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The Box with the Sunflower Clasp

Uncovering a Jewish Family's Flight to Wartime Shanghai

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The Box with the Sunflower Clasp

By: Rachel Meller
Narrated by: Sarah Cullum
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Rachel Meller was never close to her aunt Lisbeth, a cool, unemotional woman with a drawling Viennese-C alifornian accent, a cigarette in her hand. But when Lisbeth died, she left Rachel an intricately carved C hinese box with a sunflower clasp. Inside the box were photographs, letters and documents that led Rachel to uncover a story she had never known: that of a passionate Jewish teenager growing up in elegant Vienna, who was caught up by war, and forced to flee to Shanghai.

Far from home, in a strange city, Lisbeth and her parents build a new life - a life of small joys and great hardship, surrounded by many others who, like them, have fled Hitler and the Nazis. 1930s Shanghai is a metropolis where the old rules do not apply - a city of fabulous wealth and crushing poverty, where disease is rife, and gangsters rub shoulders with rich emigrés; where summer brings unspeakable heat, and winter is bitterly cold; and where European refugees build community and, maybe, a young woman can find love.

Set against a backdrop of the war in the Far East, The Box with the Sunflower Clasp is a sweeping family memoir that tells the hidden history of the Jews of Shanghai. Rachel Meller writes with elegance and insight as she examines what it means to survive, and what the legacy of displacement and war might mean for the generation that comes afterwards.©2024 Rachel Meller Asia China Military War Refugee
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Rachel's hard work as she discovered details about her roots is enlightening, as well as disheartening, and fills in more of what so many of us are trying to uncover about our own painful roots embedded in a time of ignorance and hate. Thanks so much for sharing your journey.

A journey of love and understanding...

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An absorbing read, the author's family research paints a vivid picture of personalities and events. It gives a good sense of what it must have been like to flee for one's life to an unknown destination in China, and then be faced with a whole new set of desperate threats. It compellingly illuminates a less known corner of Second World War and Jewish history through its sympathetic depiction of a group of very human characters

Seeking refuge from the Holocaust in Shanghai. One family's story

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Driven by the need to connect with a branch of her family she never knew, Rachel has given us a compelling and vivid account of her family escaping war-torn Europe. They survive the harrowing depths of the war in the fascinatingly complex and alien society of Shanghai... A clearly impressive amount of research combined with a skillfully crafted narrative and a big dose of empathy gives us a deeply moving and life affirming story.

Jewish family's survival in war-time Shanghai.

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