Sigmund Tobias and his family fled Berlin, Germany, and arrived in the Hongkew district of Shanghai about June 1939. There, he attended the Shanghai Jewish Youth Association School and the Mir Yeshiva. Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Tobias family, along with most of the Jewish refugees in Shanghai, were forced by the Japanese to live, under difficult conditions, in the Hongkew ghetto. He describes his visit to Shanghai in 1988, almost 50 years after his arrival there as a refugee from Germany.