jews.” Joe’s father managed to get an exception for their family because he’d lived in Japan for fifteen years and was fluent in Japanese. “But the fact that the Japanese had agreed to create a ghetto and relocate Shanghai’s Jews was of grave concern to my family.” Their fears were heightened by the arrival in Shanghai by submarine of a German Gestapo agent, Joseph Meisinger, known as the “Butcher of Warsaw.”

“Meisinger said that Jews were a common enemy because they were rooting for both Germany and Japan to lose the war. Meisinger’s plan was to put all the Jews in the city onto old ships, tow them out to sea, and then sink them. Fortunately, the Japanese officials were appalled by this plan and refused to carry it out.”

Ultimately, 20,000 Jews evaded slaughter by the Nazi’s by immigrating to Shanghai during World War II. While the international community (with the exception of the Dominican Republic) was unwilling to ease immigration restrictions to help European Jews escape Hitler’s Final Solution, Shanghai was a sanctuary.

Joe’s entire life has been deeply impacted by events he experienced during the war. He also feels regretful that he accepted, rather than protested, the discrimination he witnessed. As a Jew, he was very aware of the evils of prejudice. He honestly reports, “It took me several years to come to the full and unalterable conclusion that all human beings, as different as they may be, must always be treated with dignity, respect, and above all, equality.”

Joe gives much of the credit for this realization to his experiences at UC Berkeley, where he had the opportunity to get to know people from all over the world with different racial, religious, ethnic and social backgrounds. When he left Shanghai for college in 1946, he lived in Berkeley’s International House where they paired every international student with an American one.

“My first roommate was a Chinese-American war veteran who had flown bomber missions over Germany. I became a great admirer of his wartime exploits. It’s strange it took coming to America to become friends with a Chinese person. During my six years living in Shanghai, there were five million Chinese and I’d never socialized with a single one.” Berkeley was where Joe met a Black person for the first time, and also where he became good friends with a Palestinian student. The friendship stuck, despite the fact that their political views clashed from the time Israel was created in 1948.

Joe’s professional headshot from 1953

After completing two years of UC Berkeley undergraduate study, Joe entered UC Hastings College of the Law to get his law degree. In his career as an attorney, he took cases filed by Black men against white ones in the late 1950s, despite the fact that bias in favor of whites was an undisputed fact in the judicial system.

Throughout his life, Joe has learned that simply being tolerant of people with different backgrounds is not enough. “We must constantly be aware of our reactions to people we meet and consciously make an effort to correct those reactions if need be. And this is not only true in relation to race, its any pre-judgment—anything relating to a person’s outward appearance or mannerisms.” Because there have been countless messages communicated to each of us by society, some conscious and some not, Joe says that even at 93, he must still maintain his vigilance.

In his book, Joe quotes the lyrics from the famous song in South Pacific, “You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught”

You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear

You’ve got to be taught from year to year…

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late

Before you are six or seven or eight

To hate all the people your relatives hate

You’ve got to be carefully taught

No matter our age, we must always work to uncover the ways we have been taught to hate and fear, and to foster more tolerance, acceptance and generosity. Honest and self-aware people like Joe Jedeikin are helping move the world in the right direction, and I feel very grateful that he has shared his story and wisdom with the world.

Joe Jedeikin’s Story: The Dangers of Discrimination