In response to questions of the interviewers, Mathilde S. Ezratty Lehem gives broken and fragmentary bits of information about her upbringing, her experiences in World War II, and how she eventually came to live in Charleston, South Carolina. She was born in Salonica, Greece, in 1916, the daughter of Rachel Ezratty and Saady Ezratty, both descended from Sephardic Jews who had been expelled from the Iberian Peninsula. The Jewish community in Salonica was quite large. Most of the port workers were Jewish, there were 41 synagogues in town, and school was not held on Saturdays. In the 1930's, Mathilde, her younger brother Alfred, and her parents went on a tourist visa to Israel, then known as Palestine, where they eventually lived in poverty for several years before becoming permanent residents. At about the age 20, she made a disastrous marriage with a Mr. Lehem, who lived near the Suez Canal; she went to live with him and his family and had a daughter. At the outbreak of World War II, with bombings of nearby Ethiopia, the family went to Shanghai where Mr. Lehem had a sister. Her parents and brother stayed in Israel, while her European family perished. When Shanghai fell to the Japanese, the family was interned in a British civilian prisoner of war camp. They survived under very difficult conditions for three and half years, and during this time the interviewee was hospitalized for many grave illnesses and conditions. After liberation, helped by an American doctor, Mathilde Lehem left her husband and went on a tourist visit to the United States, landing in San Francisco. Befriended and helped by a stranger, called an "angel," Ms. Lehem managed to travel to New Jersey with her daughter to find a paternal aunt. Once there, she again fell ill and fortuitously ended up in the care of the same physician she had been cared for in Shanghai. Family took care of her daughter Florette and thinking it would be a pleasant surprise for her, arranged to have her husband brought over to be reunited with her. It took many years for her to resolve her citizenship status, while enduring a difficult marriage. She eventually left her husband for good, got work in a bank, and raised her daughter, who married and had a child of her own. Her daughter's husband was offered a job in Charleston and they, and eventually the interviewee, moved there.
