Charles K. Bliss - Detention and The War

Detention and The War

Bliss graduated from the Vienna University of Technology as a chemical engineer in 1922. He joined an electronics company and rose to be chief of the patent department.

In March 1938, the Third Reich annexed Austria via the Anschluss, and Bliss, as a Jew, was sent to Dachau concentration camp, near Munich. Later he was moved to Buchenwald. His wife, Claire, a German Catholic, made constant efforts to have him released. He was released but was required to leave the country for England immediately. In England, Bliss tried to bring his wife to him; however, the outbreak of World War II in September 1939 made this impossible.

Bliss arranged for Claire to escape Germany via his family in Czernowitz, Romania (now called Chernivtsi and in the Ukraine). Needing to leave there, Claire moved on to Greece and safety – until October 1940 when the Italians invaded Greece. The couple were re-united on Christmas Eve 1940, after Claire continued east to Shanghai and Charles went west to Shanghai via Canada and Japan.

After the Japanese occupied Shanghai, Bliss and his wife were placed into the Hongkew ghetto. Claire, as a German and a Christian had the option of claiming her German citizenship, applying for a divorce and being released. She did not do so but accompanied Bliss into the ghetto.

In Shanghai, Bliss became interested in Chinese characters, which he mistakenly thought were ideograms. He studied them and learned how to read shop signs and Chinese newspapers. With some astonishment he one day realized that he had been reading the symbols off not in Chinese, but in his own language, German. With ideograms for his inspiration, Bliss set out to develop a system of writing by pictures. At that time Bliss had not become aware of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s “Universal Symbolism”.