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I've read before about Germany trying to pressure Japan to give up the Jews they had and the Japanese respectfully declining this request. It's nice that his parents had the sense to get out of Berlin in 1926 instead of staying behind living in denial.

The Shapiro family in Yokohama, 1941 (Courtesy)

Isaac Shapiro’s best friend was a member of the Hitler Youth.

One of the best mathematicians of the 20th century was in the Sturmabteilung (SA), Ernst Witt.

After the war when he was visiting at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, a Russian mathematician told him how much he liked one of Witt's theorems.

Witt said, "I came up with that in Russia."

The Russian said, "How interesting! When were you in Russia?"

Witt said, "When I was in the Wehrmacht."

The Russian turned around and walked out.

There is one aspect of this fascinating story that I wish the author had made more clear: that of language.

• He says the parents were "both Russian Jewish musicians, [who] met and married in Berlin."
• Further, the father "played a role in helping Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese diplomat who saved thousands of Lithuanian Jews. When some of those Jews reached Japan in 1941... Shapiro’s father would translate for them at the American consulate in Yokohama."
• And finally, the son who is the protagonist of this story was fluent enough in English at age 14 to sign on with the Americans as a post-war translator.

Were the parents natural polygots, speaking Russian, German, Japanese, Lithuanian, Hebrew, Yiddish and English? Were they American Jews who learned English in their youth before traveling to Berlin and Japan, and who spoke it at home to their American-looking children? Had they relied on Yiddish in Germany, since they were probably with other Jewish musicians?

We can assume the family also learned Japanese while living there a long time, but when the father translated for the Lithuanian Jews, was it from Lithuanian to Japanese, or from Yiddish or Hebrew to Japanese? Or to English, since they were in the American consulate?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Doubtless the father and the son were fluent in more than one language, but how many?

http://www.chinajewish.org/SJC/Jhistory.htm

... From 1938 on, some 20,000 Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria escaped to Shanghai, the only place in the world that did not require a visa to enter. Among them was Michael Blumenthal, who later became U.S. Secretary of the Treasury in the Carter Administration, and the late Shaul Eisenberg, who founded and ran the Eisenberg Group of Compalnies in Israel.

Between 1939 and 1940, approximately 2,000 Polish Jews escaped to Shanghai, avoiding certain death. Among these, all the teachers and students of the Mir Yeshiva, some 400 in number, miraculously survived...