Henry Haas

Prepared by the Witnesses of War team

Henry Haas was born on 8 April 1938 in Berlin, Germany, to Jewish parents Ivan Hans Haas, later known as John, and Gerda Haas. His parents held Czechoslovak citizenship, which helped them leave Germany as Nazi persecution intensified. In July 1938, when Henry was just three months old, the family fled Berlin, beginning a search for safety that took them through Czechoslovakia, Italy, the Netherlands and France.

After months of uncertainty, a Jewish refugee organisation in Paris helped them obtain passage to Shanghai, which admitted refugees without entry visas. On 7 July 1939, Henry and his parents sailed from Marseille aboard the Président Doumer. They reached China after a journey of approximately three weeks, arriving with little money and facing an unfamiliar language and culture.

Henry spent the war in Shanghai’s Hongkew district, where his family shared a single small room without a bathroom or kitchen. In 1943, Japanese occupation authorities established a restricted area for stateless refugees, commonly known as the Shanghai Ghetto. Despite poverty and wartime shortages, Henry attended the Kadoorie School, while his parents worked to maintain a family life. Air raids brought further danger during the final months of the war.

Henry and his parents survived, but many relatives who remained in Europe were murdered in the Holocaust, including his maternal grandparents, Max and Paula Buchheim, and his uncle Herbert Haas. In 1947, assistance from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society—HIAS enabled the family to immigrate to the United States. They arrived in San Francisco and subsequently lived in Portland, Oregon, and Centralia, Washington, before settling in Tacoma.

Henry graduated from the University of Puget Sound and earned his law degree at the University of Washington in 1962.