An 'Uncommon Journey' to East Hampton's Authors Night

East Hampton artist and fashion designer Ilie Wacs and his sister, San Francisco philanthropist, Deborah Strobin will be under the tent Saturday, August 11th, at Authors Night, East Hampton Library's annual fundraiser. Brother and sister will be signing copies of their memoir An Uncommon Journey, a chronicle of their harrowing journey from Nazi-occupied Vienna to Japanese-occupied Shanghai, America and freedom.

Fourteen years ago, on his 70th birthday, Wacs and Strobin were visiting the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. when they were asked to identify a Japanese propaganda photo taken in the Shanghai Jewish Ghetto during World War II.

"We said, we'll do our best," Wacs recently told East Hampton Patch, "and we looked at the photograph — and there was Deborah."

"At first I didn't recognize it then it was shock, total shock, when I finally realized I was looking back at myself," said Strobin, explaining how it felt to come face to face with a photograph of her five-year-old self more than 50 years later.

Wacs was 12 and Strobin 3 when their family fled Nazi Austria on the last boat from Italy before war officially broke out. Traveling a circuitous route through war-torn waters, the family of four landed in Shanghai where they would spend the next 12 years.

"Shanghai was the only place in the entire world that had no restrictions," Wacs said, explaining that during WWII, China was a haven to some 18,000 Jewish refugees. "It was an international city. All you needed was passage."

Neither Wacs nor Strobin had ever seen the half-century old photo of Deborah before, though in the book, Strobin recalls the day it was taken.

"In the park, I'd been playing with my friends Judy and Peter, a pretty little boy with a girlish face, when a Japanese soldier approached and told us to pose for a photograph. They were forever taking propaganda photos of Jewish children to show we were clean, healthy, and happy...We didn't look like starving refugees. The photographer made Peter sit in the middle, and he told us to smile. None of us wanted to smile. There was nothing to smile about, we were sad kids, but we were afraid of the soldiers, so we smiled."

Strobin said it took "a long while" to digest the photograph and even longer before she decided to write about it.

"I think I was talking to Ilie and it just dawned on me I should write something, but I didn't realize that I was going to end up with a memoir," she said. "And then I realized that there is a lot of information I didn't know. I was really under the impression at that age, and it stayed with me up until this time, that we were on vacation. It was my memories of what my mother told me and this was all done, I guess, to protect me. They felt I wouldn't understand...and I thought, well, my children deserve to know what really happened to me."

Ilie recalls first reading his sister's version of the events. "When I saw a first draft of hers where she talked about leaving Vienna and our mother telling her we were going on vacation, I called her up and said, 'what are you talking about, what vacation?' Then it occurred to me, let it be like that, these are her memories, so what you have is different memories of the same events which adds another dimension to the whole story."

"I think the story needs to be told," Strobin said, "so few people even know there were Jews in Shanghai."

Wacs describes a recent book signing at the Holocaust Museum in Washington. "What was really striking about it to me was that it was vacation time and there were lots of kids there, teenagers, primarily from the south and the interest they showed in our story was amazing. They had as much relationship to our story as to the Punic Wars, I mean, it could be ancient history, and yet they were interested. So my feeling is if something sticks, even a little bit, it's worth the whole thing. The story is really not for us, we know what happened, it's for them."

The East Hampton Library's Authors Night book signing reception will take place at the Gardiner Farm in East Hampton Village on Aug. 11 at 5 p.m. The evening’s Founding Co-Chairs Alec Baldwin and Barbara Goldsmith will be joined by Honorary Co-Chairs Ken Auletta, David Baldacci, Robert A. Caro, Dick Cavett, Lynn Sherr,Dava Sobel and more than 120 distinguished authors.