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(1939) Sharks Attacks Officer

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Iltus Huk Beach

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Just to the east of Tsingtao lay the German seaside resort area of Iltis Huk also known as Zhan Shan. German architecture [probably?] predominated. Here Johan Alfred and Hedvig had a cottage built a few minutes walk from the beach to which they would escape during the hot summer months of the interior, a heat so oppressing that little work could be done. Each street of the town was lined with a different flowering tree such as cheery, crabapple or chestnut. All streets had Chinese names, but using the western alphabet for example Tai-Ping gua SE Loo (Below the Mountain 4th road) Lo Shan Mountain or Da -Ma Loo (Big Horse Road). This was the road that went pass the horse race course.

Iltus Huk

During the summers the Rinell family crammed into the Iltis Huk house or took turns staying at the coastal house. Oscar, Hellen, Roy, Dollan and mosquitoes were in room 2. No doubt mosquitoes shared all the rooms, but Dollan is specific in remembering the mosquitoes in her room. Egron, Gerda, Lally and Johnny were in room 3. Across the hall was the only bathroom for all the Rinells. When lightening flashed and thunder rolled Hedvig ordered the children out of bed, and told them to sit on wood chairs in the hall. The children's beds were made of metal, and Hedvig thought they may be electrocuted.

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Rinell Family
Birthday Party
Iltus Huk
1939

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The bathroom backed up on Johan Alfred and Hedvig's room, the largest room in the house, and the only one with a fireplace. An enclosed porch doubled as a dining room with a long table around which all the Rinells ate their meals. In the sitting room a wicker furniture set including a small round table allowed for lovely teas and birthday parties.

That was the main house. Attached to the main house was a roofed breezeway and then another building housing the kitchen and other rooms. The ice box was made of wood with a metal lining. A big chunk of ice was delivered by the ice man who had ice stacked on his cart. The cooks came out to the cart and carried the block of ice with the bare hands into the kitchen into the ice box.

Next to the kitchen was a tiny room containing the icebox that kept their perishable food items cool. Ice was delivered every other day to replace the ice that had melted. Down the same row as the kitchen was the cooks' quarters, and the garage that rarely housed the car. At one time Dollan and Lally lived in the garage to give themselves privacy from the rest of the family.

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Summer House at Iltus Huk
Circa 1940

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Looking from the street and on the far left in the yard was a small 'house.' Here the milk goats lived. The cooks milked the goats, and occassionally, so did Hedvig. After some years someone talked Hedvig out of bringing the goats to Iltis Huk from their home in Kioahsien. Goat milk could be purchased in Tsingtao. The kids commandiered the goat house turning it into a play house, and painted it pink.

Behind their house stood a small but tall interdenominational church. Everyone went there, and every Sunday evening as the sun was setting in the west the congregation sang the hynm "Day Is Dying in the West."

Day is dying in the west
Heaven is touching earth with rest
Wait and worship while the night
Sets the evening lamps alight
Through all the sky.

(Refrain)

Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Hosts!
Heaven and earth are full of Thee!
Heaven and earth are praising Thee,
O Lord most high!

Lord of life, beneath the dome
Of the universe, Thy home,
Gather us who seek Thy face
To the fold of Thy embrace,
For Thou art nigh.

Refrain

While the deepening shadows fall,
Heart of love enfolding all,
Through the glory and the grace
Of the stars that veil Thy face,
Our hearts ascend.

Refrain

When forever from our sight
Pass the stars, the day, the night,
Lord of angels, on our eyes
Let eternal morning rise
And shadows end.

Refrain

On the other side of the road from the house was a wheat field and next to the field was a 'boxie' white hotel. Dollan was never was in it. On the other side of the hotel was another street with a few houses. On the street below the Rinell's yard lived a father and his son. They had come most immediately from France, but they were actually German Jews named Ginsburger.

In a house below the Rinells, but still on their street was the Swedish Postmaster General, Nordstrom whose sons were Erik and Ulf.

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Oscar and Hellen Rinell
On motorbicycle, Iltis Huk, China
circa 1939

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To get out to Iltis Huk from Kioahsien was at least a day's journey. One of the neighborhood rickshaw pullers was alerted that the Rinell family needed transportation to the Kiaohsien train station. He arranged for another four rickshaw pullers to meet at Egron and Gerda's house at a given hour where the Rinells and the Chinese help collected the suitcases, two goats, and a few bicycles. Each goat was housed in their own crate. The suitcases and goats were loaded into two or three rickshaws. The older Rinells rode in the remaining rickshaws. The younger Rinells either walked or road bicycles. The cooks also walked. The first leg of the journey to the Kiaohsien train station could take up to an hour and a half. The time needed to reach Kiaohsien's city gates was about 45 minutes, and another 45 minutes was needed to travel from the city gate to the train station because the station was outside of the city walls.

After everything and everyone was loaded onto the train, the journey to Tsingtao took about 2 1/2 hours. Upon arriving at the Tsingtao train station, everyone disembarked the train, along with the the suitcases and the crated goats.The Rinells rented two carriages pulled by two horses each, and a cart pulled by one horse. The crated goats were placed on the cart. The Chinese drivers help load the suitcases onto the carriages, and the Rinells and the cooks climbed aboard. The trip to Iltis Huk from the train station took another 2 hours.

By this method all the Rinells, Johan Alfred and Hedvig, Hellen, Roy, and Dollan, Egron, Gerda, Johnny, Lally and later little Margaretta, and the cooks all arrived in Iltis Huk - everyone except Oscar. Oscar in the mean time drove the Model A Ford to Iltis Huk. Having the Ford at Iltis Huk gave the family a convenient way to get into Tsingtao. Occassionally Oscar would take his motorcycle.

Dollan remembered going to Iltis Huk for about ten summers, from the end of June when school got out, until the end of September when school started again. Of course summers were spent at Iltis Huk even before she was born.

A "jagdschloesschen" or 'hunt castle' lay on the other side of Number 2 beach for the German govenor for the purpose of hunting wild boar and deer in the nearby forests. 3

During the Janapese occupation Japanese soldiers relaxed and swam at the beach at Iltis Huk just down the street from the Rinell family's summer cottage. Sometimes they wrestled with each other on the sand, Sumo style, wearing only their "T-straps". One day a Japanese officer was swimming just offshore when he was pulled underwater by a shark. After some seconds the Rinells saw the salt water turn red with blood.

In email from Doris (Rinell) Brown to Lennart Holmquist, Meilynn Smth, Margaret Jonell, Lally (Rinell) Hermansson on 7 July 2018

Soo quiet that we could hear our hearts pounding ,and we did not dare go in ,then they would of come out to us !!! And I also the Japanese officer that got. eaten at the POINT !! At times I still hear him scream and see the BIG blotch of blood ?You are right trucks of Japanese that hopped off with a "binder" as swimming suit !!!!!!

Luckily they left us alone .Ofcurse we wee just litte kids ,perhaps 6 and 9 .....???????

In email from Lally (Rinell) Hermansson to Meilynn Smith, 8 July 2018

It was the last year of our childhood summer days in Iltis Huk. The Japanese troops were all over the place. They had even occupied the small community Church close to our house. This summer Doris and I slept in a small room behind the bungalow, close to the kitchen. This was next to a vacant plot, where there were some bushes and scrub. The Japanese soldiers guarded this area at night for fear of guerilla attacks. The soldiers moved around among the bushes and sometimes they rested right outside our window with bayonets on their rifles. When they did we almost didn't dare to breathe for fear they would hear us! Nothing really happened, but this is how I remember it.

However that summer the troops had a contest: they would swim from the beach to a point further out in deep water. One soldier was taken by a shark… and although they dived for him, he was lost. In Hedvig's diary it says that three more soldiers were lost at the German beach that same day! They had not yet provided any shark nets! Now they have protection, but summer is over by September 1st, when the shark nets are taken away for the season!!

At the end of each summer the house was boarded up waiting for the following summer. No one, Dollan remembers, ever went to Iltis Huk the rest of the year.

Dollan always wore her hair short. Her father cut it for her peridocially. About the year 1939 she refused to have it cut, grew it long, and braided it.

Other Events

In 1939 Han Fong-ming was chosen as the successor to Wang Gi-shan who had completed his ministry as pastor of the Kiaohsien church in 1933.

Also in 1939 the evangelist school, which was started in 1911 in Kaomi, was moved to Kiaohsien (och är treårig -which I think it means 'is a three year course' which is quite different from the two month course it started out as in Kaomi in 1911.)1

It may have been in 1939 that Dollan and Lally both came down with diptheria a contageous disease causing the deterioration of the myelin sheaths in the peripheral and central nervous system. Lally was in a coma for a week. The doctor was so unsure about her recovery that Lally's burial clothes were put in Dollan's hospital room closet. Dr Eitel said the only hope for Lally and Dollan was prayer because he could do no more. The Swedish mission sent out telegrams to all the other missions no matter what their nationality nor denomination asking for prayer. 4 Lally and Dollan recovered.

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Footnotes

  1. See document entitled: Svar på Lally's frågar.

  2. Johan Alfred and Hedvig also had a house built in Tsingtao, possibly to retire in eventually. The Rinell family never lived in that house. The communist Chinese took over China, and the Rinell family lost their properties, and most of their possessions except what the were able to ship back to Sweden before the last Rinell, Oscar, left China.

The house in Iltis Huk was eventually torn down (circa 2000?) to make way for another building - either a large house or building with apartments..

Johan Alfred's Tsingtao house is still standing. It had been taken over by the communist authorities, and given or rented to a number of families to live in. Family members have visited the house as recent as 2014 though they had access to only a small portion of the house. Both properties continue to be owned by the Rinell family one might say because the property and houses were not sold, but rather confiscated by the communist Chinese. As of 2015 no one has tried to claim the properties. Claiming them may be difficult. The authorities would not allow the Rinell family or other westerners who owned property to take deeds of what they owned out of China. The authorities, evidently, were not thinking of giving back the properties to the owners. I do remember, I believe, photographs of architectural plans for the Iltis Huk house, and I think these photographs are in my possession. (Lennart Holmquist, September 2015)

  1. Information about the jagdschloesschen was obtained from a website on 09/2007. In an email on September 9, 2007 Dollan Brown told Lennart Holmquist that she did not know where it was. By the way, Johan Alfred, Egron and Oscar never hunted while staying in Iltis Huk though they did hunt in Kiaohsien.

  2. Email from Doris Rinell to Lennart Holmquist, Febraury 29, 2009

CHAPTER

Foreign Devils: A Swedish Family in China 1894 to 1951
© 2012-14 Lennart Holmquist
Lorum • Ipsum• Dolor • Sic Amet • Consectetur

Updated: 28-Apr-2019

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