Seeking Home: A World War II Refugee Childhood in War-Torn China

by Eva Richter

Overview

Seeking Home is a memoir of a childhood in China as a refugee from Nazi Germany during the turbulent years 1934-49. Richter recalls the little-known history of North China's occupation by the Japanese during the World War II years amid the remnants of a dying British colonialism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798881804411
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	08/07/2025
Series:	World Social Change
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	232
File size:	11 MB
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About the Author

Born in Germany, Eva Richter grew up as a refugee from Nazi Germany in Tianjin, China, where she lived through the turbulent years of the run-up to the Second World War, the Japanese occupation and the civil war that followed, until the Communist Revolution in 1949 decided the family to leave for the United States. She retired from teaching English at the City University of New York in 2002 to take up NGO advocacy work at the United Nations and co-founded the NGO Committee on Migration at the UN in 2007, serving on its Executive Committee and the Executive Committees of the NGO Committee on the Status of Women and the UN Department of Public Information. She is a member of the NGO Committee on Human Rights, was a member of the Expert Working Group for Addressing Women's Human Rights in the Global Compacts.

Editorial Reviews

Eva Richter tells the story of her childhood in Tientsin (Tianjin) China during World War II vividly with marvelous descriptions and sense of drama and irony. It was a life of Jewish refugees from the Nazis in the city's British Sector — rare privilege mixed with scary moments and discomfort under Japanese occupation and later Chinese civil war. The contrast of her life in China with her college years in, of all places, Utah, is nicely drawn. A rare and evocative read!” —Wilbur R. Miller, Professor of History (Emeritus), State University of New York, Stony Brook

“Eva Richter has gifted us with a riveting powerful memoir. We travel over time across the world— from her family's history in Germany, to her parents (both medical doctors) move to Tientsin China in 1934 when Eva was 2 , to the US when she was 16 and her ultimate home in New York.
Every page is packed with stirring research, stimulating details, fascinating history, stunning surprises. Readers interested in history, war and peace, the vagaries of life, will enjoy and be profoundly informed by this superb book.” —Blanche Wiesen Cook, Distinguished Professor of History and Women's Studies at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York

From the Publisher