A passport lost around the time of World War II and found a few years ago in Shanghai is finally being returned to a 71-year-old woman who now lives in Australia. The search for the owner of a second passport is still being sought.
The owner of the document has been identified as Gerti Waszkoutzer, a girl born on December 9, 1934, in Vienna, Austria.
She may have been among the 30,000 European Jews who found asylum from the Nazi Holocaust in Shanghai during the 1940s. But confirmation will have to wait until her son comes to town in April to pick up the passport.
The document was bought at a flea market near Yuyuan Garden six years ago by a local collector, Zhu Peiyi. Zhu stumbled across Waszkoutzer's passport along with a similar document.
Zhu decided to track down their owners in December last year when he heard the city was planning to build a Jewish cultural heritage site along the northern Bund and that many Jewish people were returning to the city to remember their past.
He first approached the Xinmin Evening News on December 7, which reported his quest, then contacted the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Memorial for help. They posted the documents on the internet, prompting a quick response from Waszkoutzer's son, who mailed his mother's childhood picture as confirmation of her identity two weeks ago.
Qin Siquan, who works for the memorial group, said the son sent an email explaining that his mother married in Australia in 1954 and has remained there ever since.
The owner of the second passport was Manfred Lichtenstein, born on August 24, 1932, in Halle, Germany. No one has claimed ownership so far.
Both of the passports were marked as belonging to Jewish people, and contain confirmation of restrictions on how much money they were allowed to change into foreign currency. On leaving Germany, they had to leave most of their possessions behind.
(Shanghai Daily February 4, 2005)
