... From Lennart Holmquist ...
April 2008,
I was wondering why a website named 'weihsien-paintings.org' came to have a lot more info than paintings.
I am writing a book on my mother's side of the family who where Baptist missionaries from Sweden. By great-grandparents emigrated to China in 1893, arriving in China in 1894. My grandfather was born and raised in China. He married a Swede, and my mother was born an raised in China. My mother married a Swedish American, who was a US marine stationed in Tsingtao between 1945-46, and so I was born in the United States growing up in what you might say was a "Swedish-Chinese-American" home.
Of course, my family would have been sent to Weihsein if they were not Swedes. Instead they continued to live through the scarcity of the times in Kiaohsien. However, they had Lutheran missionary American friends who did join you and the others in Weihsien. This was the Reinbrecht family. I am in contact with Georgie Reinbrecht who was a girl at the time of their internment. Georgie has been very kind in providing information, and answering my resulting questions. I am including the Reinbrecht family experiences in my book.
Members of my family did, however, visit the camp immediately after the war. The first visit to the camp was by my grandfather, Oscar Rinell and his brother, Egron, both missionaries in Kiaohsien. Oscar Rinell's second or third visit to the camp was with his daughter who is my mother, Dollan. I am in the process of writing about their journey to Weihsien and their short time at the camp.
You are welcome to include what I have written about Weihsien and my family's visit on your website. It may be of interest to others. I have put my book-in-progress on the web. You are welcome to put a link to the book for your readers to visit. I would appreciate any comments, additional information, corrections or suggestions from your Weihsien community about Weihsien - or about any other part of the book actually. Of course I would be very interested if anyone knows anything about the visit of my family to Weihsien, though I doubt anyone does. I believe my family's interaction was almost exclusively with the Reinbrecht family.
The Table of Contents to the book can be found at:
http://www.earthwander.com/Roots/Rinell-Book/006-Table-of-Contents.htm
That chapters having to do with the Reinbrecht family, and about Weihsien can be found in the following chapters:
http://www.earthwander.com/Roots/Rinell-Book/1943-PianoLessons.htm
http://www.earthwander.com/Roots/Rinell-Book/1945-PeaceWar.htm
http://www.earthwander.com/Roots/Rinell-Book/1949-HedvigLeavesChina.htm
As mentioned above this is a book-in-progress. I will have more to add about Weihsien over time, and much more writing and editing on all chapters of the book.
All the best.
Len
[update: January 2020 ...]
All URLs are to be copy/pasted into your Internet browsers.
