On the rainy afternoon of November 28,1938, a slight 18-year-old Austrian man took in his first impressions of Shanghai. Paul Hoffmann had left his family and all that was familiar to him in Vienna and was now among a forlorn stream of thousands of Jewish refugees into China to escape Nazism. For the next thirteen years, Shanghai would be his home, and he made the most of the last years of the foreign-dominated world of old Shanghai. Witness to History is the moving memoir of a man caught up in the tides of history, who witnessed and experienced the Nazi revolution in Europe, the Japanese invasion of China and the Communist victory in China in 1949, and emerged from the challenges all the wiser. In Shanghai, he taught mathematics, lived the high life, and worked for an American lawyer, Norwood Altman, who was also secretly the US spy chief in China before and after the Communist takeover.

Paul Hoffmann was born in Vienna, Austria on October 14, 1920. He was the first member of his family to flee Nazi-occupied Austria for Shanghai, China in October 1938. Paul and his family survived World War II in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. Despite having spent two years in the Hongkew Ghetto, Paul found work at the American Private School and graduated from Aurora University. Upon graduation in 1946, he was employed by a prominent American law firm, which he single-handedly managed for two years after the Communist takeover of China in 1949 until February 1952. Paul, wife Shirley, and their one-year-old son, Abe, arrived in New York City in April 1953. Their second child, Jean, was born the following year. Paul had a successful career as a corporate lawyer. He spent the last 29 years of his career as Trademark Counsel for General Electric Company. Paul passed away in March 2010.