The Name Left Behind
Flash of light.
As the world brightened around him again, Si-woo came back to himself and hurriedly grabbed his smartphone.
He called Yang Dong-seok, the general manager in Hong Kong.
Rrring... Rrring...
"Yes, Appraiser Kim Si-woo."
Yang Dong-seok’s voice was drained of strength.
The inquiry had been running into dead ends, and Si-woo understood the situation from his tone alone.
So they still haven’t found a solid clue.
He asked carefully, "General Manager Yang Dong-seok, how is the investigation going?"
"Sigh... To be honest, we’re stuck. All the old records from the district office archives were burned and lost, so it’s hard to trace where they went."
Deep fatigue clung to Yang Dong-seok’s voice.
"We questioned people in the Tokawan area, but it went nowhere. We also asked around among the elders who’d lived there a long time, but no one knew anything."
"I see. Did you also check Stanley Internment Camp?"
"Of course. We went through the Stanley Internment Camp records as well. I found 'Anna' and 'Maria' in the surviving documents, but... there were several people with the same names, and there wasn’t a single record of a mother and daughter entering together. And without a surname, it was impossible to tell who was who."
The memories he had just seen inside the Bird Box came back to him in vivid detail.
They had definitely been taken to Stanley Internment Camp.
Then...
"General Manager Yang Dong-seok."
"Yes. Go ahead."
"Have you tried searching with different spellings of the names?"
"Different spellings?"
Yang Dong-seok sounded flustered at the sudden question.
"The records from that time were probably written by a Japanese clerk who knew English. In the process of writing down German pronunciation in English, the spelling could have changed."
He spelled it out one by one as an example.
"Anna could have been recorded as Ana or Anne, and Maria as Marie or even Marya. They probably didn’t keep especially careful records at the camp during the war."
Yang Dong-seok let out a small groan.
"Oh! I never even thought of that!"
"And let’s change the approach. Instead of looking for Anna and Maria directly, why don’t you go through the Shanghai records first?"
"Shanghai?"
"Anna and Maria didn’t come straight from Vienna to Hong Kong. In 1939, Shanghai was the only place that accepted Jews without visas. They came to Hong Kong through Shanghai."
He could hear the scratch of a pen on the other end of the line.
While that was happening, he briefly asked Shin A-young for permission.
He kept talking while searching on her computer.
"It looks like the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum holds refugee registers from that period. We should look for Austrian Jewish mothers and daughters who arrived between 1939 and 1941. Ah, wait."
A search turned up an archive on Shanghai refugees created by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the JDC.
The number alone came close to twenty thousand.
An enormous number of Jews had come to Shanghai.
Would Anna’s records still be there?
He could feel his heart beating faster.
Once he accessed the archive and searched for Anna and Maria, a record surfaced in a way he had never expected.
"I found them."
Shin A-young, standing beside him, stared with wide eyes.
"R-really?"
He could hear Yang Dong-seok sucking in a breath through the phone.
"Yes. I found their surname. It was Vaiss. So she would be Anna Vaiss."
"Well, now. Haha. Honestly, even hearing you say it, I still can’t believe it."
There was admiration in Yang Dong-seok’s voice now, something that went beyond simple surprise.
"Our documentary team and local coordinators have been wandering around without direction for days, and not only did you put us back on track, you even found the surname. That’s truly astonishing."
"They’ve only been there a few days, haven’t they? Even if it weren’t me, I’m sure they would’ve thought of it soon enough."
It wasn’t simple modesty.
The biggest difference between them was that he had directly peered into the memories through the Bird Box.
The quality and quantity of information he had were different from the start.
But Yang Dong-seok, unaware of that, thought something else entirely.
That the appraiser named Kim Si-woo was not only seeing artifacts differently, but thinking on a completely different level from everyone else.
"This really drives home once again that finding that eight-billion-won porcelain wasn’t luck. I’ll contact the Stanley Internment Camp Museum side again."
"General Manager Yang Dong-seok."
"Yes?"
"I’ll go there myself."
"Pardon? You’re going personally?"
Yang Dong-seok hesitated, but the thought quickly turned in a more positive direction.
If Kim Si-woo showed up, the documentary would get a very compelling scene.
That was, admittedly, an occupational illness.
"No. I want to confirm this myself. What happened to Anna. Whether they were eventually reunited with their father."
Si-woo’s voice was firm.
The memories he had seen in the Bird Box were still vivid.
The father at Vienna Station, his trembling hand offering the Bird Box to his daughter.
The twelve-year-old Anna taking it to her chest with tears streaming down her face.
"This isn’t goodbye forever! We’re only apart for a little while!"
The father’s cry, nearly swallowed by the clatter of the train.
Two years passed.
Christmas Day.
Hong Kong fell.
Japanese soldiers burst through the door with the sound of boots pounding the floor.
"They’re Jews. Take them to the camp!"
Anna sobbing as she shielded her mother.
"No! We have to go! Father is waiting for us!"
And after that, the box, stripped of its owner and left in darkness for eighty years.
After seeing all of that, he couldn’t simply stand by.
"Understood. If Appraiser Kim Si-woo is coming, we couldn’t ask for anything better."
Yang Dong-seok’s voice softened.
After hanging up, he looked beside him and Shin A-young said, "Go without worrying. I’ll handle the gallery, the cafe, and the merchandise in the meantime."
* * *
Stanley Internment Camp was located in southern Hong Kong.
They requested access again under the name of the Nutflix documentary and were able to review the restricted documents at the museum.
"Records for Austrian Jews who arrived between 1939 and 1941."
The museum researcher placed several thick binders on the table.
The filming crew stood behind them, carefully recording everything with their cameras.
"About twenty thousand Jews fled to Shanghai at the time. Of those, around four thousand were from Austria."
"Four thousand... So we need to find a mother and daughter among them."
"We can narrow it down."
Si-woo said, "Limit it to arrivals after March 1939, and only look for records where an adult woman entered together with a girl in her early teens. A mother and daughter who came alone, without a husband or father."
The researcher nodded.
"If we use those conditions, the pool becomes much smaller. Please wait a moment."
The archivist began searching the records.
But soon after, he tilted his head and looked at them.
"I’m sorry, but there are no records under the surname Weiss."
"Search again with alternate spellings. Vaiss, Vais, Weis, something like that."
The staff member started searching again.
Not long after, he exclaimed, "Found it!"
At the sound of the archivist’s voice, everyone gathered in front of the monitor.
- Arrest date: 25 December 1941
- Name: Vaiss, Marie (39, Stateless-Jewish)
- Name: Vaiss, Anne (14, Stateless-Jewish)
- Admission date: 22 January 1942
"Haha. There it was after all."
Yang Dong-seok burst out with admiration.
"Weiss had been written as Vaiss, Maria as Marie, Anna as Anne. Everything was written differently. That’s why we couldn’t find them! You were right, Si-woo!"
Si-woo stared at the date on the screen.
Arrest date, December 25. Christmas.
The very day Hong Kong fell.
The admission date was January 22, 1942.
So they were held in a temporary detention facility for about a month. Stanley Internment Camp officially opened on January 21.
After being arrested, they must have been confined in temporary barracks or a hotel, and then transferred as soon as the camp opened.
"What about the records after that? What happened to them after the war ended?"
In response to the question delivered through the interpreter, the staff member swallowed hard and said, "Well... there’s an additional record here. You should see it for yourself."
[Vaiss, Marie]
- Died: July 1945
- Cause of death: Malnutrition and complications from pneumonia
- Burial site: Stanley Military Cemetery
His heart dropped.
"Maria died at the camp."
The camp’s daily ration was nothing but a handful of rice and wilted vegetables.
Malnutrition and disease ran rampant.
Medication was desperately scarce.
Especially in 1944, as the war situation worsened, food rations were nearly cut off altogether.
The elderly, the children, and the frail fell one after another.
According to the records, Maria volunteered as a nurse and cared for the sick.
Yang Dong-seok let out a heavy sigh.
"July 1945... that was less than a month before the war ended."
If she had only held on for one more month, she could have lived and been reunited with Anna.
It was a tragedy.
Maria’s face from inside the Bird Box rose in his mind.
The woman who had shielded Anna even as Japanese soldiers dragged them away.
Maria never made it out of the camp in the end.
"What about Anna? Is there no record for Anna?"
When Si-woo asked urgently, the question was translated at once.
The staff member scrolled down the screen again.
"There is."
[Subject: Anne Vaiss]
- Guardian: Harrison, Margaret (British, fellow internee)
- Relationship: Legal guardian
- Destination: London, England
- Note: Harrison requested protection after the death of her mother, Marie Vaiss
"A guardian, then..."
Yang Dong-seok said quietly.
It was less a question than confirmation.
"So there was a British woman who protected Anna at the time."
Si-woo nodded.
"Yes. During the war, it probably wasn’t easy to transfer a minor on her own. Especially if she had lost her parents. She would absolutely have been placed under the responsibility of a protector or legal guardian."
One name remained on the monitor.
Harrison, Margaret.
"Someone who was in the same camp."
Si-woo added, "She was probably someone Anna was close to."
After Maria died.
Someone must have decided that a fourteen-year-old girl could not simply be left alone.
"So she applied to be her guardian," Yang Dong-seok said quietly.
"Anna wasn’t alone," Si-woo said evenly.
And now it was time to follow that name.
London.
Now that he had a lead on Anna’s later life, the rest would not be hard to trace.
That woman named Harrison.
And Anna’s life.
Soon enough, I’ll know.
After leaving the Stanley Internment Camp Museum, they got back into the car.
The destination wasn’t far, but no one rushed.
Stanley Military Cemetery.
The resting place of those who had died here during the war.
When he stepped out of the car, the wind reached him first.
Grass scent drifted through the salt-heavy air.
"According to the records, this is the section."
Yang Dong-seok said, glancing back and forth between the map and the markers.
But what lay before them was not a neat cemetery.
The grass had grown up to knee height.
Many of the headstones were tilted or half-buried in the earth.
There seemed to be more names lost than names left intact.
Without a word, Si-woo walked deeper inside.
The sound of grass brushing beneath his feet followed him.
He scanned the headstones one by one.
And then.
His gaze stopped at one point.
The letters had weathered away until they were almost gone.
But he could still make them out.
Here, the surname and given name had, regretfully, been recorded incorrectly.
Marie Vaiss.
Death year: July 1945.
He stood there for a moment in front of the grave.
Without saying a word.
Then he bowed his head and observed a silent moment of remembrance.
He set down the bouquet he had brought with him.
That was enough.
Maria Vaiss.
One of the many noble names that vanished in the war, after devoting herself as a nurse to caring for countless people in the camp.
* * *