Once My Name Was Sara

A memoir of hope and survival.

I. Betty Grebenschikoff has reached into the past to write a moving account of her experiences as a Holocaust refugee in China. Shanghai was the only port in 1939 that was willing to admit European Jews without passports or visas.

Once My Name Was Sara details her family's flight from Nazi Germany just days before her father's expected arrest by the Gestapo. With wit and humor she describes her early childhood in Berlin and later growing up in Shanghai, the city that became her home. As stateless Jewish refugees, she and her family were interned in the Hongkew ghetto by Japanese authorities in the face of overwhelming odds.

After leaving Shanghai in 1950, Grebenschikoff lived in Australia before coming to America in 1953. She split her time between Ventnor, New Jersey and St. Petersburg, Florida until she passed away in 2023 at the age of 93.