Ursula Bacon's impassioned memoir Shanghai Diary has touched the lives of people around the world, recounting the story of her youth in China. Eternal Strangers finds the author recounting events before Shanghai Diary begins, with the meeting of the author's parents and their escape from war-torn Europe to the safer harbors of Asia. Inspiring, thought provoking and starkly honest, Eternal Strangers will be a book discussed for years to come. Book overview By the late 1930s, Europe sat on the brink of a world war. As the holocaust approached, many Jewish families in Germany fled to one of the only open port available to them: Shanghai. Once called "the armpit of the world," Shanghai ultimately served as the last resort for tens of thousands of Jews desperate to escape Hitler's "Final Solution." Against this backdrop, 11-year-old Ursula Bacon and her family made the difficult 8,000-mile voyage to Shanghai, with its promise of safety. But instead of a storybook China, they found overcrowded streets teeming with peddlers, beggars, opium dens, and prostitutes. Amid these abysmal conditions, Ursula learned of her own resourcefulness and found within herself the fierce determination to survive.