TE number of Jewish refugees in Shanghai was brought up to total of about 460 with the arrival yesterday aboard the s. Conte Verde, of an additional 180 from Germany and Austria. Pathetic sights were witnessed as these people disembarked from the tender shortly after 5 o'clock yesterday afternoon, when anviously they proceeded to the Customs shed to have their luggage examined.
Very little arrived as a matter of fact because most of the luggage of the travellers from Berlin, was detained at the German frontier to be examined for possible currency smuggling, so that the majority of those arriving yesterday had nothing but the original hand-luggage which they had taken along for their two days' trip from Berlin to Trieste.
They were informed that their other luggage would reach here with the next steamer.
At least one of those arriving bore vivid evidence -of his detention in a concentration camp, his forehead being heavily bandaged. Questioned as to the origin of his injury, he refused to make any statement but a bystander informed the representative of the "North-China Daily News" that he had been hit across the head at the concentration camp at Buchenwalde, in which, incidentally, most of the Germans who arrived yesterday, had been detained prior to their departure, for periods varying from three years to ten weeks.
it was almost impossible to get an actual statement from one of the new arrivals as they had been instructed by the committee looking after them here, not to talk to the press.
Yesterday's arrivals are mostly from Germany, only about 30 per cent. coming from Austria. Whilst they were awaiting the Customs. examiners, yesterday, one of them was taken ill and fainted. As was later explained, he had been an ex-soldier who had fought throughout the war and had received a stomach wound then. He also had been detained for some time in a concentration camp, prior to being permitted to leave, according to one of the travellers. Another passenger who was well in the fifties and who, too, was an ex-service man, told the reporter that he had been detained in a concentration camp for a minor offence committed in 1912, for which at the time he had paid a fine of five marks. As to the life in a concentration camp, he only reluctantly cared to make a statement.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.