Photo by Phil McKenna: Passport To Freedom: Lotte Marcus holds her former Austrian passport stamped with a Chinese visa.

"There are still days when a kind of gut hunger comes back and I find myself eating an apple and eating not just the flesh but the skin, down to the housing of the core and its seeds, as if I will never be able to get enough to eat," writes Carmel Highlands psychologist Lotte Marcus of her childhood as a World War II refugee.

In 1939, Austrian Jews Oskar and Margaretat Lustig sewed diamonds into their coat linings and fled Europe with their daughter Lotte, then 11 years old. Along with more than 20,000 other European Jews, the Lustigs found safe haven from the impending Nazi Holocaust in Shanghai, China.

Shanghai in the 1930s was already home to a sizeable and wealthy community of Russian and Iraqi Jews, and one of the few places on Earth open to Jewish immigration. Central European Jews began trickling in by 1934. Immigration continued until December 1941 when Japan entered World War II and occupied Shanghai''s foreign settlements. In February of 1943, Japanese authorities in Shanghai issued a "restriction order" commanding all "stateless persons"--i.e. Jewish refugees--to report to a square-mile ghetto on the city''s north side. That was where Lotte and her family would wait out the final years of the war.

"We were stateless, controlled by the Japanese, and bombed by the Americans," Lotte says. "Yet, our story paled in significance to the Holocaust in Europe. While we were oppressed and hungry and fearful, we actually did have a tiny amount of freedom and were able, barely, to support ourselves.

By 1945, Lotte, a pig-tailed 17-year-old, had lost 15 relatives to the Holocaust, her father to the Shanghai ghetto, and her childhood to the ravages of war. Today, the psychologist, activist and former ESL teacher is a vibrant woman with fire in her eyes and love in her heart.

Lotte''s husband, Beat novelist Alan Marcus, says, "She was a very lovable person. She still is. She went through the war and came out an innocent."

Now a psychologist who runs a clinic in Carmel and a nonprofit at home, Dr. Lotte Marcus has spent her adult life coming to terms with her childhood. "Any- thing I can do to help others has helped me, has broadened my understanding of my own experience at some level," she says in Survivors of the Holocaust, a video recorded several years ago.

"I was a happy child," she says of her first ten years in Vienna. "I remember hiking trips in the Alps and ice skating with my mother."

Then, in 1938, Germany annexed Austria. "I remember standing in the window of our fourth-floor house and looking down on acres and acres of Nazi flags," she says in the Survivors video. "Solders were marching in and Hitler was riding in some big car, standing and giving that malignant salute. The world that I knew was being turned upside down and my only question was, who sewed all those flags? How could we have not known anything? The question has haunted me ever since."

Anti-Semitism soon hit home. Lotte recalls the time she was stoned by kids her own age. "It happened on the way home from school," she says. "It wasn''t about them throwing rocks. It''s that they shouted Juden, Juden, Juden [Jews]."

The following year her family fled Europe, booking first-class tickets on a steamer sailing from Genoa to Shanghai. When they arrived in China, they had no money left, there were no jobs, and no places to live. They survived on the generosity of other Jews, odd jobs, and black-market trading.

"I was the only white employee in a Chinese department store," Lotte says of one of the many jobs she took to help her family. "I sold British cookies to the few remaining [Europeans] who came. At the end of each day I would collect the sugar that had separated from the cookies and sneak out an ounce or two. That little bit of sugar helped us out a lot." Still, in many ways Lotte led a normal teenage life in Shanghai. She went to school, had girlfriends and dated boys.

More than 50 years later, as a history student living in China in 1997, I walked the streets of Shanghai searching in vain for any remaining trace of the wartime Jewish ghetto. I had to come to Carmel to hear Lotte Marcus tell me stories of the ghosts I''d once sought.

"I remember the image of immigrant ex-professors wearing their velvet robes and house slippers incarcerated as they were in their rented one-rooms in Shanghai with their leather-bound classics and their phonographs drowning out the Chinese melodies outside," Lotte wrote in a letter of her wartime recollections. "As a child it struck me as comical, but later as tragic."

Lotte remembers Feng Shan Ho, the Chinese consul in Vienna who issued visas to her family. She discovered only recently from Ho''s daughter, who now lives in Maine, that the consul had acted against his superiors'' orders and was demoted for issuing thousands of life-saving visas to Austrian Jews.

After the war, Lotte immigrated to the US with her mother on a troop ship bound for San Francisco. Soon after, she met Alan, an American Jewish war vet who had helped liberate the Buchenwald concentration camp. He later wrote a book about that experience. "It was Alan who made it possible for me to be whole again," Lotte says.

Since then, Lotte has drawn on her experiences as a refugee to help others. The refugee experience, she says, has a "universality" to it that enables her to sympathize with people from many different cultures in similar straits. "I taught English to Mexican Americans in Salinas where I used what I knew about oppression. I knew what it meant to have no voice. As a psychologist, I''ve worked with Salvadoran, Cambodian, Mexican and Russian emigrants and uprooted Americans."

Lotte has carried that kindness over to working with the chronically ill, running the nonprofit Multiple Sclerosis Quality of Life Project out of her home. "I''ve become sensitized to pain and suffering," she says. "It''s easy for me to understand the oppression that people feel who are in a chronic situation for which there is no cure but only containment."

For her dedication to Multiple Sclerosis she has been recognized by the LA-based Freedom to Live Foundation, which will give her its Spirit Award in June.

Now 75, Lotte is still coming to terms with her turbulent past. "I''ve learned that I can not overcome evil entirely. But by struggling against it, by fighting to keep courage and hope alive, evil won''t totally prevail: and restorative love--tender, compassionate, faith-based love--is both sweet and healing."