Mia Blocker interview and transcript, June 28, 1989

Mia Blocker was born in Vienna in 1927. In 1938, following the Austrian Anschluss, she was sent to Norwich, Norfolk, England, where she lived in safety for two years. In 1940, she left England to join her family in Shanghai. She and her family, the Hochstadts, were wealthier than many of the other Jewish families who had come to Shanghai to escape Nazi persecution (Ms. Blocker's father was a doctor) and so they were able to live in the International Settlement in Shanghai, which was controlled by the British, French, and Americans (until 1941). Ms. Blocker attended the Public School for Girls, the Internatoinal Settlement school, from which she graduated in 1944. That same year she enrolled at St. John's University in Shanghai, but after the war ended, transferred to the University of California at Berkeley.