Ruth's Record

The year 1941 was a turning point for the world, but long-time Shanghai resident Ruth Hill Barr had no way of knowing that when she started her five-year diary on January 1st. Before the year was over, the Japanese Army had occupied Shanghai's International Settlement, and she and her family were stranded as enemy aliens, soon to be placed in a Japanese internment camp. This book includes the full text of Ruth’s diary along with explanations and memories by her daughter Betty, revealing with fascinating detail the anguish and, incredibly, the continuity of life inside and outside the Shanghai camps during the war.

Ruth Hill Barr was born in Dallas in 1903 and graduated from Columbia University in New York before moving to Shanghai where she worked with the International YWCA and married a Scottish missionary teacher, John Barr. After release from the Lunghwa internment camp at the end of the war in 1945, Ruth and her husband returned to Shanghai in 1946 and lived there until 1952. They then moved to Hong Kong until 1965 when they retired in Scotland. Ruth died there in 1990. Their daughter Betty still lives in Shanghai.