Too young to know he should cry: a wartime orphan in Hong Kong and his Empire of the Sun life

‘It was great in Stanley. No one told me to wash, no one told me to brush my teeth and no one told me to brush my hair. For me, it was heaven’

Canadian Bob Tatz, 88, recalls Japanese bombing Hong Kong, fleeing troops on a Star Ferry, his lonely life as a prisoner, and his return to work in the colony

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Bob Tatz in Hong Kong last month at Pier 8 in Central. Now 88, he has written a book about his memories of the Japanese attack on the then British colony and his time as an orphan in captivity in the city. Photo: Antony Dickson

Published: 9:48am, 17 Dec 2019Updated: 5:16pm, 20 Dec 2019

The lost boy: I have just turned 88, so I guess I have been an orphan for 81 years. My birth certificate lists my place of birth as 98 Argyle Street, in Kowloon. My mother, Antonina Shangin, was a White Russian who fled the revolution. She married my father, Kalman Tatz, who was Austro-Hungarian, in Harbin, in northern China. They were both artists. My father died in a Kowloon hospital when I was one year old.

Our servant, Ah Kai, taught me Cantonese and she was my surrogate mother while my real mother worked. When I was about six years old, my mother remarried a former Russian cavalry officer, Nicolas Rojdestvin, who owned Victoria Riding School, in Ma Tau Wai Road. He died in a riding accident so my mum was widowed twice. In February 1939, my mother was suddenly taken ill and became paralysed. She died later that year, at the age of 35, in Matilda Hospital, on The Peak. I lost my boyhood when my mother died.

Orphaned and abandoned: When Hong Kong was being bombed by the Japanese, in December 1941, all the kids at Diocesan Girls’ School (which admitted boys at junior levels), on Jordan Road, were sent home to their parents. I was a boarder and had no parents, so they did not know what to do with me.

I was with the headmistress, Miss (Elizabeth) Gibbins. She told me to wait while she locked the school gates to prevent looting. I remember she reversed her car up to the gates and then got out to close them. Then she returned to the car and drove away, and left me behind. She was the headmistress and had told me to wait, so I just carried on waiting by the school gates. I was 10 years old.

A picture of Tatz’s family shows his father (reclining in the background), mother, oldest sister Margaret, an amah and a family friend, in China, circa 1929. Photo: courtesy of Bob Tatz

Saved by Sewell:Eventually, I followed the crowds towards the Star Ferry. Everyone was fleeing south from Mong Kok as Japanese forces drew closer. I reached the ferry still dressed in my school uniform but I didn’t know what to do.

I was standing next to an Englishman. He looked down at me and asked, “What are you doing here, boy?” I told him I didn’t know and he took me under his wing. He was called William Sewell (a Quaker missionary and lecturer in pre-war China) and I remember watching Japanese bombs fall on Stonecutters Island as we crossed on the ferry. I joined his family. If I had not been picked up by him, I would have been wandering the streets until Christmas Day and would probably have been killed.