Editor's note: This article was contributed by Michael Xu, a Chinese student studying at a U.S. high school, to share his thoughts inspired by a visit to the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum. The Museum welcomes and encourages students worldwide to cross our threshold and develop their own opinions after reading the history of Jewish refugees in Shanghai, as part of an educational process. The views expressed in the article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the museum's standpoint.

“I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them,” God said to Noah. “Go into the ark, you and your whole family, because I have found you righteous in this generation” (Gen. 6:13-7:1). Noah did everything just as God commanded him. For forty days, the flood covered high mountains under the entire heavens, annihilating all that moved on dry land and all that breathed life in its nostrils. However, Noah and his family, along with two animals of every species, survived the deluge, as the cypress ark persisted afloat in rising waters.

Eons after the Flood, the world suffered another catastrophe equal in size but not of divine intervention — the Holocaust. To date, the mass killing of European Jews during World War II remains one of the worst moral tragedies and ethnic losses in human history. Starting withthe Nuremberg Laws of 1935, the Jewish population was subjugated by Nazi Germany to asequence of dehumanizing abuses, including citizenship nullification, deportation, segregation,coerced labor, and ultimately, extermination. Due to a totalitarian empire’s fanaticism, six millionlives were slaughtered, thousands of communities demolished, and one people forever disrupted.

And yet, just as how the sparks of life shimmered within Noah’s Ark, a faction of Jews survived calamity with the assistance of righteous persons. While some fled to Palestine or Cuba, this paper focuses on the unseen many who migrated eastward. Though their odyssey wasarduous, traversing oceans and continents, these refugees eventually arrived in Shanghai, amulticultural oasis and an inclusive haven. The purpose of this essay is to chronicle in their entirety the escape, residency, and aftermath of the recorded 18,578 Jewish refugees in Hongkou,Shanghai, an untold tale spanning 1933 to 1951. Specifically, this paper spotlights the countless figures and stories during the process of Jewish emigration and their settlement in Shanghai,which often intersected and entwined into an embroidery of humanity. For its resemblance to thetale of Genesis, and for glorifying intent, city locals proudly refer to this part of history as the Ark of Shanghai.

Amidst the Rising Storm

On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany, a turning-pointevent instigated by immense reparation demands after World War I and the escalating civicresentment in reciprocal. Toward the issues of national debt and economic depression, Hitler responded with a series of draconian measures: banning strikes and trade unions, taking governmental control over business and industry, burning books publicly, and herding children into designated education camps. As millions worked for the construction of highways, factories,and weapons, the dictator promised an empire powerful enough to withstand a thousand years’lasting.

To justify this nationalistic machine, Hitler blamed the Jewish population for thecountry’s latest problems, emphasizing racial hierarchy and the need to remove inferior minorities. According to Hitler’s propaganda, the Aryan “genius race was reserved for its dominant position” over the Untermenschen — “subhuman,” referring to Jews, Roma, and Slavs— to “preserve the most valuable racial elements… [and] the purity of their own blood.”Therefore, eliminating Jews was declared a necessity of international significance by theautocrat, who appealed for Judenrein, or “free of Jews” in Europe, upon which a cleansed Reichcould thrive. Thus began the relentless persecution of European Jews by Hitler’s regime, which could be roughly divided into three progressive stages: Emigration (initiated by Hitler’saccession in 1933), Isolation (marked by the establishment of the first Jewish ghetto in occupied Poland in 1939), and Extermination (when the Chelmno extermination camp went intooperation in 1941).

Amid the “Emigration” phase in March of 1938, Austria was annexed by Germany, anevent later known as the Anschluss. Though seemingly trivial, this was one of the first intendedviolations of the Treaty of Versailles by the Nazis and resulted in the upheaval of Austrian lifealmost overnight. Consequently, the country’s Jewish population was brought under oppressive control, an endeavor enthusiastically partaken by many nazified Austrians. By that time, approximately 150,000 German Jews had already fled their tumultuous homeland, yet theaddition of 185,000 annexed Jews further intensified refugee issues across Europe.

To address this problem, representatives from 32 countries met at the French resort of Evian in July 1938, circa 100 days after the Anschluss. During the nine-day gathering, the Evian Conference received expressions of sympathy from delegates by mass, but almost all —including the United States and Britain — declined to accept more Jewish refugees into their borders. The US, in particular, was amidst the Great Depression, and many Americans feared the influx of Jews would incur business competition and overburden social programs. Such publicreluctance was reflected in the US Asylum Policy, which essentially refused to increase German quotas of refugees any further, as even the Wagner-Rogers bill’s effort to admit 20,000 endangered Jewish children was vetoed by the Senate. Despite the superficially professed compassion, unspoken at the Evian Conference was the antisemitic attitude across tables. In truth, none of these global superpowers either pitied or wished to help the Jews, for they all were struggling with domestic predicaments triggered by the Great Depression, which led to prevalently isolationist protocols and the acquiescence of Nazi aggression.

While the convention proceeded in France, heavy rain visited Vienna unannounced, as if a curious tempest brewing in midsummer. The sole victims of diplomatic impasse were the trapped German Jews, whose lives in annexed Austria were constantly threatened by arrests, economic expropriation, forced expulsion, and deportation to concentration camps. Day in and day out, the country’s Jews swarmed Vienna, besieging foreign consulates for visas. However, due to the tacit accordance reached at the Evian Conference to reject Jewish emigration, mostambassadors either refused to approve visas or required extensive documentation that wasvirtually impossible to obtain. Among the desperate crowd was 17-year-old Eric Goldstaub,who was turned down by 50 consulates in Vienna; as he recalled in an oral history interview, the emigrants “had to have [visas] to get the ship’s ticket” abroad. Even if the refugees managed to acquire and show proof of destination, they were automatically divested of all property and taxed based on their declared assets. Demanded the myriad preconditions for emigration, some Austrian Jews became desolately silent, others doubted if the alien shores were worth departing for, while many more continued to implore whoever they could for a paper and a stamp, only to end up in vain — months elapsed in quiet overcast, where serenity was absent in hearts.

At dusk on November 9, 1938, Kristallnacht, or the “Night of Crystal,” occurred. Induced primarily by Nazi officials and members of the Sturmabteilung (Storm Troopers), spontaneous violence erupted throughout the Reich and its annexed territories, all aimed at the destruction of Jewish-owned homes and businesses. “Spontaneous” and civilian as it seemed, the pogroms were specifically instructed by the Security Police to take no measures endangering non-Jewish German life or property, and were “not to be hampered” insofar the “demonstrations[were not] prepared or organized by the Party.”As rioters swept Germany, Austria, andSudetenland, hundreds of synagogues and Jewish institutions were destroyed or burned in full view of the public and local firefighters, who were ordered to intervene only when the flames spread to nearby buildings. An estimated 7,500 Jewish commercial establishments had their shop windows shattered and wares looted by SA and Hitler Youth members; the street-full of broken glass shards thus constituted the infamous night its title. Furthermore, Jewish cemeteries werealso desecrated, the houses of Jews were attacked by mobs, Jewish women were publicly humiliated, and a recorded 91 Jews were killed in mere hours.

Eric Goldstaub and his father, along with another 30,000 Jewish males, were arrested and imprisoned during the pogrom simply for their ethnicity, most of whom were then transferred to Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and other concentration camps. The Goldstaubs, however, showed their emigration visas as proof of identity and were released within days. Turned down by 50 ministries in July, Eric continued his quest and visited the Chinese consulate where,“wonders of wonder,” the emissary in charge approved him and his extended family 20 visas. With the necessary paperwork, the family procured tickets from an “Italian Ship’s Line,” and embarked to Shanghai in early December. Unlike the Goldstaubs and other fortunate few, the rest of the German Jewish community was condemned for the riot and fined one billion Reichsmark (approximately 8.7 billion USD today) by the Nazi government. Imaginably, the combined financial, ethical, and physical brutality entombed the last hope of Jews, provoking more futile attempts of relocation and an unprecedentedly high number of suicides ensuing the violence. German Jews came to a gradual realization that the age of material and spiritual “Isolation” was near, as if all possibilities of life were deprived from their trembling hands.

Persecuted within and repelled without, the German Jews were islanded in the eye of history’s hurricane; their utmost tragedy was neither pain nor death, yet the powerlessness when watching them slowly rendered. As the wheel of the Holocaust marched forth, 70,000 Austrian Jews eventually perished at the hands of Nazis. But the people lived on, as they did in the Diaspora — their story far from ending.

In Search of the Ark

Despite the despair and torment that permeated the darkening world of Austrian Jews, one figure preserved a shimmer of hope for the population — Dr. Ho Feng-shan, often referred to as “the Chinese Schindler.” Having attended China's elite institute, Yali College, and earning a Ph.D. in Political Economics at the University of Munich, Dr. Ho was very popular among the locals when serving as First Secretary of the Chinese Legation in Vienna. Due to his eloquence in German and charismatic personality, Ho was often asked by friends to speak on Chinese culture and customs, and many of his confidants in Vienna were Jewish. One of his intimates, Lilith-Sylvia Doron, recollected how the diplomat “accompanied [her] home… remained in [her]home [so that the Nazis] would not dare harm [her] family [for his status]… and visited her on a permanent basis to protect [the family] from the Nazis.”

In May 1938, circa 50 days after the Anschluss, Dr. Ho was appointed as Chinese Consul General in Vienna, reporting to the Chinese embassy in Berlin. Witnessing the suffering of Austrian Jews, Ho approved emigration visas to all those requesting them. Significantly, in response to the world’s predominantly isolationist policies and the requisites of additional entrance visas, Ho issued his visas to one place primarily — Shanghai, China, which had been occupied by the Japanese since 1937 with no passport control and no documents needed for entry. Thereby, according to Manli Ho, Dr. Ho’s daughter, the “‘Shanghai visa strategy’ provided Jewish refugees with the ‘proof of emigration’ required by the Nazis to leave their territories, freed those incarcerated from concentration camps, and facilitated passage through othercountries that otherwise would have been inaccessible.”As one of the first troubled refugees to approach the Chinese consulate, Eric Goldstaub retrieved 20 visas for himself and his family from Dr. Ho in July, and later escaped to Shanghai. Apart from the so-called “Paris of the Orient,” alternative destinations included the Philippines, Cuba, and beyond; Lilith Doron’s brother, Karl, who was arrested at Kristallnacht and released from Dachau thanks to the visa approved by Ho, left Vienna in 1939 with his sister for Palestine.

By September 1938, four months after Dr. Ho stepped into position, word had spread among the Austrian Jewish community that the Chinese consulate was approving emigration visas. Thereafter, throngs of people formed long lines in front of the building. Perceiving the crowds, Ho’s immediate superior Chen Chieh, the Chinese ambassador in Berlin, telephoned him to forbid large-scale visa issuance in the hope of cementing positive diplomatic relations with Germany — the consul, however, defied this order, and the office maintained its liberal policy. Subsequently, Chen sent subordinates to Vienna unannounced on the pretext of investigating rumors of the consulate “[issuing] visas for money,”, directly targeting Dr. Ho and Vice Consul Zhou Qi-xiang, the chief assistant to Ho’s work. However, upon finding no evidence of corruption and allegedly being impressed by Dr. Ho’s virtue,1the investigator returned to Berlin empty-handed, and the embassy continued approving visas.

From 1938 to 1940, Dr. Ho covertly dispensed hundreds of visas per month without interruption — an estimated total of several thousand. Eventually, the consulate building was confiscated by Nazis on suspicion of wrongful conduct, and the Chinese foreign ministry refused to fund its relocation. The consul rented a smaller facility out of his own pocket before proceeding with his deeds, but in May 1940, he was ultimately replaced by a successor who strictly adhered to the Chinese government’s regulations, curtailing the distribution of visas to Jews. Ho left Vienna for New York, and later resumed his service as a diplomat in Washington,D.C., then in Chungking, Cairo, Mexico, Bolivia, and Colombia; he retired in 1973, and died in1997 at the age of 96. It was only after his death that the survivors who owed him their lives revealed his story, for Ho remained humble and secretive whenever the subject was brought up, even in his autobiography My Forty Years as a Diplomat. In 2000, Yad Vashem, Israel’s officialHolocaust remembrance center, posthumously awarded Dr. Ho the title of “Righteous Among the Nations” for his humanitarian actions, the same honor granted in 1993 to Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who employed and saved 1200 Jews. Due to the similarity between the two in rescuing thousands of German Jews, taking great personal risks in the process, and being motivated by a sense of moral righteousness, Dr. Ho is often referred to by the media as the“Chinese Schindler.”

By September 1939 — the end of the “Emigration” phase for persecuted Jews — 282,000 refugees had left Germany to find sanctuaries elsewhere, of which approximately 20,000 fled to Shanghai in Japanese-occupied China. Besides the fact that it required no documents or visas for entry, the city was also desirable for its multiculturalism and demographic composition. Long before World War II, in 1842, the then-minor port first opened to European trade. As a result, Great Britain, the U.S., France, Italy, and Portugal all developed extraterrestrial rights in thecity’s foreign concessions — collectively referred to as the International Settlement. Populated with foreign residents, Shanghai was not only an inclusive haven to Europeans but also a modern metropolis with established Jewish communities. As far back as a thousand years ago in the Northern Song Dynasty, merchant Jews entered the East through the Silk Road, with the oldest known synagogue in Kaifeng, Henan Province, dating back to 1163. After the ports of the city opened to Westerners and the municipality globalized in the nineteenth century, severalSephardic Jewish businessmen came and settled in the hope of seizing fortune. Among them, the most successful were the Sassoon family, the Kadoorie family, and Silas Aaron Hardoon.Today’s Peace Hotel at the Bund, one landmark edifice of the city, was formerly renowned as the Sassoon House erected by Sir Victor Sassoon, a leader of the Shanghai Jewish Community. For all these appealing qualities, Shanghai was deemed a last resort for the stateless German Jews, although more than 7,000 kilometers afar from their homeland.

It was doubtless a strenuous expedition, yet compared to their dilemma under the Nazi oppression, it was a path to better chances of living, especially with the aid of righteous personsalong the way — including Dr. Ho, as well as Dutch consul Jan Zwartendijk and Japanese consulChiune Sugihara. Before June 1940, most Jewish emigrants boarded ships in the ports of Italy or northern Germany; in the course of their voyage, they transited the Suez Canal, Mumbai,Colombo, Singapore, Manila, Hong Kong, and eventually arrived in Shanghai after roughly one month. While the vessel took multiple stops over the course of its passage, the Jews were not authorized to disembark due to political complications, as emigration was disapproved by the Evian Conference. Eric Goldstaub and his family, who escaped Vienna after Kristallnacht, obtained shipping accommodation on the Conte Biancamano and commenced their 30-dayvoyage in early December 1938 from Genoa, Italy. Also among the first conveyance ships to sailin 1938 and the last to desist was the Conte Rosso that departed from Trieste with a capacity of564, and, according to passenger Tom Rosatter, performed its final trip in May of 1940 right before the marine route was terminated. On June 10, 1940, the Italian Duce Benito Mussolini declared war against Great Britain and France to implement his Pact of Steel with Hitler, and the harbors closed as fierce naval warfare and dogfights erupted in and above the Mediterranean Sea. Thereafter, the emigrants were forced to travel across Siberia and the Soviet Union eastward by train, through Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, Manchuria, Harbin, and finally south to Shanghai. According to Ralph Hirsch, his “train journey” from Manchuria to Dalian Port was rather “boring,” as he claimed that the “windows were all sealed… a soldier [watchedthem] in each carriage… [and they] were not allowed to look outside, or otherwise would be shot dead.”

Due to stringent Nazi restrictions, most Jews emigrating by sea were expropriated of all properties before embarking, at times permitted only to bring one suitcase of personal belongings and 10 German Marks (approximately 87 USD today) for the entirety of their voyage. Allegedly, clever passengers would outwit the system by purchasing first-class cabins, then returning the tickets after boarding for lower-class seats so that they could collect an additional several hundred Marks. However, for the majority of the less financially capable, such a journey to Shanghai deprived them of all remaining assets, with most refugees arriving penniless at their destination of Shanghai. While the Jews set foot upon the Bund, acquainting themselves with the foreign air, trucks arranged by local relief organizations picked up the newcomers and transferred them to the Hongkou District where they would reside; the Embankment Building next to the Bund, owned by the aforementioned Sassoon family, also served as a provisional shelter.

With their accumulated wealth and influence, the established families of Sassoon and Kadoorie generously assisted their destitute compatriots, creating funds, upholding independent businesses, and subsidizing relief organizations that supplied lodgings, amenities, health care, necessities for adaptation, and vouchers for free food. Formed in 1938 by prominent local Jews,the Committee for Assistance of European Jewish Refugees solicited financial support from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) of New York, which installed an office in Shanghai led by Laura Margolis and increased its appropriation from 5,000 to 100,000 USD in1939 (approximately 2.2 million USD today). Another international organization dedicated to the aid of Shanghai Jews was the International Committee for Granting Relief to European Refugees (IC in short), sponsored by the Sassoons and arranged by one Hungarian Paul Komor as honorary secretary general. Among the many philanthropies of Mr. Komor was the issuance of temporary identification cards for the distressed, stateless Jews, admitting them social standing in the new world and revitalizing their sense of human rights long suppressed by Nazis.

Through the famed Garden Bridge (the first all-steel bridge in China) and the International Settlement, carriage trucks unloaded their passengers in the Hongkou District, which was mainly uninhabited due to the Sino-Japanese War. While welfare policies in Shanghai were generous, settlement in the city was still an extreme mental challenge: one group of 58 Jewish emigrants could dwell in a red-brick sanctuary, previously a tiny school, sleeping on double-deckers with the only space for personal belongings under their beds. Days ago, they had been served breakfasts on European liners by uniformed stewards, but were now found queuing up for lunch in a soup kitchen. It was at such moments that the sudden and absolute realization oftheir own fugitive status manifested itself to the Jews, and many were forced to rely on at least some charitable relief.

To accommodate the escalating population of refugees, eight shelters were constructed in the Hongkou, a central district tangent to the Huangpu River, as financed by the Committee for Assistance, and were referred to by the Jews as Heime — “homes” in German. By the end of 1939, about 2,500 people lived in the Heime, each room of 30 to 200. An additional 4,500 resided in rented apartments elsewhere, with their housing fees covered by relief while still depending on the shelters for meals. Among the settlers was Former US Secretary of the Treasury Michael Blumenthal, who remembered that “in 1939, when [he] was only 13 years old, [his] family fled to Shanghai and lived in a small apartment at 59 Chusan Road, which the Shanghai people called the Attic … [that] only had 10 square meters of space.” As sleeping appeared a problem for the family of four, the Blumenthals decided to “each choose a corner…kept [their] heads in the corner and [their] feet lay inward… [so that the father could] keep his feet from touching others.” “It was tough, but unforgettable,” concluded Mr. Blumenthal, “And it was a time when no one in the world opened the doors to us, but because of historical circumstance, even though Shanghai had a lot of problems of its own, Shanghai did open to us.”

People of decency conformed to moral standards, yet those of righteousness clung to them intangible balances of gold even at times when colors were lost — thus, righteous were Dr. Ho, Sir Sassoon, and Mr. Komor. With the support of their altruisms, the Jewish refugees of Europe underwent laborious emigrations, arrived at the cosmopolitan city of Shanghai, and resumed their versatile lives in new “homes.”

Sparks of Life in Shanghai

Miserable were the Jewish refugees in Shanghai after 1938, for with the onset of World War II and economic recession, it was difficult to pursue any sort of formal career and maintain livelihood. According to Czechoslovak-Jewish refugee Joseph Schulhof, who joined the Shanghai Volunteer Corps in November 1940, his job was to “patrol the International Settlement together with the police… [and] collect bodies of poor people frozen to death on the streets.”Given the unfavorable circumstances, many Jews subsisted by performing errands, transporting briquettes, baking bread, selling newspapers, or repairing electric appliances; others managed small enterprises as grocers, pharmacists, plumbers, locksmiths, barbers, tailors, cobblers, andmilliners. By 1940, the area around Zhoushan Road came to be known as “Little Vienna,”dispersed with European-style cafes, delicatessens, nightclubs, and retail stores. As the settlers’material life steadily enriched, their culture bloomed upon foreign land as of grafted florets.

Family was vital to the Jews above all else. From 1939 to 1946, 366 Jewish couples married in Shanghai; their wedlocks were documented on finely painted certificates of traditional Chinese design. After Jewish babies were born, their parents would publish an announcement in newspapers such as Israel’s Messenger for the relatives to visit and celebrate. When the boys reached the age of thirteen, they were celebrated of adulthood in Bar Mitzvah, which was considered by Jews to be the second most important moment in life — the ceremony usuallyoccurred at home or in a synagogue. Another closely heeded ritual in the households was family education, as the Jews believed that home was the place to deliver knowledge and their ethnic virtues to the children. When the youngsters reached a certain age, they received proper education by attending the Shanghai Jewish Youth Association School, or the Kadoorie School, established by the aforesaid Kadoorie family and other Sephardic Jewish businessmen. With over 600 students, the institution taught in both English and French a curriculum of 20 subjects, preparing its pupils for their lives anew in the US or Europe after the War. Besides secular instruction, religious education remained significant for the Jews even in exile: students andrabbis of Mir Yeshiva fled Poland to Lithuania and traveled across Siberia to Kobe, Japan with the aid of Dutch consul Zwartendijk and Japanese consul Sugihara, before arriving at Shanghaiin 1941. Throughout their expedition and during their stay, the scholars proceeded with their study and interacted with other Shanghai Jewish refugees in synagogues until 1946, when they relocated to Brooklyn New York and became the only Eastern European yeshivas to survive the Holocaust unscathed.

Though intermarriage was uncommon, there were exceptions, including the esteemed businessman Silas Aaron Hardoon and his Eurasian wife Luo Jialing. Another example was deaf painter David Ludwig Bloch, who was introduced in a social gathering to Chinese girl Zheng Dixiu, who also happened to be deaf; the two’s identical impairment and mutual empathy fostered intimacy, guiding them to lifelong matrimony. From his local friends, Mr. Bloch earned the nickname “Ba lo ha” based on the Shanghai dialect, which was similar in pronunciation to his surname; the epithet also translated literally to “white green black,” alluding to Bloch’s profession. After being arrested at Kristallnacht in 1938 and interned in the Dachau concentration camp, Mr. Bloch fled Germany with the financial help of relatives, and continued his career as a commercial illustrator in Shanghai. Inspired by his new surroundings, Bloch composed naturalistic woodcuts of the underprivileged peddlers, rickshaw pullers, beggars, andstruggling Jewish refugees, reflecting their quotidian life and stressing interconnectivity of thecity’s diverse populations. Mr. Bloch was merely one among numerous gifted Jewish artists from Germany and Austria, who filled the routine days of both Jews and Shanghai locals with vividhues and frisky melodies. Two brothers, Otto Joachim the violinist and Walter Joachim the cellist, organized a band in Hongkou and performed regularly in cafes throughout the time of the “Shanghai Ghetto”; one of their globally recognized songs was “Rose, Rose, I Love You.”* Alsoa musician, Alfred Wittenberg was a Hungarian violinist who tutored multiple prestigious Chinese performers including Mr. Tan Shuzhen; he became a professor at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music postwar and passed away in 1953 after remaining in the city for some 10 years. Moreover, in the Jewish neighborhood, theater productions, sporting events, and beauty pageants frequently took place, all reported in German and English by the 40-some Jewish publications, as the press was a chief information communication method among the people. With incredible adaptability and strength, the Shanghai Jew swiftly surmounted the post-emigration challenges in subsistence and cultural nourishment.

While the Jewish refugees were gradually accustomed to their Shanghai lifestyle, the course of history made another pivotal turn, thrusting them once more into a veil of darkness. In the winter of 1941, December 7, Japan launched surprise aerial attacks on the naval base at Pearl Harbor, resulting in the United States’ entry into WWII and the detonation of the Pacific War. In Shanghai, Japanese troops invaded the International Settlement controlled by the French, Americans, and British, enclosing the city and prohibiting further entry of Jewish emigrants. Additionally, the Sephardic Jewish businessmen could no longer aid the refugees, for most of them were deemed “enemy aliens” by authorities. 44 days later on January 20, 1942, a 90-minute classified assembly was held in Wannsee, Germany among 15 high-ranking Nazi officials. Initiated by the proposal of the Reichsführer (Reich Leader) Heinrich Himmler, the meeting discussed the “fall” of approximately 11 million European Jews in the Nazi “Final Solution” to the Jewish Question*. These were of course euphemisms, and the aim of the Wannsee Conference was evidently the coordination of European Jews’ complete, physical extermination: according to Governor General of Nazi-occupied Poland Hans Frank, “We must annihilate the Jews wherever we find them.”

With the “Extermination” stage of the Holocaust formally underway, the Gestapo chief in Warsaw Poland, Colonel Josef Albert Meisinger, arrived at Shanghai in July as dispatched by Himmler. According to Rabbi Marvin Tokayer, Meisinger covertly proposed the Final Solutionin Shanghai to Japanese authorities and envisioned a two-step execution: firstly rounding up the Jewish families on Rosh Hashanah — the Jewish New Year — in movie theaters and houses of worship, then either setting them adrift to the East Sea in abandoned barges to die of starvationor confining them in a concentration camp on the Chongming Island for inhumane medical experiments.

Since Japan was a principal ally of Nazi Germany in the War, it would be expected that its administration in occupied Shanghai would assist the operation. However, for various subsidiary reasons, including Japan’s lack of avid antisemitism like in Europe, the country’s desire to maintain peace with the USSR by preserving Shanghai Russian Jews, and its wish not to irritate the US again by avoiding genocide, Meisinger’s plan was hampered. One specific intervention transpired — as documented in the autobiography Shanghai Refuge by Ernest Heppner — in July 1942, when a confidential convention was urgently called among Japanese Vice Consul Mitsugi Shibata, the Director of Bureau for Jewish Affairs Tsutomo Kubota, members of the Kempeitai (military police), and prominent leaders of the city’s Jewish community. Disclosing the content of Meisinger’s scheme, Shibata “concluded that because he was an honorable man with many friends in the Jewish community, he had been compelled to bring this matter of life and death to the attention of its leaders… regardless of the consequences to his own safety or to his career.” Fortunately, due to Shibata’s courageous deed, Meisinger’s“alleged plot” to exterminate the Shanghai Jews in secret was divulged and doomed to failure. However, as the details of the meeting were inadvertently revealed, the Kempeitai chief furiously arrested all related personages of the event. Boris Topas, the president of the Shanghai Russian Ashkenazi Jewish Community who had before the war made statements against Japan, was tortured for 10 months, being “severely beaten; his fingernails were pulled out, and he was burned with cigarettes during the interrogation… Headfirst, he was thrown down a long flight of stone stairs, then repeatedly pulled up and thrown down again until he lost consciousness.”Presumably, retribution like such for Mr. Topas, equal in severity if not worse, was no singular occurrence to the other apprehended figures. Vice consul Shibata, despite his position, was confined for weeks before being sent back to Tokyo in shame. He was never to be heard from again — possibly stripped of his rank, wasted a life in surveillance, and died alone with no medals addressing his righteous act that potentially saved around 20,000 Shanghai Jews.

Although mass extermination of Jews in Shanghai was prevented, unfavorable measures were sequentially imposed upon both the refugees and the city locals. Circa six months after the Nazis failed to implement the Final Solution in Shanghai, on February 18, 1943, Japanese authorities issued the Proclamation Concerning Restriction of Residence and Business of Stateless Refugees, officially declaring the establishment of a constricted sector popularly known as the Designated Area, or the “Shanghai Ghetto,” as the refugees called it colloquially. An area of about three square kilometers, or one square mile, within the Hongkou District, the Designated Area was circumscribed east by Yangtzesco Creek (now Yangshupu Road), west by Chaoufoong Road (now Gaoyang Road), north by the International Settlement’s boundary, and south by Wayside Road (now Huoshan Road). Though the Proclamation made no reference to“Jews,” a concurrent news article indicated that “Stateless Refugees” indeed were defined as those who had fled to Shanghai since 1937 from Germany, annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia — in an essence Shanghai’s European Jewish community.

Adding on to the 7,000 inhabiting Jews of Hongkou, 5,526 Jewish refugees were hastily shepherded into the Shanghai Ghetto by June 20. According to statistics published by the Emigrant Residents Union, in November of 1944, 14,245 European Jews lived in the Designated Area along with some 100,000 original Chinese residents. As recorded by Ellis Jacob in his autobiography, The Shanghai I Know, Japanese occupiers censored Jewish sources of news, music, and movies and instead imposed propaganda journals and films. Meanwhile, almost all American and British educational institutes were suspended, and by 1944, only two English-speaking schools — the previously mentioned Kadoorie School and the Shanghai Jewish School — were left operative under strict control and mandated to teach Japanese. Furthermore, unemployment, rampant disease, and recurrent bombing constantly pervaded and threatened the livelihood of segregated Jews, as the recent acquaintants of placidity and contentment in Shanghai were once again enveloped by death and darkness that they so desperately escapedfrom.

In managing the Ghetto, Japanese authorities implemented the Pao Chia system, anarchaic practice of neighborhood organization last employed during the Qing dynasty. Similarto the Nazis’ method of control, the system supplemented the Kempeitai in Shanghai and required a yellow strip on the Jewish residence certificate as an indication of their identity. Inaddition, if anyone wished to enter or leave the Designated Area either for work, business, or health purposes, they had to apply for a badge with the Chinese character 通 on it, meaning“pass,” from the Ghetto’s administration, which became the center of dispute between residents and the ruling authorities. After vice consul Mitsugi Shibata was escorted back to Japan for exposing Meisinger’s plan, another attendee of his confidential convention, Tsutomu Kubota, became head of the Shanghai Stateless Refugees Affairs Bureau from June 1943 to 1945 — his direct subordinate, Kano Ghoya, was the vice chief and the Ghetto’s actual manager. Those who wished to exit the Designated Area thus had to consult Ghoya for the badge of passage; and yet, despite the Ghetto’s large population, only 1,600 quarterly passes and 2,500 temporary passes were assigned during Ghoya’s first year.

Unlike his righteous superiors, Ghoya was considered eccentric, temperamental, and cruel to residents of the Designated Area, even addressing himself as “the King of Jews.”According to then-refugee Chaya Small’s tape-recorded interview, “Once [she] was seriously ill and must see a doctor outside the Ghetto. [Her] father took [her] to the office of Ghoya… [who]was well known for his cruelty to the refugees, so [they] were very afraid… but [they] had noother choice.” When Chaya’s father Rabbi Walkin “asked for the permit, after explaining[Chaya’s] sickness… Ghoya ordered [her] father to put his head on the desk… Suddenly, he pulled out his sword, held it high, and in one quick swoop cut off [Walkin’s] beard. Then he burst into laughter.” Chaya was traumatized profoundly by this incident and never in her later life owned knives. In response to Ghoya’s draconian policies, indignant Jewish refugees discreetly scorned the administrator’s physicality and sadism. On the pamphlet entitled Goodbye Mr.Ghoya by Friedrich Melchior in September 1945, seven caricatural cartoons ridiculed Ghoya’sshort height and mocked his “King of Jews” statement by depicting him as dwarfish and regally cloaked. Though such publications and private denunciation threatened neither Ghoya’s position nor even appealed to his senses, the actions themselves served as the community’s amusement and gave the Jews alleviation amidst continuous oppression.

Aside from composing derisive caricatures for their mental solace, the abused refugees also undertook more pragmatic endeavors for their own welfare. Led by Mr. Boris Topas, the attendee of vice consul Shibata’s confidential convention who had been tortured, the Russian Ashkenazi Jews did not need to relocate into the Designated Area by the Proclamation’s policy due to their residency in Shanghai since the early 1900s. As the community was unaffected by the Designated Area’s restraints, the Shanghai Ashkenazi Collaborating Relief Association (SACRA) was established to assist the refugees’ movement, accommodation, job seeking, food distribution, and other facets of their transition. Later, when infectious diseases — including cholera, malaria, typhoid, and amoebic dysentery — plagued the Ghetto Jews, SACRA’s medical committee also helped vaccinate refugees to endure the hour of crisis. In addition, Ruth Callmann, who emigrated to the city from Germany in 1939, was hired as a typist and worked for administrator Ghoya personally. Responsible for inventorying the names of roughly 14,000 Jewish residents in the Ghetto, Ms. Callmann also acted as a liaison between the Japanese authority and the general public, who often applied for special passes. With miraculous adaptability and resilience once again, the Jewish refugees created opportunities to earn a decent living in the Ghetto, shaping the environment to preserve their cultures and traditions through the establishment of European restaurants, cafes, and shops. For instance, the Roy Roof Garden, near the southern border of the Designated Area on Wayside Road, was among the most popular Jewish gathering spaces, which hosted music, dances, Yiddish conversations, Ghetto gossip, evening Shabbat shaloms, aromatic Viennese coffee, and authentic deserts that quenched the homesickness of many.

Life for the segregated Jews was also significantly improved with the help of their Chinese neighbors, who shared their difficulties and demonstrated remarkable generosity. Jerry Moses, along with his family of five, emigrated to Shanghai in 1941 after his father was imprisoned and excruciated during Kristallnacht in Breslau, German-occupied Poland; Jerry was seven upon arrival. While the Moseses shared a room with two Austrian couples on Chaoufoong Road, the Ghetto’s western perimeter, the kitchen of their communal shelter had to feed hundreds of Jewish refugees simultaneously, almost all of whom frequently went hungry due to supply shortages, some of whom even starved to death. Jerry remembered, however, that their Shanghai neighbors were exceptionally sympathetic despite their own miseries: “If we were thirsty, [the Chinese] gave us water. If we were hungry, they gave us rice cakes… As bad as we had it, they had it worse. And they felt bad for us.” Thus, although the conditions were harsh, Jerry’schildhood in Hongkou was memorable, spent frolicking with the local children, playing various Chinese games, and learning the Shanghai dialect.

Another instance of Chinese hospitality and ingenuity occurred, George Reinisch recalled, when gas, electricity, and charcoal were severely restricted during this period of the Shanghai Ghetto. Utilizing what meager resources they had, the Shanghai locals “[made] ‘soilcoal’ by mixing garbage with brown soil and making them into balls. After they were dried, people burned them together with waste paper and wood.” Although this process “produced unbearable smoke… [and] people had to keep fanning,” the “soil coal” both resolved dire problems of energy supply and recycled human waste to reduce environmental contamination. Gradually, Jews in the Designated Area imitated their Hongkou neighbors to cook on tiny coalstoves, fetch hot water from communal kitchens, enjoy Chinese operas, speak the Shanghaidialect, and relish native cuisines. Regarding local eats, then-refugee Nina Admoni commented,“The Chinese people lived in the building next to us. We visited each other from time to time. Our Chinese neighbors often came to our house and taught my mother how to cook. Chinese foods were really delicious and I liked them very much.”

With the basic necessities in life ensured, forms of sports, entertainment, and artistic activities flourished in the Ghetto among Jewish residents and their Shanghai neighbors. According to William Schurtman, who fled to Shanghai after the Anschluss, the refugees organized soccer teams shortly after their relocation into Hongkou. Several months later, they established an amateur soccer association that hosted league matches enthusiastically attended by Chinese players, foreign teams, and thousands of fans. Other sports, including ping pong, boxing, tennis, and baseball, were also favorites of the Jews. In terms of entertainment, there were three or four Chinese-operated cinemas featuring American movies even before the Designated Area was announced, which provided not only amusement but also the opportunity for the refugees to learn English. (However, after the Pacific War erupted, American films were banned and replaced by their German, French, Italian, and Russian counterparts.) Moreover, since there were many professional actors and artists among the Shanghai Jews, Jewish singers assembled a light opera troupe that staged multiple popular operettas for all of the population in Hongkou, while the musicians arranged wind bands and orchestras. Throughout the Jews’ time in the Ghetto, tunes of “Rose, Rose, I Love You” can be heard across Hongkou as performed by the previously discussed Joachim brothers in wayside cafes or bridge clubs.

Refugee life in Shanghai not only fostered the artistic inspiration for Mr. Ludwig Bloch, but also for the celebrated painter Peter Max. Born in Germany, Peter and his parents fled to Shanghai in 1938 when he was less than a year of age, and lived in a pagoda-style house of the Hongkou Jewish community for the next ten years. On one side of their house was a Buddhist monastery, where monks painted calligraphic images with bamboo brushes on sheets of rice paper during the day; on the other was a Sikh gurdwara, where tuneful prayers were chanted at night. Shanghai’s multiculturalism ravished Peter deeply, likely contributing to his later style of vibrant colors, psychedelic shapes, and incorporative elements from existing artwork. When Peter turned three years old, he was nurtured by a Chinese 阿嫲, or “nanny,” a daughter of thefamily’s local friend, who used to “come to [his] home almost every day, walking with [him], playing with [him] and teaching [him] to draw… by using the movement of his wrist in painting.”This memorable relationship lasted throughout the two years of the Shanghai Ghetto, as Peter recollected, “[The nanny] was only nine years older than [him], so she was more like an elder sister of mine. She [was] my first art teacher.” Peter’s bond with his Chinese nanny in many ways epitomized the interaction between Jewish refugees and the Shanghai citizens: the support from one community in life was requited with mutual care, the two peoples’ suffering alike prompted congenial collaboration, and this family-like intimacy nourished creativity for the betterment for both.

On April 30, 1945, Hitler committed suicide after Soviet troops entered the heart of Berlin, and the German Third Reich announced unconditional surrender on May 7. Exactly three months later on August 6, two atomic bombs were released upon the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing tens of thousands in their initial explosions; the following day, Japanese government agreed to accept the Allied surrender terms dictated in the Potsdam Declaration. After Japan surrendered the Second Sino-Japanese War on September 2, the Designated Area was abolished and their imperial forces withdrew from the city of Shanghai. World War II was over. At last, people around the world, once trapped, fettered, and scourged, walked again in the land of the free, inhaling the air of liberty and bathing in the light ofemancipation.

It was only after the War that the Holocaust’s brutality became globally publicized, theWannsee Conference’s horrendous scheme exposed, and the extermination of 6 million European Jews known to the world. Of all those massacred, 1.5 million were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen (mobile-killing “deployment groups”) within the Soviet Union as ordered by the SS chief Reinhard Heydrich, who was also responsible for commanding extensive Jewish arrests during Kristallnacht. About three million were slaughtered in gas chambers inconcentration camps throughout Poland, most notoriously the Auschwitz camp, in which approximately 6,000 were executed daily at the height of deportations from 1942 to 1944. An additional thousands of minor camps and ghettos were scattered across German-occupied Europe, where over one million Jews died of starvation, disease, and overwork. Though also victims of persecution and hardship, the 20,000 Jewish refugees in Shanghai were blessed with unfathomable luck compared to their European compatriots, for except the 1,700 lost in diseaseand bombards, the majority of their population survived.

Eagerly scrutinizing the names on published survivor lists, the Shanghai Jews wrote letters to correspond with what remaining families, relatives, and friends they had, in the hope ofreunion. By 1951, around 22,000 to 24,000 European refugees or displaced persons departedShanghai to the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Argentina, or the newlyfounded State of Israel in 1948. Due to US immigration quotas that limited Jewish influx, Eric Goldstaub migrated to Canada in 1949 at the age of twenty; reviewing his ten-year Shanghairefuge in an oral history interview, Eric reflected that “we never experienced any of the fear that[seemed] to creep out [European Jews]… there was never any antisemitism that I ever experienced, anywhere, not only personally, but as in community.” In 1947 at the age of 21,Michael Blumenthal also left Shanghai, his home of eight years, for the United States; he laterbecame the chairman of Bendix Corporation, taught at Princeton University, and was appointed Secretary of the Treasury under President Carter. In July 1947, Jerry Moses and his family embarked on a ship bound for San Francisco, en route to their postwar home in Chile; heremembered, “the [Huangpu] river water [turned] from brown to blue as we entered the ocean…And that’s really when my life began.” In 1948 when Peter Max and his family migrated to Haifa, Israel by ship, the boy wept to have to bid farewell to his Chinese nanny; later aninternationally acclaimed artist, Peter Max composed portraits of celebrities, sportsmen, andstatesmen including those of US Presidents Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and Bill Clinton.

While many left, some Jews lingered due to a sense of attachment to the city, the country, and its people. For instance, Richard Frey, who arrived at Shanghai in 1939 as a refugee and worked in a hospital, joined the Communist Party of China in 1944. In the military, Frey developed the nation’s first crude penicillin, which contributed to the short supply of medicine at the time. Sara Imas, the first Chinese-Jewish descendent to immigrate to Israel in 1992, spent the first 42 years of her life growing up among her Shanghai peers, solely speaking mandarin, enduring early upheavals in the new China, and wedding local men despite her three unsuccessful marriages. As she initially provided for herself and family in Israel by selling spring rolls, Sara became fluent in English and Hebrew, sent her three children to Israeli colleges, and returned to Shanghai after ten years in 2002, where she is now married to a Chinese professor and her one true love. According to unofficial estimation, roughly 2,000 to 3,000 Jewish residents dwell in Shanghai today.

To date, Shanghai still bears unforgettable memories of its Jewish refugees and their progenies, who often revisit the city to reminisce the bygone times. Beside the old Ohel Moishe Synagogue in Hongkou, what is now a part of the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum, situate six walls carved with the names of 18,578 Jews who once lived in Shanghai from 1933 to 1951, signifying the commemoration and perpetuation of the history of the Ark of Shanghai. It is a story of salvation and requital, of righteousness and resilience, of two peoples and one world.

Conclusion

“Above all nations is humanity,” thus spoke British historian Goldwin Smith*. Indeed, beyond geographical boundaries, racial differences, and ideological discrepancies that seemingly demarcate one identifiable group from another, it is self-evident that all people, no matter their nationalities, are equal citizens of mankind. Therefore, it is neither this essay’s primary purpose to criticize specific Western superpowers for acquiescing in the Nazi oppression of Jews nor to categorize Japan as villainous for confining Shanghai Jews in the Designated Area, but to spotlight the decision of an individual, the endeavor of a people, and the events in a piece of microhistory, which demonstrate humanity in its purest.

As to the question of how the 18,578 European Jews in Shanghai survived calamity, individual righteous figures were pivotal throughout the Jewish emigration and settlement from 1933 to the early 1940s. Although it is debated whether Dr. Ho accepted bribery during hisoffice, there lacks empirical evidence of corruption, and the suspicion itself does not negate thefact that he issued thousands of visas to the Viennese Jews while risking one’s personal safety from 1938 to 1940. Such a deed was laudable firstly for it contradicted the general acceptance of antisemitic persecution at the time as exemplified by the Evian Conference, and also because Dr. Ho had no prior connections with the Jewish community before his life in Vienna. Supporting the people solely for he could not bear witness to others suffering vindictive cruelty, Dr. Ho displayed true righteousness that extended beyond ethnicity and culture. Dutch Consul Jan Zwartendijk, Japanese Consul Chiune Sugihara, Sir Victor Sassoon, Mr. Paul Komer, Vice Consul Mitsugi Shibata, and many more also contributed to acts of altruism, as their separate yet collective efforts were indispensable to the Jewish survival.

When Colonel Meisinger proposed the Final Solution to the Japanese authority of occupied Shanghai in 1942, what prevented mass extermination other than Vice Consul Shibata’s whistleblowing was Japan’s political deliberation. Unlike how a great number of Austrians fanatically embraced Nazi antisemitic measures during the Anschluss, Japan, along with most other Eastern countries like China, was uninfluenced by radical racial bigotry in terms of managing the Jewish refugees. Though a member of the Axis alliance, Japan remained hesitant toward the Final Solution simply because it would pose them disadvantageous in the War. If Russian Jews in Shanghai were slaughtered, Japan could face imminent warfare with the USSR on a continent where they had newly extended their powers. Eliminating the Jews would also augment the United States’ animosity with Japan due to Pearl Harbor, which will further incur international censure. Consequently, as Japan considered the Jewish population its rare linkage to the rest of the world, diplomatic game was a second crucial factor for the Jewish survival.

While Japan’s political strategies secured lives on a macro level, the everyday livelihoods of Shanghai Jews in the Ghetto were ensured largely by interacting with their Chinese neighbors. Despite the language barriers and severe conditions, the Jewish interaction with locals burgeoned as the two populations shared similar ideals for family, education, and community. Throughout times of segregation, the Hongkou residents veritably rescued the lives of thousands of Jewish refugees by providing water, food, amenities, and resources including the soil coal. More importantly, the Chinese offered spiritual solace to the Jews, whether participating in sports and artistic activities, caretaking the children, or engaging in extensive cultural exchanges, in which they benefited as well. If Dr. Ho’s undertaking was the most of an individual’s righteousness, each of the 100,000 locals and the 14,000 Jews in the Designated Area showcased morality at the slightest, often as common as lending a cup of water, but collectively mounting to an entire society of welfare, mutual respect, and general goodness.

This bond between the two peoples is imperishable. As recent as in early 2020, when extreme anti-Chinese sentiments caused by the COVID-19 pandemic plagued multiple Americancities, more than 80 Jewish organizations and communities in the US issued a joint letter, expressing condolences to the Chinese and promoting Chinese American businesses. The letter by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs states, “The Chinese and Jewish communities share much in common, including a commitment to the highest ideals and welcoming spirit of America. We in the Jewish community are more committed than ever to upholding these ideals and ensuring they are extended to you, our friends and neighbors.” As the Ark of Shanghai continues its voyage in the heart of survivors, the history’s message perpetuates also to this very day — a duet of two voices in harmony, a garden of a thousand flowers blooming.“

After forty days Noah opened a window he had made in the ark and sent out a raven…He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark. When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf!” (Gen. 8:6-8:11)  Alas! humanity is saved!