c. 2006 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) We usually think of Holocaust survivors as traumatized and emaciated Jews who were liberated from Nazi German death camps in Europe at the end of World War II. But there was also another kind of survivor.
During the horrific period between 1933 and 1945, the United States, Britain and other Western nations enforced a restrictive immigration quota system that required difficult-to-obtain entry visas. Driven to desperation, some Jews, often made “stateless” under Nazi law, escaped Hitler’s gas chambers by traveling for two weeks on the trans-Siberian railroad across thousands of miles of the former Soviet Union to the port city of Vladivostok. From there many journeyed with difficulty to one place in the world where visas were not required: Shanghai, China.
That’s right … Shanghai.
Indeed, as many as 30,000 Jews lived in the Chinese city during the Holocaust years. At first, it was an open “international” city, but that status changed when the Japanese occupied much of China, including Shanghai. Because Japan was a wartime ally of Germany, Shanghai’s Jews feared the Nazi policy of genocide would be applied to them.
Their fear intensified in 1942 when Joseph Meisinger, a Gestapo official, made an official visit to Tokyo. He urged Japan’s leaders to carry out the Nazi “Final Solution” _ mass murder _ on the Jews living under Japanese control in Shanghai and other Asian cities including Hong Kong, Kobe and Harbin.
Fortunately, the Japanese refused their ally’s advice. However, following the German’s visit, the Japanese did create a “Ghetto” in Shanghai that worsened the already crowded and disease-ridden living conditions. Yet, life went on in “Jewish Shanghai” with schools and religious institutions, newspapers in German, Polish, and Yiddish, cultural events, marriages, births and a host of other “normal” activities. When World War II ended, the Jewish community in China’s largest city scattered _ some settled in newly independent Israel, others came to the United States, Canada and South America, and some moved to nearby Japan.
While stationed as an Air Force chaplain in Japan and Korea in the 1960s, I met some of Shanghai’s Jews who were then living in Tokyo. They praised the Japanese for rejecting Meisinger’s murderous request. They also lauded the heroic work of Chiune Sugihara, Japan’s World War II consul in Lithuania, who saved many lives by issuing exit visas to Jews.
These little-known chapters in history are vividly captured in Marion Cuba’s recently published novel, “Shanghai Legacy.” It is a compelling multi-generational family saga that skillfully moves between World War II Shanghai and contemporary New York City.
“Shanghai Legacy” is the story of Hannah, a psychologically rigid and emotionally bitter German Jewish girl who spent eight years in Shanghai, where both her parents died. At war’s end, young Hannah and her husband, also a Shanghai Jew, move to the U.S. and begin a new life. In the novel, Maya, their American-born adult daughter, discovers many painful family secrets after her mother’s death.
Cuba superbly recreates wartime Shanghai when Maya discovers Hannah’s long-hidden diaries. Because Cuba’s carefully researched novel draws on source material from the period, her book is more than the usual mother-daughter story of love, loss, rejection and reconciliation. Nor is it just another Holocaust memoir. Instead, “Shanghai Legacy” tells a gripping story that holds the reader’s attention while conveying important historical information.
Besides, the thousands of “ordinary” Jews who lived in Shanghai, some community members became prominent in the years after World War II. Among them are Michael Blumenthal, who served as treasury secretary in the Carter administration, and Yosef Tekoa who was Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. Zerach Wahrhaftig, a signer of Israel’s Declaration of Independence in 1948, was also a “Shanghai Jew.” Wahrhaftig later served as Israel’s minister for religious affairs.
The internationally acclaimed illustrator, Peter Max, arrived in Shanghai from his native Berlin at age one with his family in 1938. He remained in China for the next 10 years.
Finally, Laurence Tribe, the distinguished Harvard University constitutional law professor was born in Shanghai in 1941, as was Mike Medavoy,the former head of Orion and Tri-Star Pictures, and currently the president of Phoenix Pictures in Hollywood.
All are part of Shanghai’s Jewish legacy.
AMB/JL END RUDIN
(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of the recently published book “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us.”)
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