sister Stefanie. She recalls, "My mother wept—not so much out of the loss, but out of a sense of the unfairness of it, that someone we'd trained could turn on us, could get something we had worked so hard for, for nothing." With their little remaining money, his mother bought tickets for them to go to Shanghai, China, an open port city which didn't require a visa. They fled Germany on a passenger-carrying freighter shortly before war broke out in 1939. They took only minimal possessions; they were not allowed to take any money. He remembers the voyage: "From Naples via Port Said, Suez, Aden, Bombay, Colombo, Singapore, and Hong Kong; each one of those ports of call was part of the British Empire, and none would admit Jewish refugees." Upon arriving, they expected to remain only briefly, assuming they could then travel on to a safer country. However, with the outbreak of World War II, Japan had occupied Shanghai, and the Blumenthals were confined to the Shanghai Ghetto along with 20,000 other Jewish refugees for the next eight years. Blumenthal witnessed severe poverty and starvation throughout the ghetto, sometimes seeing corpses lying in the streets. "It was a cesspool," he said. He was able to find a cleaning job at a chemical factory and earned $1 a week, which was used to feed his family: His schooling was haphazard, and the stress of survival caused his parents to divorce. Nevertheless, he was able to learn English during a brief period attending a British school, and learned to speak some Chinese, French and Portuguese during other periods there. When the war in the Pacific ended in the summer of 1945, American troops entered Shanghai. He found a job as a warehouse helper with the U.S. Air Force, which benefited from his linguistic skills. By 1947 he and his sister, after much effort and being refused visas to Canada, received visas to the U.S. They made their way to San Francisco, where they knew no one, and with only $200 between them. With limited education, and now a stateless refugee, he did his best to make something of himself: Education Blumenthal found his first full-time job earning $40 per week as a billing clerk for the National Biscuit Company. He later enrolled at San Francisco City College and supported himself doing part-time work, including truck driver, night elevator operator, busboy and