By: Fr. Aldan McGrath

SHANGHAI PRISON would not be high on everybody’s list as a place to spend Christmas, and though we prisoners could not see or talk to one another we could not let Christmas pass with out celebrating it. And celebrate it we did.

For months several prisoners had been secretly writing messages to me on a sheet of rough brown toilet paper the only paper we had. I used to write in return. Through this correspondence I actually gave a complete course of religious instructions to one prisoner, Wolf Gruen, a German Engineer who was in prison on a trumped up charge of espionage.