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Ursula Bacon fled Nazi Germany with her parents in 1939, and landed in Shanghai, China along with more than 18,000 other Middle European Jews. The family spent most of the war years in a Japanese-controlled "Designated Area," often referred to as the Shanghai Ghetto. She came to the United States in 1947.
She is the author of The Nervous Hostess Cookbook—A Comforting Guide to Worry-Free Entertaining. She has contributed eight stories to the popular Chocolate for a Woman's Soul series, Simon & Schuster.
Her most recent book, Shanghai Diary, has been chosen as a major motion picture project and was selected by Barnes & Noble for its "Discover Gifted New Authors 2004 Holiday Selection." One of her Barnes & Noble book-signing events was filmed by C-Span2.
The prelude to Shanghai Diary, titled Eternal Strangers, is available now from Amazon.
Nominated
for the Sophie Brody Medal by the American Library Association 
From the back cover:
"Germany, February 1918: In the coming months the Great War would come to an end. People dared to think about the future. Irene Burger and Martin Blomberg found each other against all odds as the war ended, and although her rigidly orthodox Jewish parents objected, they were married. Irene, the daughter of an innkeeper, and Martin, a soldier stationed at an nearby garrison, shared a few idyllic years together, but their joy would be short-lived, as the embers of anti-Semetic hate were being stoked even then by Adolf Hitler and the machine he would raise into the Nazi Party, fanned into a flames that would erupt and consume Europe and virtually all who would stand in its way in an inferno of pain and misery. As the horrors of World War II loomed on the horizon, Irene and Martin, two people like millions of others, would be forced to wander, and struggle to stay together, eternal strangers in search of a safe haven to call home."
News note: Ursula spoke for two days to students of Roseburg, Oregon, to promote the importance of positive thinking. The students were impressed with her story of how she and her family escaped Nazi Germany and spent the war years in Shanghai.
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