25 September 2016 | By Peter Finkelgruen, Huang Yuan / trans. Huang Xie'an |
Copyedited by Gu Yiqing
Editor's Note: During the World War II, more than 30,000 Jews, under attack by the Nazis in Europe, fled to Shanghai, China and 16,000 of them took refugee in this city. Meanwhile, the local Shanghai people were also in an abyss of pain inflicted by the Japanese invasion. Though the time was difficult, gratitude and mutual friendship lived on in the heart of the Jewish and Chinese people. The Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum and Shanghai International Studies University (SISU) launched a initiative early this year to present those touching stories in Chinese, English, German and Hebrew. This is one of the selected stories in the project to commemorate the history of Jews in Shanghai.
was born at 138 Ward Road (now Changyang Road) in Shanghai Ghetto in 1942. Sixty years later, I revisited my birth place to relive my memory of my childhood as a refugee in Shanghai.
Ward Road has become Changyang Road now. It is now a long, wide and busy street lined by dark grey houses on both sides. I came to 138 Changyang Road, just opposite the Tilanqiao Jail. There was a low wall on the pavement and on the wall there was a row of glass-encased newspaper frames. Just beside the street number on the wall, there was a white board with Chinese characters written in black and a red cross. I guess it was a first aid station or a clinic. I then saw a young cobbler sitting beside the gate and he was surrounded by many women. Some of them were having their shoes repaired, while others were simply hanging around. My Chinese interpreter said hello to the cobbler and asked him if he knew what the building complex No. 138 used to be and who was the owner.
“It was once a morgue of the Jews,” replied the cobbler. He didn’t even raise his head.
He must be referring to more than half a century ago when this area was proclaimed a Restricted Sector for Stateless Refugees, or the so-called Ghetto, and the building complex No. 138 belonged to one of the four hospitals for the Jewish refugees.
The word Ghetto suggests the Holocaust in Europe after East Europe was annexed by Nazi Germany. Jews were forced into Ghettos set up in many cities and then transported to concentration camps, or extermination camps, where they were killed. Did the Ghetto in Shanghai, which is thousands of miles away from Europe, serve the same purpose?
Sure, there was once a Ghetto in Shanghai. It was set up in February 1943 and ended when WWII was over, or after the Japanese surrendered and the Japanese forces withdrew from Shanghai in September 1945. Over 1,581 Jewish refugees died in the building complex No. 138 on Ward Road, including my father, while 294 Jewish babies were born there from 1939 to June 1945. These Jewish babies were later called Shanghai Babies. I am one of the Shanghai Babies.
“The babies born in the Ghetto did not realize how weird the world was when they were small kids.” I remember Manfred Worm saying again and again when I visited him in Kronburg near Memmingen in Bavaria, Germany. He admitted, “Our experience in Shanghai was very much different from the sufferings of those remaining in Germany.” So I think we’re lucky to be born in Shanghai Ghetto, although it was still a Ghetto. We’re luckier than other members of the Jewish family who were shot dead in Theresienstadt, starved in Lodz and killed by gas in Auschwitz.
When I drove to Manfred’s home, I turned on the car radio and heard a song written by Stefan: “I am here today and there tomorrow. I’ve arrived at a place just now but I have to start off immediately…” I am possessed by mixed feelings whenever I listen to this song. The author was also a Jewish refugee born in Shanghai. The lyrics are simple, but they are deeply imprinted in my mind. I’ve visited many people with the same feeling. We’re all Shanghai-born babies, or so-called Shanghai Babies.
I met Manfred when I visited the Jewish Museum of Munich in summer 1994. He was also a visitor there, staring at the photos on the wall. One of them was a primary school in Shanghai. He told his daughter beside him that it was the school he attended in Shanghai. This picture was familiar to me, too. I spent two years in the kindergarten affiliated to that primary school from 1945 to 1946. I said hello to him and we talked about things in the past. At that time, I was about to go to Shanghai with film producer Dietrich Schubert and that would be the first time I had come back to my birth place after my mother and I left the city in winter 1946. Now the film telling the stories of the Jewish refugees in Shanghai is finished. When I visited him again, Manfred could still remember his childhood in Shanghai clearly.
Manfred invited me into his family library. While we drank coffee, he took out a pile of documents in which I saw an article he wrote in 1945 in remembrance of his uncle Schoenbach, a symphony conductor active in the Little Vienna in Shanghai, on a German newspaper published by the Jewish refugees. Schoenbach had been a conductor of the Halle Opera House and had played an active role in organizing cultural activities for the European Jewish refugees in Hongkou while he was also one of them. On the wall, I found a photo of Manfred’s great grandfather. Manfred had been deep into his family history. The family had gone through dramatic changes, and they had almost forgotten that they had been Shanghai Jews. Manfred’s father and mother met aboard the ship to Shanghai and were married in Shanghai. Manfred was born on June 3, 1940, two years before me, and had lived in Hongkou with his parents. In 1943, a proclamation was made to set up a ghetto in Hongkou and all Jewish refugees arriving in Shanghai after 1937 were forced to move into the ghetto. They lived there, too. They’re lucky to receive a 5 US dollar monthly allowance from a black young man in the USA who had been a lodger of Manfred’s grandfather back in Halle. After the Pacific War broke out in 1941, the allowance was cut off.
Actually, when they were about to board their ship, the refugees had no idea of where they were going, and had not made any preparations. They got to know that they had arrived in Shanghai when they finally landed.
After arrival, they had to struggle for a living in a new environment. Some continued their practice as doctors, while some others opened restaurants or businesses. They hoped to start a new life here. The problem was that Heinrich Himmler, head of the Nazi police force, did not want to set them free. He attempted to control their fate and sent Josef Albert Meisinger, known as the Butcher of Warsaw and then chief representative of the Gestapo in Japan, to Shanghai to exterminate the Jewish refugees. Meisinger proposed the Final Solution, or the Meisinger Plan. The Japanese, trying to resist the German influence, did not implement the Final Solution, and set up the Restricted Sector for Stateless Refugees, which is referred to as Shanghai Ghetto, instead.
After the Japanese surrendered, the restriction was lifted and the Jewish refugees were able to improve their living condition. The evidence is the birth of new babies: 36 Jewish babies were born in the Ghetto in 1942, 27 in 1943, 48 in 1944, 50 in 1945, and the number soared to 114 in 1946.
On July 25, 1947, an American ship which used to transport soldiers came to Shanghai and took 650 German and Austrian Jews back to Europe, including Manfred’s family. At that time, Manfred was 7 years old and attending the Shanghai Jewish Youth Association School, commonly called the Kadoorie School in Hongkou. During the homecoming journey, Manfred made the first commercial deal in his life: he collected empty coca cola bottles to exchange for cigarettes. Finally, they arrived in Halle. He recalled, “It was natural for my parents to insist on going back there, since it is their homeland. People grow homesick as they get older.”
Manfred later worked for some time at a garage, and then he won an unexpected scholarship and studied journalism in college. After graduation, Manfred worked for a newspaper, but before long he resigned and went to Munich where he studied law and then joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany. He also co-founded the Memmingen division of the German Association of Israelis. Later, he worked for the local court of Memmingen as a chief judge, and at the same time leadership member of the Constitution Court of Bavaria.
According to Ralph Hirsch, a historian and secretary general of SJCA, among all the Jewish refugees in Shanghai, about 3,000 are still alive and most of them were born in Shanghai. Those who had been born in Germany and fled to Shanghai have all but passed away after half a century. Most of the surviving Jewish refugees in Shanghai are living in Israel, the USA, Australia and of course some in Germany. Ralph Hirsch lives in Celle, a northern German town, and has travelled to Philadelphia and many other places in the world to enhance the connection of the former Jewish refugees in Shanghai. He has tried very hard to mobilize the surviving Jewish refugees in Shanghai to contribute relevant historical records and exhibits.
I met Ralph Hirsch at an exhibition “Jews in China: From Kaifeng to Shanghai” at the Ethnography Museum of St. Augustine near the city of Cologne. The museum also displayed the wood carvings and water color paintings that David Ludwig Bloch produced in Shanghai from 1940 to 1949. David Bloch wrote the preface to the exhibition.
Ralph Hirsch was also a refugee in Shanghai. He came to Shanghai with his parents in 1940 and they were almost the last Jews to flee. After 1940, no German Jews were lucky enough to escape. Ralph Hirsch is now 67, but he can still remember with freshness the considerations of his parents before they set out. There were three ways to get to Shanghai: one was to travel across the Soviet Union and Mongolia to China by road; the second was to take the train across the Siberia to the far east city of Vladivostok and then take the ship to Japan and then back to Shanghai; while the third option was to travel by sea, or to take a ship through the Suez Canal and across the Indian Ocean. In the end, they picked the third option.
Ralph Hirsch also attended the Kadoorie School in Hongkou. It was a school sponsored by the wealthy Kadoorie family and Sir Ellis Kadoorie was a member of the Jewish Committee in Shanghai.
Together with Ralph Hirsch, I appreciated the wood carvings and water color paintings of David Bloch and gained a deeper understanding of the influence of Shanghai on Jews in exile. Based on his keen and clear observations, David Bloch produced about 300 wood carvings which showed the life of 1,7000 German, Austrian, Polish and Czechoslovakian refugees in Shanghai.
Marian Schubert was born on Oct. 13, 1946. Her parents had come from Berlin and married in Shanghai where they took refuge. Her uncles and grandparents had also fled to Shanghai, or otherwise they could have been killed by the Nazis. In 1949, they left Shanghai together and went to the USA and then Israel. In Oct. 1953, they left Israel and returned to Germany. That’s when Marian was 7 and in primary school. She had to adapt to a new environment again.
Marian Schubert is now a staff of the Israeli embassy in Poland. She was obviously keen on Shanghai. She has gone through her father’s album of pictures taken in Shanghai time and time again, and Shanghai is a frequent topic of her uncles when they play bridge. She said she would never forget where she had been born and what she had gone through.