Victor Othello dos Remedios

Victor Othello dos Remedios was born in Macau in 1893. He spent most of his life in Shanghai, China until 1951. He was trained as an accountant and worked for most of his adult years at the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank of Commerce and at an American-owned pulp and paper mill. He married his first wife at the age of twenty-four and had a son who developed polio and was sent to Switzerland for schooling and health care. He married again at about the age of forty and had a daughter in 1938. At age fourteen he registered in the Shanghai Volunteer Corps and served until 1942 when war broke out. He took photographs of two bombing incidents in Shanghai in the 30s as a member of the Corps. In 1942, Victor along with his wife Valentina and daughter Elizabeth were interned at one of many of the camps set up by the occupying Japanese forces in Shanghai for expatriates. They were released in April 1945 and had no place to live as their house was occupied by Korean allies of the Japanese, so they remained for another year in the camp.
The family eventually repossessed their home and Victor resumed work at his previous job as a manager of the pulp and paper mill. With the impending threat of invasion by the recently formed Red Army, his wife and daughter were sent to Hong Kong to live with relatives. Victor stayed in Shanghai until he had trained a Chinese replacement to manage the mill. In 1950, he was able to join his family and after a short stay in Hong Kong the family immigrated to Canada. In 1981, Victor passed away in a care facility in Victoria, BC. As of March 2014, his wife Valentina still lives in Victoria.