| Born: | 03-08-1917 |
| Faculty: | Philosophical School |
| Category: | Expelled student |
Annemarie HECHT, born on March 8th, 1917 in Vienna/Austro-Hungarian Empire (entitled residency ("heimatberechtigt') for Vienna/Austria, citizenship 1938: Austria), daughter of pediatrician and university professor Franz Adolf HECHT (he was dismissed from the university in April 1938). She lived with her family in Vienna's 9th district, Alser Strasse 24 and was enrolled finally in the fall term 1937/38 at the Philosophical School in the 3rd year of her studies. She took courses in Psychology and Educational Science.
In 1938, after the takeover of power of National-Socialism she was forced to quit her studies for racist reason and to leave the University of Vienna. The Leaving Certificate ("Abgangszeugnis") was issued on May 23th, 1938.
She had to flee Vienna but was able to emigrate in time. Her brother Hans Georg HECHT had emigrated to Argentina a few years before 1938, where he married an Austrian woman and had one son, Peter Hecht who still lives in Buenos Aires. Her father Prof. Franz Adolf HECHT commited suicide in Vienna on December 19th, 1938 in National-Socialist Vienna. Her mother Margarete HECHT (nee EISERT, 1887-1942[?]) left Vienna for France in early 1939. There she was apprehended by the French authorities and handed over to the Nazi occupation forces who deported her to the concentration camp in Auschwitz where she was murdered. The exact date of her death is not known.
Annemarie Hecht emigrated to the USA on her own, and soon further on to Shanghai, to where her fiancée and fellow student from Vienna Ernst SCHWARZ could manage to emigrate. Soon they got married in Shanghai and lived in the privileged "French Concession". She could realize the dream of economic independency by founding a private kindergarten - "Alice in Wonderland" - together with a friend and even received permission from the Japanese authorities in 1943 to continue outside the ghetto area. This kindergarten catered most likely to more prosperous foreigners rather than refugees until 1949. It was the economic basis for her economic independence. Because she contracted polio and after long crises in her marriage she divorced from Ernst Schwarz.
Later she got married to Friedrich PORDES, another fellow student from Vienna, who was forced to leave Vienna University for racist reasons in 1938 and who could flee from Vienna. He emigrated via Denmark to Shanghai in 1938.
She lived a successful life in Shanghai – without finishing her studies - and developed from a shelter bourgeois Viennese girl to a successful international businesswoman. She did not leave Shanghai after the end of World War II, even after her friend and companion left for the USA. She was one of a few German and Austrian refugees that stayed in Asia after the war. She left Shanghai only in 1949 after the communist takeover of power.
In 1950 Annemarie Hecht Pordes moved with her husband Friedrich and their two sons to Hong Kong, than British colony. There she became a language teacher for German at the German Goethe-Institute and at a German-Swiss school in Hong Kong.
She returned to Vienna in 1997 where she deceased on October 25th, 2002. She is buried in the cemetery in Doebling/Vienna.
Lit.: Archive of the University of Vienna/enrollment forms ("Nationale") PHIL 1937–1938; Michael Andreas FRISCHLER, "Little Vienna" in Shanghai - auf den Spuren von Melange und Wiener Schnitzel im Paris des Ostens. Eine kultur- und kommunikationswissenschaftliche Betrachtung, ungedr. phil. Dipl. Univ. Wien, Vienna 2009, 102-103; Georg ARMBRÜSTER, Michael KOHLSTRUCK u. Sonja MÜHLBERGER (ed.), Exil Shanghai 1938-1947. Jüdisches Leben in der Emigration, Berlin 2000, 138f.; Yad Vaschem Archives (YVA) 078/105 Memoir of Annemarie Pordes; Irene EBER, Wartime Shanghai and the Jewish Refugees from Central Europe: Survival, Co-Existence and Identity in a Multi-Ethnic City (=New Perspectives on Modern Jewish History1), Berlin/Boston 2012 [https://www.degruyter.com/view/product/179473]; Irene EBER, Voices from Shanghai: Jewish Exiles in Wartime China, Chicago London (The University of Chicago Press), 2008; information by courtesy of her son Richard Pordes, 07/2018.
Herbert Posch
