HEINZ Gruenberg was five when he fled with his mother from Vienna in 1938, just in time to escape the Nazis. They squeezed on to an Italian ship travelling to the only place willing to give asylum to Jewish refugees: Shanghai.
It was there that Gruenberg spent the next 11 years of his life, acquired his first violin and started learning the craft which would later place him for 30 years as a soloist with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra.
The story of his 11 years and of the 25,000 Jewish refugees who also found sanctuary in Shanghai during World War II is the subject of Escape To Shanghai, a 60-minute documentary directed by the Shanghainese oil painter-turned-film-maker, Chen Yifei.
The idea for this extraordinary film occurred to Chen in 1990 at an art gallery in New York when he met an elderly Jewish woman who addressed him in fluent Shanghainese dialect, because she had grown up in the city.
But it was not the time to make such a film, Chen said, because China was a strong supporter of the Palestinians and had no diplomatic relations with Israel. Six years later, though, there was an Israeli embassy in Beijing and Chen started work, visiting former Shanghai Jews around the world.
'[Oskar] Schindler took 9,000 Jews and Shanghai 25,000,' Chen said. 'Schindler used them for his own profit and Shanghai got no benefit. The Chinese people were very generous. It is something we should be proud of.