Harbor from the Holocaust (2020) - full transcript
Shanghai's complex association with Jewish immigrants, focusing on its welcoming of Jews fleeing Nazi persecution during World War II.
[ Birds calling ]
♪♪
Woman: It was
a strange atmosphere.
When you're on a boat,
that sort of feels
like vacation.
But on the other hand,
you were really sailing
into a black hole.
You didn't know what
in God's name awaits you there.
I wondered,
would any of us
ever be alright again?
♪♪
♪♪
♪♪
Bar-Gal: I took myself
the same tour
I will deliver to you
this morning,
and I find the whole story
fascinating
because we do not
get to learn at all
about the Jews
from the Far East,
the Jews from China.
Everything that I will tell you
in the next 4 hours,
completely new to me
when I arrive Shanghai.
There was no other city in the
world that during the Holocaust,
getting to save so many Jewish
lives like Shanghai did.
Most of them lived right
in this neighborhood here,
and my question to you
will be,"PourquoiShanghai?"
You live in Germany,
you live in Austria,
you live in Poland --
why are you coming to here?
♪♪
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♪♪
Sasson: I was born
in Vienna, Austria.
It was 1938.
My parents, prior to that,
had a very comfortable life
in Vienna,
and I used to hear stories
about the music
and the pastries
and the chocolates
and going to the mountains
on weekends.
Marcus: I was a skier
and I was an ice skater.
I was in Vienna
from 1 to about 11 years,
and it was the perfect life.
Silberberg: My dad owned
a furniture store in Berlin.
It was a large family.
My father was one of nine.
The family was close.
We kids played,
and it was just like
a regular childhood.
There was absolutely nothing
to warn of what was
going to happen.
♪♪
[ Car horn honks ]
Hirsch: The Jews were very proud
to be German.
Hirsch: The Jews were very proud
to be German.
At first, there were people,
including my father,
who thought that,
well, you know,
"I fought in World War I.
Surely, they will
leave me alone."
Well, [chuckles]
that -- that...
that did not happen.
[ Soldiers chanting ]
Tobias: There was a period
beginning when I was about 4,
when I felt in relatively
constant danger
growing up in Berlin.
And then the worst period
was Kristallnacht.
Silberberg: Which is known as
Night of the Broken Glass.
And that's when everybody
started saying,
"Oh, this is getting bad."
Blumenthal: My mother had a
store, and the store was wrecked
and taken away from her.
Most of the Jewish men
between the ages of 18 and 60
that the Nazis could find
that night
were arrested --
my father was arrested --
were taken
to concentration camps.
Tobias: The next morning,
after Kristallnacht was over,
in the center of the courtyard
of our synagogue
was a mountain
of simmering ashes.
And in the center of the mound,
I could see the handles
of the Holy Torah scrolls.
And that was perhaps the most
frightening moment of all.
I suddenly realized that there
was no safety for us anywhere.
[ All chanting ]
♪♪
Marcus: Many people
were giving up.
There were suicides,
people were leaving.
We were in terror.
My aunt and uncle knew
that the time had come --
we get out now,
or we don't get out.
That's really all I know.
Marcus: Then came
this terrible time
when my father went
from consulate to consulate
to see if we could be accepted.
Blumenthal: The problem was that
while there was a lot
of sympathy in the world
for us as victims
and refugees,
very few countries
wanted to accept us.
My father,
who was a career diplomat,
was posted to Vienna, Austria,
to the Chinese legation there
in the spring of 1937.
He was fluent in German.
He was very social.
He had very many
Jewish friends
because Vienna was really the
cultural hub of Western Europe.
And as soon as Hitler came in,
the persecution was so public,
so humiliating.
My father said it's daily,
you know, you see it
every single day.
He just couldn't stand by.
So he came up with
a very ingenious strategy.
Word began to spread about
this place called Shanghai,
Word began to spread about
this place called Shanghai,
which again,
perhaps the refugees
have seen in a movie once
or read about it in a book,
but it was this
faraway, exotic place.
Newsreel narrator:
Situated near the mouth
of the Yangtze River,
it is the biggest city in China.
As the largest seaport
in the Far East,
it dominated the commerce
and foreign trade of China.
And through its great docks
and channels
passed most of the wealth
of the Orient.
In Shanghai, truly,
the East met the West.
Kaufman: So, what happened
to Shanghai
was that it was
essentially divided up.
Different imperialist powers
would go in.
It started with the British
in 1840, after the Opium War.
Then the Americans came in.
They got a part.
Later, the French arrived,
and they said, "We want
part of Shanghai, too,
that we can control
with our government."
And then starting in the 1930s,
you have the Japanese.
Newsreel narrator:
From North China
down the coast of Shanghai,
grow the storm clouds of war,
bringing terror to the hearts
of the city's people.
Kaufman: The Japanese
began invading China
in the early 1930s,
and they start in the north
in Manchuria
and gradually come closer
and closer.
Newsreel narrator: China
was to be the giant back
on which Japan would ride
to world conquest.
Kaufman: The Japanese occupy
more and more of China,
and in 1937,
they gradually are closing in
on Shanghai.
They encircle it.
♪♪
Ho: When Japan routed
the Chinese government,
they left and they left the port
of Shanghai with nothing --
you know, with no immigration,
no passport control, nothing.
The reason the Japanese
didn't take immediate
control of the port
was because the other foreign
powers didn't want them to.
So my father seized on that
opportunity to issue visas
to the one place that
didn't require visas, Shanghai.
It helped people get out.
I mean, the Germans
and the Austrians didn't know.
Right, they see this visa
for Shanghai --
"Okay, you're going to Shanghai,
we'll let you go."
Marcus: Somebody says,
"You know, there's a long line
standing in front
of the Chinese consulate.
Why don't you go there?"
And my father went to that
long line, and he stood in line,
and within five minutes,
he had a visa.
And he came out and said, "See!
We can always go to Shanghai!"
That's all he knew.
Ho: So all of a sudden,
Shanghai caught on
like wildfire.
It became a failsafe
for the Jews in Germany,
who didn't have access
to Vienna, to those visas,
who heard, "Oh, my gosh,
there is a place
where you don't need
any papers to go to."
It put Shanghai on the map.
♪♪
Silberberg: Our parents
couldn't tell us much.
Silberberg: Our parents
couldn't tell us much.
They didn't know
what this was gonna be like.
[ Laughing ] You know,
they were just as clueless
as we children were.
They were going into
a totally foreign atmosphere.
Marcus: My mother was terrified
of Shanghai.
She said, "Isn't this where
they kill white people?"
That's how much we knew.
Fogel: In their wildest dreams,
they never thought,
"I'm gonna be living
in Shanghai."
I don't think that ever entered
anybody's mind,
until it happened.
Woman: When I read about
the faraway land,
I saw lovely pictures
of dainty Chinese ladies
in long, silken gowns
strolling
in beautiful gardens...
Butterflies fluttered about
the snowy-white heads
of huge chrysanthemums.
And then the anchor dropped,
the engines stopped,
the gangplank came down and
connected us to our new world.
And what a world it was.
♪♪
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Marcus: Shanghai was chaos,
dirty, unmanaged.
From here to here,
you weren't walking alone.
There was always
one line of people,
another line, another line,
probably with some goats
and pigs slithering between you.
Blumenthal: We loaded
our belongings on rickshaws.
They pulled us
to a fleabag hotel
where we made the acquaintance
with the scourge of Shanghai --
bedbugs, mosquitos, rats.
Marcus:
But there were no guns!
Nobody shot at us!
Blumenthal: The people
who got off those ships,
many of them had
no money at all.
They came with 10 marks
in their pocket from Germany.
Fogel: The Nazis
did not allow you
to take any money or jewelry.
You had the clothes
on your back,
plus what you could carry
in one bag --
that's it.
Sasson: And how much could that
possibly provide?
And here they are trying
to find a place to live.
Marcus: My mother began to cry,
and my father said
"We'll get you out of here,
we'll get you out of here."
♪♪
Woman: I closed my eyes
against the light.
I tried to shut out
the busy noises around me.
And right there, young
and as green as I was,
I made up my mind
that I would have as little
as possible to do with China.
Shanghai would serve
as a waiting place,
a place to go
from a place of "home."
a place to go
from a place of "home."
I would think of myself
as a girl Robinson Crusoe --
shipwrecked on an island,
waiting for a ship to rescue me
and bring me back home.
[ Yao Lee's
"Rose, Rose, I Love You" plays ]
♪♪
Kaufman: It was called
the Paris of the Orient.
It was vibrant, cosmopolitan,
international.
It really put cheek by jowl
this incredible wealth
and this incredible poverty.
The Jewish community of Shanghai
was actually very diverse
by this point.
There were the Jewish refugees
coming from Vienna
and from Berlin.
There was also
a Russian Jewish community,
Russian Jews who had come
after the Russian Revolution.
But the first wave
are the Baghdadi Jews
who come in the 19th century.
All of the Baghdadi Jews
who came
were global financiers already.
They were dealing with India,
they were dealing with London.
And they end up taking over
the opium trade.
Jacob: My parents are Orthodox
Iraqi Jews from China
who worked
for an opium dealer.
In some ways, it was like
they were not in China --
they were in their own
little bubble.
Shanghai in the '30s
was a place of immense wealth,
and the Baghdadi Jews were
a huge part of the wealth.
Families had servants,
and there were dance halls.
They had horses
at the racetrack.
Once the refugees
started arriving,
it was overwhelming
for our Jewish community.
And my mother was quite
astonished by their condition
and said that she had never met
a poor Jew before.
Kaufman: "We're the wealthy Jews
of Shanghai."
Like, "Who are these folks
suddenly giving us a bad name?"
I think ultimately what
the wealthy Jews realize is,
is that their fate
is tied to these refugees.
They can't turn
their back on them.
Victor Sassoon, who is really
the king of Shanghai --
he's a billionaire,
very influential.
The Japanese appoint a man
named Inuzuka
to be in charge
of the Jewish question.
He really believes, in this
kind of anti-Semitic way,
that Victor Sassoon
controls everything
because he's a wealthy Jew.
Victor Sassoon understands that,
and so what happens
over the next year and a half,
two years,
is this ballet that goes on,
or you could call it a con job,
where Victor Sassoon encourages
the Japanese to believe
that, yes, he's talking
to the British government,
he's talking to the Americans,
he'll think of investing
in Japan.
"Just keep on protecting
these Jews who are coming in,
and I'll make sure
things work out."
And so the Baghdadi Jews begin
to find the refugees housing,
to feed them,
helping them pay for things.
Marcus: There were one or two
Jewish families, very wealthy,
Marcus: There were one or two
Jewish families, very wealthy,
and one of them sent
some cattle trucks to pick us up
and bring us to some home
in one of the Chinese areas.
♪♪
Fogel: You walk
down the alley
and you see laundry
hanging out everywhere,
and you're living practically
on top of each other.
Hirsch:
We lived in this little house
of about 200 to 250 square feet,
and a family of four.
Tobias: We lived in a house
on the lane on 737 Broadway,
and I believe
almost all the houses
except for one or two were
also occupied by other refugees.
One of the things that was
absolutely shocking
is that they would have
a toilet in the room,
they would have buckets.
Anybody who doesn't know
what the honey bucket is,
it's the toilet that gets
picked up every day
by a big wagon,
and the wagon gets filled
and got drawn through the lane,
and it used to spill
a little bit
[laughing] of the stuff
on the road.
The living conditions
were way more primitive
than in other parts of Shanghai.
Sasson: Our parents,
they never let on
that they were making
any sacrifices.
And when I think about it now,
it really saddens me.
If there was
a little bit of food,
being the baby in the family,
I'm the one
that actually got it.
The rest went hungry.
Hirsch: We had almost nothing.
We did not have a kitchen.
My mother, she had
what we call a Chinese stove.
You could not do it indoors
or you'd die from noxious fumes.
My mother...
[ Sighs ]
[ Sniffles ]
...was such a wonderful cook.
She made all kinds of stuff
on this dinky little stove.
Kaufman: Hongkou was
the worst part of Shanghai.
As it turned out, several of
the wealthy Jewish families
owned a lot of property there,
so they were able to say,
"Well, you know, we'll kind of
move these refugees there."
It was a poor community.
There were a lot
of bombed-out buildings.
The Chinese themselves
had often been refugees.
They'd come from
the countryside.
They'd come to Shanghai.
[ Speaking Chinese ]
Tobias: Hongkou,
where the refugees lived,
had been occupied
by the Japanese in 1937.
had been occupied
by the Japanese in 1937.
[ Speaking Chinese ]
Tobias: In general,
it was very frightening
because you'd see
Japanese soldiers
who had been drinking too much
walking along the street.
But I remember an older Chinese
woman walking on the street
and a Japanese soldier
accosting her
and feeling between her legs,
and I was shocked.
[ Speaking Chinese ]
Silberberg:
Sometimes, you could see
these little straw packages.
And we all knew
those were dead babies,
who had died over the night of
starvation and things like that.
I was stunned by that.
And not only that I would have
a sense of empathy
for the difficulties
of the Chinese,
which were the same as ours,
surviving in a very
difficult environment.
But I guess underneath that
was also the fear
that that could happen to me.
And I realized it was one world.
♪♪
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Bloch: My father was deaf.
He was an orphan,
and he was poor.
In Germany, he had
a whole completely different
social circumstance.
So when he got to Shanghai,
he was a bird that could soar.
He was on equal footing
with every European
in Chinese culture,
'cause no one knew the language.
So that deafness
actually became an attribute
because he'd communicate
as he always did
through his life,
by using sign.
[ Humming ]
These are the boxes
of my father's artwork.
These are his woodcuts.
It's hard to see, but this is
one man's lifetime of work.
Look at his artwork.
You can see what he heard.
[ Indistinct conversations,
bells dinging ]
♪♪
He heard the heights
of beautiful things
and the incredible pain
and suffering
of those people
who lived out in the street,
of the beggars who had parts
missing, who were starving,
to the children who were
innocent bystanders
of all this unkindness,
if you will.
♪♪
♪♪
He didn't let them die
and just go away.
He honored them.
He gave them voice.
Even though he was deaf,
he had this amazing ability
to understand life
on a very profound
and deep level.
He is them, they are him.
Silberberg: The Chinese were
very, very gracious
to the immigrants.
We lived amongst them,
they were poor,
and they accepted us.
There was definitely compassion
for each other.
For the Jewish refugees,
when they had fled Germany
and had fled Austria,
their neighbors,
their non-Jewish neighbors,
hated them.
In China, everyone was
kind of equal.
They were living
so close together
that if they heard
a baby crying,
they would offer some of their
food to the family with a baby,
whether they were
Chinese or Jewish.
Fogel: They had nothing
to give us,
any more than we had
to give them,
other than friendship
and being together.
♪♪
Blumenthal: How do you feel
if you are marginalized,
if what you want
doesn't matter,
if you don't have a government
to protect you,
if you think nobody
even knows you exist?
It's a feeling
I've never forgotten.
And that's how
the refugees felt.
Silberberg: You just think,
"What will I do tomorrow?
What's gonna be tomorrow?"
Not "what's gonna be
next year,"
because we don't know.
Kaufman: You have to remember
these were families and children
who had came from middle-class
families in Berlin and Vienna.
They had been going to school,
they played sports.
They had had a normal life.
Suddenly, they were uprooted
and thrown into conditions
of terrible poverty, disease.
But it was also
completely unstructured.
These children were roaming
the streets during the day.
They were forming gangs.
I think for the parents,
this was the most
heartbreaking thing.
They thought, "My children
have no future.
My children have no hope."
What I think really
changed that for them
was the Kadoorie School.
Fogel: A very wealthy Jewish man
by the name of Horace Kadoorie
opened a school
for the Jewish kids.
Silberberg: Life at
the Kadoorie School was, for me,
one of the most important
things of Shanghai.
It gave me the education I had.
Fogel: Our school had
a wonderful principal --
Lucie Hartwich.
I can see her
in front of me right now.
She wore her hair with a wave.
Always made-up.
She was a no-nonsense person who
insisted that we learn English.
Silberberg:
The idea of us not talking
German in school was just that
we didn't like the Germans,
and second of all,
if you graduated
from our school,
if you graduated
from our school,
you automatically could enter
the University of Cambridge
because they followed
that program.
This school also had
a lot of activities.
It wasn't just come to school,
learn, go home.
Fogel: I danced.
Mister Erstein,
he was our teacher.
I don't know how I'm remem--
at 85, I'm remembering
all these names.
Hirsch: There was this
gym teacher, Leo Meyer,
and he was a holy terror.
I'm convinced that he
ate nails for breakfast.
Fogel: I have memories
of doing
what you would consider
normal things
under un-normal circumstances.
And you made lifelong
friendships
because you were all
in the same boat.
Silberberg: We had Jewish
youth organizations,
and we had theatrical plays.
It was always to a Jewish theme,
all the time.
We were taught, "You are Jews,
no matter what."
And that sticks.
Tobias: My parents joined
a synagogue called Ohel Moshe,
and our Hebrew school,
called the Talmud Torah,
was also there
on the third floor.
The fact that I was reading
the holy language
was a source of great comfort
to my parents and to me.
Studying the sacred texts really
meant that Judaism was alive,
and therefore that I was alive.
Silberberg: I wear
the Star of David all the time.
The day I can't wear it anymore,
it's time to leave,
because that means they don't
want me wherever I am.
Newsreel narrator: The savage
blow unparalleled in infamy,
Pearl Harbor,
December the 7th, 1941.
♪♪
Woman: Yet a day promised
intolerable suffering
and sacrifices
to so many nations,
and eventually
presented Shanghai Jews
with a whole new set of troubles
and undiluted anguish.
Tribe: Japan bombed
Pearl Harbor,
and war was then declared
between the United States
and the Allies
and Japan.
Tobias: After Pearl Harbor,
suddenly the Japanese controlled
most of Shanghai.
Kaufman: They force
all British citizens
and all American citizens
to put on labels
identifying themselves,
and then they are put
in internment camps.
Tribe:
My parents were Russian Jews.
My father had become
an American citizen,
and so he was dragged off
by Japanese soldiers
and taken
to a Japanese prison camp.
I remember standing
on some kind of a little box
in the middle of the street,
and I remember waving to him
in the middle of the street,
and I remember waving to him
and asking my mother,
"What did he do?
Why are they doing this to him?"
and the sense of injustice.
I knew that something
unfair had happened.
My father had done
nothing wrong,
and yet he was being taken away
from his family.
Kaufman:
Some of the wealthy Jews
were actually imprisoned
and tortured by the Japanese
because the Japanese believed
that they had been conspiring
with the British
and the Americans
against the Japanese.
Victor Sassoon has fled.
These wealthy Jews
who had protected the refugees,
who had supported them,
now were powerless.
The Japanese were now in charge,
and they're formally allies
with the Germans.
♪♪
[ Speaking German ]
Tobias: The Germans,
who were aware
of 20-odd-thousand
Jewish refugees
living in Shanghai,
sent Colonel Josef Meisinger,
who was known
as the Butcher of Warsaw.
He was apparently a brutal man,
and he was sent to Shanghai
to convince the Japanese
to impose the Final Solution
of the Jewish problem on us,
meaning to kill us.
They had said
the most efficient way
of liquidating our community
was to put us on a bunch
of rickety old junks,
tow us out to the Yellow Ocean,
and sink us.
To their credit, the Japanese
simply refused to do that.
Tribe: We would all
have been killed,
and the fact
that that didn't happen,
the fact that we were spared
that fate
was one of the closest calls,
in retrospect,
that I'm very grateful
to have escaped.
Blumenthal:
In February of 1943,
suddenly, without any warning,
there appears in the newspapers
a proclamation which says
that in 90 days, you have to
give up where you live and move
to the worst part of town,
half destroyed during the war.
Silberberg:
The Japanese guy came in,
he slapped my dad, and said,
"Out by tomorrow."
Kaufman: As a compromise
measure, the Japanese say,
"We'll put them in a ghetto.
We'll put them in a
1-square-mile area of Hongkou."
Maybe half the Jews were living
in other parts of Shanghai,
and they were all ordered
to abandon their apartments,
abandon their belongings,
and trudge over to this ghetto,
which was monitored
by Japanese guards,
which was adding another
10,000 people to a community
that was already filled,
overflowing.
You're essentially doubling
the population of Jews.
Marcus: The room was like maybe
15 feet by 5 feet long,
for the three of us.
It had one window.
But we lived there, my father,
my mother, and I,
for six or seven years.
It's...
Silberberg: Where we wound up,
it was a room
Silberberg: Where we wound up,
it was a room
with 14 people sleeping there.
We put, like, blankets
on the sides of our bed,
undressed and dressed in bed
because there was
no other space.
We had a small table
in front of the bed,
and that's where
we took our meals.
They appointed
a civil servant
by the name of Ghoya --
Mr. Kanoh Ghoya,
who was the chief
administrator of the ghetto.
And Ghoya said,
"Napoleon, he was a great man,
but I'm a greater one.
I am the emperor of the Jews."
Marcus: He was a nutcase!
Silberberg:
The guy was very short
and actually, when he wanted
to slap somebody,
had to get up on a chair.
Fogel: If you wanted to go
out of the area
to work or do anything,
you had to get by the Japanese.
Mr. Ghoya, who was
the worst of the worst --
if you didn't have
the right papers,
he could stand on the corner
with his bayonet
and do whatever the heck
he wanted to do.
Woman: Hongkou was
bordering on despair,
and "hysteria"
was putting it mildly.
It took me a long time
to go to sleep that night.
There was so much
to worry about.
Sasson: There was
so much poverty,
people getting sick,
people dying
of all these rare diseases.
You'd see someone that you would
see on a regular basis,
and the next day,
they were gone.
They died because they got ill,
they didn't have enough food,
they had dysentery.
It was -- It was just dreadful.
And a lot of Europeans
died, as well,
especially the elderly.
Silberberg: They were two large
Jewish cemeteries in Shanghai
with people who passed away.
Newsreel narrator: For over
a quarter century,
The Joint Distribution Committee
has been the main American
source of preserving
and protecting Jewish life
and traditions abroad
wherever and whenever they have
been jeopardized
by misfortune,
disaster, or injustice.
Kaufman: The American Joint
Distribution Committee
was the main organization
trying to deal
with a worldwide refugee crisis
as Jews were fleeing Europe.
There are tens of thousands
of refugees in Shanghai.
The crisis has become so big,
the Joint finally decides
that it has to do something.
And they go to a woman
named Laura Margolis,
who is a representative
of the American Jewish
Joint Distribution Committee,
to try to help the refugees.
She was in Cuba
when theSt. Louis,
which was a ship
carrying European refugees,
had tried to enter Cuba
and been turned away.
And then it went to America
and was turned away,
returned to Europe,
and presumably some of
the refugees were killed.
And she swore to herself
at that point in Cuba
that if she ever had the chance
to help refugees,
that if she ever had the chance
to help refugees,
she would do whatever she could
to make sure
that tragedy wasn't repeated.
She arranges to meet
Captain Inuzuka,
the anti-Semitic captain who's
in charge of Jews in Shanghai.
And she says to him,
"If there isn't enough food,
these refugees are going
to start to riot,
and that will be dangerous
for you
and dangerous
for the Japanese.
I'm completely apolitical.
Let me help them."
So Inuzuka agrees.
She's able to start getting
more food to the refugees,
more housing.
Marcus: They bought
these huge, like, warehouses
that were called Heime.
And Laura Margolis was able
to get $100,000, US dollars,
to bring to the Japanese
in that time.
And with that money,
we spent to get a hospital.
200-bed hospital.
I was a secretary.
I was extremely happy
to be working in a hospital
because I saw people
were being helped.
Hirsch: The JDC set up
a kitchen
which made it possible
for everyone to have
at least one meal a day,
which kept people alive.
Laura Margolis is...
...a saint.
♪♪
Sasson: Even though
it was war years,
life started picking up,
and people tried to re-create
a little Europe.
Kaufman:
They begin to build their own
independent communities
with German newspapers
and German cafés and orchestras.
♪♪
Bloch: One of the things that
my father did with other artists
was create these art shows
to show their art
and re-create their culture,
if you will, in Shanghai.
Fogel: It's very important
to have some culture
so that you don't feel
even though you physically
are alive,
but your mind has gone dead
and you've lost everything
that you've always had.
Community action
can make an enormous amount
of difference.
And that's what happened
when we were finally locked up
by the Japanese
in a kind of a ghetto.
The energy of adversity
ended up in some kind
of creativity, even,
and that helped
the people to survive.
♪♪
♪♪
Sasson: We lived
in a Chinese lane,
and we were the only family
that came from Europe.
And in the lane
lived a gentleman
And in the lane
lived a gentleman
by the name of Mr. Chu.
He really took a liking to me
and kind of adopted me.
[ Speaking Chinese ]
My father became
so close to Mr. Chu,
it was almost like
they were brothers.
And they shared the same values.
A sense of family was
very important to both,
so any differences
just melted away.
Later on, when I started school,
he arranged
for a rickshaw for me
to be picked up every morning.
[ Speaking Chinese ]
His daughter,
who is my little sister,
only spoke Chinese,
so what choice did I have --
I had to learn Shanghainese.
When I think about Mr. Chu,
you can see the tears
just swell up in my eyes.
And it still...
After all these years,
I still have
that connection to him.
It's -- It's just feeling
protected again,
feeling loved,
feeling cared about.
So he's a very, very
special person in my heart.
Woman: The winter of 1944 seems
longer, darker, and tougher.
Perhaps the length
of our confinement,
the endless war
made the cold colder,
the rain wetter,
and made us less agreeable.
Hirsch: One of the things
that people would say was,
"How are you today?"
And the other person would say,
"Well, we're one day closer
to the end of the war."
And that was a favorite saying.
"One day closer
to the end of the war."
♪♪
Tobias: On July 17, 1945,
the ghetto was bombed.
And we were stunned.
Fogel: We were in school,
Fogel: We were in school,
and we went under our desks
for protection.
Silberberg: My mom, she had to
deliver a dress to somebody,
and there was a Chinese man
who ran out, grabbed her arm,
and made her come into the store
and go under the counter.
He really saved her life.
Tribe: When the Americans
liberated Shanghai,
they were trying
to obliterate an area
that the Japanese had occupied.
Silberberg: The bomb dropped
right into the ghetto.
The building it hit
was right next to
a Japanese radio station
which was transmitting,
and the Americans wanted
to hit that radio station.
In doing that, they also hit
that compound
where there were
a lot of Jews living.
Tobias: And I remember
my father saying
that as he walked along
the street,
one of the houses
which had been bombed,
he recognized from the legs that
one of the rubble was a refugee.
So they pulled out the corpse of
a refugee who had been killed.
After that, we suddenly realized
that liberation
would not be easy.
♪♪
♪♪
And then one morning,
I'll never forget
the incredible puzzlement,
because the Japanese
occupying forces
simply vanished.
Sasson: My father came home
and he said, "The war is over,"
and I just chucked up.
Fogel:
And nobody believed it until
we saw planes flying across
and little leaflets
falling down.
That was an unbelievable day.
Whether it was German Jews
or Chinese,
everybody was out
on the streets.
Newsreel narrator: Vast throngs
of grateful, happy people
celebrate the end of fighting,
the dawn of peace.
It's official -- it's all over.
It's total victory.
[ Crowd cheering ]
Fogel: The war was over.
Now what?
Now what?
Marcus: We had no idea.
We had no idea
of concentration camps.
We had no idea
how brutal it had become.
We all guessed that some
of our relatives
probably didn't make it,
but no one had any idea about
the enormity of the Holocaust.
When we heard about it,
horror sort of rattled
through the Jewish community.
♪♪
♪♪
And every day,
people would go and look
and see what new names
were coming down,
to find the people
who had survived.
My father's brother was killed.
My father's other brother,
they were gassed.
So if we had been there,
I think we'd be dead, too.
Tobias: 14 of my aunts, uncles,
or cousins had not survived.
These are people
I had lived with,
I had laughed with,
I'd cried with.
The last time I saw
one of my cousins,
we got into a big fight
and were rolling around
in the dirt.
When we found out
that he did not survive,
I had the sense that the
wrong cousin had perished,
that it had I
who had been deserved
because I had been so brutal
and rough on him.
Fogel: My father's parents died
at Dachau,
and my mother's father died
at Sachsenhausen.
I've never carried a chip
on my shoulder -- why me?
If I ask, "Why me," it's,
"Why me, did I get saved?
And didn't get killed,
and was able to live
in Shanghai and grow up?"
That's the why --
you know, that's the "why me."
♪ Baruch ata Adonai
Tobias: I had my Bar Mitzvah
in Shanghai in November 1945.
Into the Ohel Moshe wandered
an American soldier.
He was wearing the scrolls
and the Magen David,
and we realized he's a rabbi.
He said, "To find a synagogue,
a service, and a Bar Mitzvah
as deeply steeped in Judaism
as this is,
it's a memorable experience."
And he said, "Now for me, the
words, 'Am Yisrael Chai,'"
which means,
the Jewish people will live,
"will mean something
very specific to me
for the rest of my life."
And everybody cried,
including me, of course.
Our very survival had moved him
as much as we were moved
by him being here.
Woman: I didn't hate
the Germans.
I didn't hate the Japanese.
I didn't like
what had been done to us,
that we had been robbed
of our identity,
of living a life of purpose,
of following our star.
Finally, I was free
to follow my star.
Silberberg:
So then the big question
started -- where do we go?
There were maybe a few people
who would have considered
staying in China,
but the majority took Shanghai
as a waiting place.
Sasson: We were stateless.
We could have gone back
to Austria right away,
but my mother didn't want
to take us back there.
So, where do we go?
Kaufman: The Baghdadi Jews
return, Victor Sassoon returns,
Kaufman: The Baghdadi Jews
return, Victor Sassoon returns,
the Kadoories return.
Working with the
Joint Distribution Committee,
these wealthy Jewish families
begin to try to figure out
where these families will go.
They can go to America,
they can go to Palestine,
they can go to Australia.
Some go to Latin America.
And so, in the two or three
years after 1945,
all the refugees
just about leave Shanghai
and they board ships
to these various places
to start their new lives.
Silberberg: It was again
a journey into the unknown.
♪♪
♪♪
[ Singing in Hebrew ]
♪♪
[ Applause ]
Woman:
I would like to ask
all first-generation
Shanghailanders to stand.
This is anyone
who lived in Shanghai.
[ Applause ]
Will all second-generation
Shanghailanders please stand?
[ Applause ]
Will all third-generation
Shanghailanders please stand?
[ Applause ]
And do we have
any fourth-generation?
[ Applause ]
[ Indistinct conversations ]
Helga's son: I have
a question for my mom.
Okay.
Do you think back, if Hitler
wouldn't have happened,
how your life
would have been different?
Silberberg: Oh, way different.
For starters,
I would never have met
your father.
[ Laughter ]
I think what I learned
in Shanghai
has taken me
through my life,
because nothing can really
faze me very much.
Because we know what it means
to have absolutely nothing.
My mom and dad, no matter
what was going on in life,
they just always moved forward
and never complained.
Never complained
about anything.
She didn't --Idid.
[ Laughter ]
I'm very proud of you
for what you went through
and what you made
of your life.
Helga's daughter:
If I can say something, too?
My mom has taught me
so much in life.
Whenever anything is down,
she brings me right up.
And that's made me,
you know, a tough lady.
I mean, she is a tough lady
to compete with,
I mean, she is a tough lady
to compete with,
but her motto in life is,
"There's always worse things."
Yeah, that's what
she always says.
Thank you, Mom.
Silberberg: Welcome.
I've been able to install that
in you, that's good.
-[ Laughter ]
-Yes. Yes, you did.
Silberberg: The whole experience
taught me
that nothing is for sure.
Everywhere I live,
I know that any day,
it might not be home anymore.
And it's not that devastating
if it does happen.
Blumenthal: I always knew that,
at heart, basically,
I was still
Werner Michael Blumenthal,
whether I was
the Secretary of the Treasury
or whether I was
a United States Ambassador
or a CEO or a professor
or whatever.
I always knew, tomorrow,
that could all be gone.
And what's important
is what kind of person I am,
how I conduct myself.
That's one of the
important lessons
that I learned in Shanghai.
When all those are gone,
what kind of a human being
will you be?
Most people think
that in order to be
a Holocaust survivor,
you have to have
a number on your arm
and you have to have spent time
in a concentration camp.
But that's not so.
It was time.
It was time that
I started to speak,
and to talk about
what happened.
I've lost track
of the thousands of students
that I have spoken to.
We live in an age now
where there are people
that need to escape
their countries
because of the horrors
that are going on.
It breaks my heart to see people
trying to come to our country,
that is plentiful,
being turned away.
This never happened to us
when we went to Shanghai.
Shanghai
opened their arms to us.
Tribe: For me, the Jewish
culture that I grew up with
embodies the importance
of being truthful,
of seeking justice, of doing
what you can to help others.
We all probably have some
elements in ourselves
that could make us,
under other circumstances,
treat people horribly,
which is what makes it
all the more important
to have a structure of law
and a system of rights
and a system of commitments
to the equal human rights
of everybody.
We are one of the lucky people
who had a door open
when so many others
have doors shut.
Opening those doors
is an obligation,
not just an opportunity.
[ Knocking ]
Ho: Lotte!
Ho: Lotte!
Oh, wait a minute.
Yay, I'm so glad
to see you.
Marcus: [ Laughs ]
Have a seat. Sit down.
Nobody can really imagine
what it was like
for me to meet you
and find out
who your father was.
That was what,
17 years ago, Lotte?
You came here
with your lemon cake,
and I brought out
my passport.
And you opened it up,
and there was
all this Chinese writing.
And you said, "See that number
that's there?
That's the number of visas
my father gave that day."
I figure, at least that day,
they issued --
the Chinese consulate
issued or stamped
at least 100 visas that day.
I was overwhelmed
that after 70 years,
or 60 years...
Yeah.
...my story turned
upside down.
I believed before
that some clerk
had just stamped
this Shanghai visa,
but now I saw that somebody
knew it to save people.
That's totally different.
Ho: My father was
never reunited
with any of the people
that he helped.
He was unknown to most of them.
And so when I meet these people,
I feel that my father's efforts
were worth it.
I jokingly call them
mymishpacha,
which in Yiddish
means my family.
It's like a miracle to me,
and you and I have become
very good friends.
And it doesn't change
the darkness,
but it gives light
into the darkness.
[ Indistinct conversations ]
-Remember where it is?
-Ah, ah, ah, ah...
Look over here.
You see it?
-Yeah, that's right!
-That's my nana.
Boy: That's my nana.
That was her brother.
That's the whole family.
This is the list of all
the people
that were able to come here
when your great-great-grandma
came here.
Kaufman: This miracle occurred
because certain people
stepped up at the right moment.
I think the Baghdadi Jews did,
I think Laura Margolis did,
Ho Feng Shan,
so I think there were
individuals who did it.
But more than that,
this was a place,
the most unexpected of places,
that saved these Jews
when they needed help the most.
Beyond politics,
beyond,
you know,
rivalries and economics
and military things,
in the end,
there was a human connection
that was established between
the Chinese and the Jews.
that was established between
the Chinese and the Jews.
And I think that created
a common bond
that you certainly didn't see
anywhere else in the world.
♪♪
Woman: The years fell away
and I saw myself --
I saw the young girl
and her parents
walk off the gangplank
eight years before.
Coolies in sweat-stained rags
were hauling loads,
children shrieked and chased
each other on the docks.
It hadn't changed.
And as I looked at the city
that had sheltered us
from the horrors
of Hitler's war,
all I saw in front of me
was a fine city
bathed in sunlight
under a China-blue sky.
I saw dainty Chinese ladies
in long silken gowns
strolling
in beautiful gardens.
♪♪
♪♪
♪♪
♪♪
♪♪
♪♪
♪♪
♪♪
Major funding provided by
♪♪
Woman: It was
a strange atmosphere.
When you're on a boat,
that sort of feels
like vacation.
But on the other hand,
you were really sailing
into a black hole.
You didn't know what
in God's name awaits you there.
I wondered,
would any of us
ever be alright again?
♪♪
♪♪
♪♪
Bar-Gal: I took myself
the same tour
I will deliver to you
this morning,
and I find the whole story
fascinating
because we do not
get to learn at all
about the Jews
from the Far East,
the Jews from China.
Everything that I will tell you
in the next 4 hours,
completely new to me
when I arrive Shanghai.
There was no other city in the
world that during the Holocaust,
getting to save so many Jewish
lives like Shanghai did.
Most of them lived right
in this neighborhood here,
and my question to you
will be,"PourquoiShanghai?"
You live in Germany,
you live in Austria,
you live in Poland --
why are you coming to here?
♪♪
♪♪
♪♪
Sasson: I was born
in Vienna, Austria.
It was 1938.
My parents, prior to that,
had a very comfortable life
in Vienna,
and I used to hear stories
about the music
and the pastries
and the chocolates
and going to the mountains
on weekends.
Marcus: I was a skier
and I was an ice skater.
I was in Vienna
from 1 to about 11 years,
and it was the perfect life.
Silberberg: My dad owned
a furniture store in Berlin.
It was a large family.
My father was one of nine.
The family was close.
We kids played,
and it was just like
a regular childhood.
There was absolutely nothing
to warn of what was
going to happen.
♪♪
[ Car horn honks ]
Hirsch: The Jews were very proud
to be German.
Hirsch: The Jews were very proud
to be German.
At first, there were people,
including my father,
who thought that,
well, you know,
"I fought in World War I.
Surely, they will
leave me alone."
Well, [chuckles]
that -- that...
that did not happen.
[ Soldiers chanting ]
Tobias: There was a period
beginning when I was about 4,
when I felt in relatively
constant danger
growing up in Berlin.
And then the worst period
was Kristallnacht.
Silberberg: Which is known as
Night of the Broken Glass.
And that's when everybody
started saying,
"Oh, this is getting bad."
Blumenthal: My mother had a
store, and the store was wrecked
and taken away from her.
Most of the Jewish men
between the ages of 18 and 60
that the Nazis could find
that night
were arrested --
my father was arrested --
were taken
to concentration camps.
Tobias: The next morning,
after Kristallnacht was over,
in the center of the courtyard
of our synagogue
was a mountain
of simmering ashes.
And in the center of the mound,
I could see the handles
of the Holy Torah scrolls.
And that was perhaps the most
frightening moment of all.
I suddenly realized that there
was no safety for us anywhere.
[ All chanting ]
♪♪
Marcus: Many people
were giving up.
There were suicides,
people were leaving.
We were in terror.
My aunt and uncle knew
that the time had come --
we get out now,
or we don't get out.
That's really all I know.
Marcus: Then came
this terrible time
when my father went
from consulate to consulate
to see if we could be accepted.
Blumenthal: The problem was that
while there was a lot
of sympathy in the world
for us as victims
and refugees,
very few countries
wanted to accept us.
My father,
who was a career diplomat,
was posted to Vienna, Austria,
to the Chinese legation there
in the spring of 1937.
He was fluent in German.
He was very social.
He had very many
Jewish friends
because Vienna was really the
cultural hub of Western Europe.
And as soon as Hitler came in,
the persecution was so public,
so humiliating.
My father said it's daily,
you know, you see it
every single day.
He just couldn't stand by.
So he came up with
a very ingenious strategy.
Word began to spread about
this place called Shanghai,
Word began to spread about
this place called Shanghai,
which again,
perhaps the refugees
have seen in a movie once
or read about it in a book,
but it was this
faraway, exotic place.
Newsreel narrator:
Situated near the mouth
of the Yangtze River,
it is the biggest city in China.
As the largest seaport
in the Far East,
it dominated the commerce
and foreign trade of China.
And through its great docks
and channels
passed most of the wealth
of the Orient.
In Shanghai, truly,
the East met the West.
Kaufman: So, what happened
to Shanghai
was that it was
essentially divided up.
Different imperialist powers
would go in.
It started with the British
in 1840, after the Opium War.
Then the Americans came in.
They got a part.
Later, the French arrived,
and they said, "We want
part of Shanghai, too,
that we can control
with our government."
And then starting in the 1930s,
you have the Japanese.
Newsreel narrator:
From North China
down the coast of Shanghai,
grow the storm clouds of war,
bringing terror to the hearts
of the city's people.
Kaufman: The Japanese
began invading China
in the early 1930s,
and they start in the north
in Manchuria
and gradually come closer
and closer.
Newsreel narrator: China
was to be the giant back
on which Japan would ride
to world conquest.
Kaufman: The Japanese occupy
more and more of China,
and in 1937,
they gradually are closing in
on Shanghai.
They encircle it.
♪♪
Ho: When Japan routed
the Chinese government,
they left and they left the port
of Shanghai with nothing --
you know, with no immigration,
no passport control, nothing.
The reason the Japanese
didn't take immediate
control of the port
was because the other foreign
powers didn't want them to.
So my father seized on that
opportunity to issue visas
to the one place that
didn't require visas, Shanghai.
It helped people get out.
I mean, the Germans
and the Austrians didn't know.
Right, they see this visa
for Shanghai --
"Okay, you're going to Shanghai,
we'll let you go."
Marcus: Somebody says,
"You know, there's a long line
standing in front
of the Chinese consulate.
Why don't you go there?"
And my father went to that
long line, and he stood in line,
and within five minutes,
he had a visa.
And he came out and said, "See!
We can always go to Shanghai!"
That's all he knew.
Ho: So all of a sudden,
Shanghai caught on
like wildfire.
It became a failsafe
for the Jews in Germany,
who didn't have access
to Vienna, to those visas,
who heard, "Oh, my gosh,
there is a place
where you don't need
any papers to go to."
It put Shanghai on the map.
♪♪
Silberberg: Our parents
couldn't tell us much.
Silberberg: Our parents
couldn't tell us much.
They didn't know
what this was gonna be like.
[ Laughing ] You know,
they were just as clueless
as we children were.
They were going into
a totally foreign atmosphere.
Marcus: My mother was terrified
of Shanghai.
She said, "Isn't this where
they kill white people?"
That's how much we knew.
Fogel: In their wildest dreams,
they never thought,
"I'm gonna be living
in Shanghai."
I don't think that ever entered
anybody's mind,
until it happened.
Woman: When I read about
the faraway land,
I saw lovely pictures
of dainty Chinese ladies
in long, silken gowns
strolling
in beautiful gardens...
Butterflies fluttered about
the snowy-white heads
of huge chrysanthemums.
And then the anchor dropped,
the engines stopped,
the gangplank came down and
connected us to our new world.
And what a world it was.
♪♪
♪♪
♪♪
Marcus: Shanghai was chaos,
dirty, unmanaged.
From here to here,
you weren't walking alone.
There was always
one line of people,
another line, another line,
probably with some goats
and pigs slithering between you.
Blumenthal: We loaded
our belongings on rickshaws.
They pulled us
to a fleabag hotel
where we made the acquaintance
with the scourge of Shanghai --
bedbugs, mosquitos, rats.
Marcus:
But there were no guns!
Nobody shot at us!
Blumenthal: The people
who got off those ships,
many of them had
no money at all.
They came with 10 marks
in their pocket from Germany.
Fogel: The Nazis
did not allow you
to take any money or jewelry.
You had the clothes
on your back,
plus what you could carry
in one bag --
that's it.
Sasson: And how much could that
possibly provide?
And here they are trying
to find a place to live.
Marcus: My mother began to cry,
and my father said
"We'll get you out of here,
we'll get you out of here."
♪♪
Woman: I closed my eyes
against the light.
I tried to shut out
the busy noises around me.
And right there, young
and as green as I was,
I made up my mind
that I would have as little
as possible to do with China.
Shanghai would serve
as a waiting place,
a place to go
from a place of "home."
a place to go
from a place of "home."
I would think of myself
as a girl Robinson Crusoe --
shipwrecked on an island,
waiting for a ship to rescue me
and bring me back home.
[ Yao Lee's
"Rose, Rose, I Love You" plays ]
♪♪
Kaufman: It was called
the Paris of the Orient.
It was vibrant, cosmopolitan,
international.
It really put cheek by jowl
this incredible wealth
and this incredible poverty.
The Jewish community of Shanghai
was actually very diverse
by this point.
There were the Jewish refugees
coming from Vienna
and from Berlin.
There was also
a Russian Jewish community,
Russian Jews who had come
after the Russian Revolution.
But the first wave
are the Baghdadi Jews
who come in the 19th century.
All of the Baghdadi Jews
who came
were global financiers already.
They were dealing with India,
they were dealing with London.
And they end up taking over
the opium trade.
Jacob: My parents are Orthodox
Iraqi Jews from China
who worked
for an opium dealer.
In some ways, it was like
they were not in China --
they were in their own
little bubble.
Shanghai in the '30s
was a place of immense wealth,
and the Baghdadi Jews were
a huge part of the wealth.
Families had servants,
and there were dance halls.
They had horses
at the racetrack.
Once the refugees
started arriving,
it was overwhelming
for our Jewish community.
And my mother was quite
astonished by their condition
and said that she had never met
a poor Jew before.
Kaufman: "We're the wealthy Jews
of Shanghai."
Like, "Who are these folks
suddenly giving us a bad name?"
I think ultimately what
the wealthy Jews realize is,
is that their fate
is tied to these refugees.
They can't turn
their back on them.
Victor Sassoon, who is really
the king of Shanghai --
he's a billionaire,
very influential.
The Japanese appoint a man
named Inuzuka
to be in charge
of the Jewish question.
He really believes, in this
kind of anti-Semitic way,
that Victor Sassoon
controls everything
because he's a wealthy Jew.
Victor Sassoon understands that,
and so what happens
over the next year and a half,
two years,
is this ballet that goes on,
or you could call it a con job,
where Victor Sassoon encourages
the Japanese to believe
that, yes, he's talking
to the British government,
he's talking to the Americans,
he'll think of investing
in Japan.
"Just keep on protecting
these Jews who are coming in,
and I'll make sure
things work out."
And so the Baghdadi Jews begin
to find the refugees housing,
to feed them,
helping them pay for things.
Marcus: There were one or two
Jewish families, very wealthy,
Marcus: There were one or two
Jewish families, very wealthy,
and one of them sent
some cattle trucks to pick us up
and bring us to some home
in one of the Chinese areas.
♪♪
Fogel: You walk
down the alley
and you see laundry
hanging out everywhere,
and you're living practically
on top of each other.
Hirsch:
We lived in this little house
of about 200 to 250 square feet,
and a family of four.
Tobias: We lived in a house
on the lane on 737 Broadway,
and I believe
almost all the houses
except for one or two were
also occupied by other refugees.
One of the things that was
absolutely shocking
is that they would have
a toilet in the room,
they would have buckets.
Anybody who doesn't know
what the honey bucket is,
it's the toilet that gets
picked up every day
by a big wagon,
and the wagon gets filled
and got drawn through the lane,
and it used to spill
a little bit
[laughing] of the stuff
on the road.
The living conditions
were way more primitive
than in other parts of Shanghai.
Sasson: Our parents,
they never let on
that they were making
any sacrifices.
And when I think about it now,
it really saddens me.
If there was
a little bit of food,
being the baby in the family,
I'm the one
that actually got it.
The rest went hungry.
Hirsch: We had almost nothing.
We did not have a kitchen.
My mother, she had
what we call a Chinese stove.
You could not do it indoors
or you'd die from noxious fumes.
My mother...
[ Sighs ]
[ Sniffles ]
...was such a wonderful cook.
She made all kinds of stuff
on this dinky little stove.
Kaufman: Hongkou was
the worst part of Shanghai.
As it turned out, several of
the wealthy Jewish families
owned a lot of property there,
so they were able to say,
"Well, you know, we'll kind of
move these refugees there."
It was a poor community.
There were a lot
of bombed-out buildings.
The Chinese themselves
had often been refugees.
They'd come from
the countryside.
They'd come to Shanghai.
[ Speaking Chinese ]
Tobias: Hongkou,
where the refugees lived,
had been occupied
by the Japanese in 1937.
had been occupied
by the Japanese in 1937.
[ Speaking Chinese ]
Tobias: In general,
it was very frightening
because you'd see
Japanese soldiers
who had been drinking too much
walking along the street.
But I remember an older Chinese
woman walking on the street
and a Japanese soldier
accosting her
and feeling between her legs,
and I was shocked.
[ Speaking Chinese ]
Silberberg:
Sometimes, you could see
these little straw packages.
And we all knew
those were dead babies,
who had died over the night of
starvation and things like that.
I was stunned by that.
And not only that I would have
a sense of empathy
for the difficulties
of the Chinese,
which were the same as ours,
surviving in a very
difficult environment.
But I guess underneath that
was also the fear
that that could happen to me.
And I realized it was one world.
♪♪
♪♪
Bloch: My father was deaf.
He was an orphan,
and he was poor.
In Germany, he had
a whole completely different
social circumstance.
So when he got to Shanghai,
he was a bird that could soar.
He was on equal footing
with every European
in Chinese culture,
'cause no one knew the language.
So that deafness
actually became an attribute
because he'd communicate
as he always did
through his life,
by using sign.
[ Humming ]
These are the boxes
of my father's artwork.
These are his woodcuts.
It's hard to see, but this is
one man's lifetime of work.
Look at his artwork.
You can see what he heard.
[ Indistinct conversations,
bells dinging ]
♪♪
He heard the heights
of beautiful things
and the incredible pain
and suffering
of those people
who lived out in the street,
of the beggars who had parts
missing, who were starving,
to the children who were
innocent bystanders
of all this unkindness,
if you will.
♪♪
♪♪
He didn't let them die
and just go away.
He honored them.
He gave them voice.
Even though he was deaf,
he had this amazing ability
to understand life
on a very profound
and deep level.
He is them, they are him.
Silberberg: The Chinese were
very, very gracious
to the immigrants.
We lived amongst them,
they were poor,
and they accepted us.
There was definitely compassion
for each other.
For the Jewish refugees,
when they had fled Germany
and had fled Austria,
their neighbors,
their non-Jewish neighbors,
hated them.
In China, everyone was
kind of equal.
They were living
so close together
that if they heard
a baby crying,
they would offer some of their
food to the family with a baby,
whether they were
Chinese or Jewish.
Fogel: They had nothing
to give us,
any more than we had
to give them,
other than friendship
and being together.
♪♪
Blumenthal: How do you feel
if you are marginalized,
if what you want
doesn't matter,
if you don't have a government
to protect you,
if you think nobody
even knows you exist?
It's a feeling
I've never forgotten.
And that's how
the refugees felt.
Silberberg: You just think,
"What will I do tomorrow?
What's gonna be tomorrow?"
Not "what's gonna be
next year,"
because we don't know.
Kaufman: You have to remember
these were families and children
who had came from middle-class
families in Berlin and Vienna.
They had been going to school,
they played sports.
They had had a normal life.
Suddenly, they were uprooted
and thrown into conditions
of terrible poverty, disease.
But it was also
completely unstructured.
These children were roaming
the streets during the day.
They were forming gangs.
I think for the parents,
this was the most
heartbreaking thing.
They thought, "My children
have no future.
My children have no hope."
What I think really
changed that for them
was the Kadoorie School.
Fogel: A very wealthy Jewish man
by the name of Horace Kadoorie
opened a school
for the Jewish kids.
Silberberg: Life at
the Kadoorie School was, for me,
one of the most important
things of Shanghai.
It gave me the education I had.
Fogel: Our school had
a wonderful principal --
Lucie Hartwich.
I can see her
in front of me right now.
She wore her hair with a wave.
Always made-up.
She was a no-nonsense person who
insisted that we learn English.
Silberberg:
The idea of us not talking
German in school was just that
we didn't like the Germans,
and second of all,
if you graduated
from our school,
if you graduated
from our school,
you automatically could enter
the University of Cambridge
because they followed
that program.
This school also had
a lot of activities.
It wasn't just come to school,
learn, go home.
Fogel: I danced.
Mister Erstein,
he was our teacher.
I don't know how I'm remem--
at 85, I'm remembering
all these names.
Hirsch: There was this
gym teacher, Leo Meyer,
and he was a holy terror.
I'm convinced that he
ate nails for breakfast.
Fogel: I have memories
of doing
what you would consider
normal things
under un-normal circumstances.
And you made lifelong
friendships
because you were all
in the same boat.
Silberberg: We had Jewish
youth organizations,
and we had theatrical plays.
It was always to a Jewish theme,
all the time.
We were taught, "You are Jews,
no matter what."
And that sticks.
Tobias: My parents joined
a synagogue called Ohel Moshe,
and our Hebrew school,
called the Talmud Torah,
was also there
on the third floor.
The fact that I was reading
the holy language
was a source of great comfort
to my parents and to me.
Studying the sacred texts really
meant that Judaism was alive,
and therefore that I was alive.
Silberberg: I wear
the Star of David all the time.
The day I can't wear it anymore,
it's time to leave,
because that means they don't
want me wherever I am.
Newsreel narrator: The savage
blow unparalleled in infamy,
Pearl Harbor,
December the 7th, 1941.
♪♪
Woman: Yet a day promised
intolerable suffering
and sacrifices
to so many nations,
and eventually
presented Shanghai Jews
with a whole new set of troubles
and undiluted anguish.
Tribe: Japan bombed
Pearl Harbor,
and war was then declared
between the United States
and the Allies
and Japan.
Tobias: After Pearl Harbor,
suddenly the Japanese controlled
most of Shanghai.
Kaufman: They force
all British citizens
and all American citizens
to put on labels
identifying themselves,
and then they are put
in internment camps.
Tribe:
My parents were Russian Jews.
My father had become
an American citizen,
and so he was dragged off
by Japanese soldiers
and taken
to a Japanese prison camp.
I remember standing
on some kind of a little box
in the middle of the street,
and I remember waving to him
in the middle of the street,
and I remember waving to him
and asking my mother,
"What did he do?
Why are they doing this to him?"
and the sense of injustice.
I knew that something
unfair had happened.
My father had done
nothing wrong,
and yet he was being taken away
from his family.
Kaufman:
Some of the wealthy Jews
were actually imprisoned
and tortured by the Japanese
because the Japanese believed
that they had been conspiring
with the British
and the Americans
against the Japanese.
Victor Sassoon has fled.
These wealthy Jews
who had protected the refugees,
who had supported them,
now were powerless.
The Japanese were now in charge,
and they're formally allies
with the Germans.
♪♪
[ Speaking German ]
Tobias: The Germans,
who were aware
of 20-odd-thousand
Jewish refugees
living in Shanghai,
sent Colonel Josef Meisinger,
who was known
as the Butcher of Warsaw.
He was apparently a brutal man,
and he was sent to Shanghai
to convince the Japanese
to impose the Final Solution
of the Jewish problem on us,
meaning to kill us.
They had said
the most efficient way
of liquidating our community
was to put us on a bunch
of rickety old junks,
tow us out to the Yellow Ocean,
and sink us.
To their credit, the Japanese
simply refused to do that.
Tribe: We would all
have been killed,
and the fact
that that didn't happen,
the fact that we were spared
that fate
was one of the closest calls,
in retrospect,
that I'm very grateful
to have escaped.
Blumenthal:
In February of 1943,
suddenly, without any warning,
there appears in the newspapers
a proclamation which says
that in 90 days, you have to
give up where you live and move
to the worst part of town,
half destroyed during the war.
Silberberg:
The Japanese guy came in,
he slapped my dad, and said,
"Out by tomorrow."
Kaufman: As a compromise
measure, the Japanese say,
"We'll put them in a ghetto.
We'll put them in a
1-square-mile area of Hongkou."
Maybe half the Jews were living
in other parts of Shanghai,
and they were all ordered
to abandon their apartments,
abandon their belongings,
and trudge over to this ghetto,
which was monitored
by Japanese guards,
which was adding another
10,000 people to a community
that was already filled,
overflowing.
You're essentially doubling
the population of Jews.
Marcus: The room was like maybe
15 feet by 5 feet long,
for the three of us.
It had one window.
But we lived there, my father,
my mother, and I,
for six or seven years.
It's...
Silberberg: Where we wound up,
it was a room
Silberberg: Where we wound up,
it was a room
with 14 people sleeping there.
We put, like, blankets
on the sides of our bed,
undressed and dressed in bed
because there was
no other space.
We had a small table
in front of the bed,
and that's where
we took our meals.
They appointed
a civil servant
by the name of Ghoya --
Mr. Kanoh Ghoya,
who was the chief
administrator of the ghetto.
And Ghoya said,
"Napoleon, he was a great man,
but I'm a greater one.
I am the emperor of the Jews."
Marcus: He was a nutcase!
Silberberg:
The guy was very short
and actually, when he wanted
to slap somebody,
had to get up on a chair.
Fogel: If you wanted to go
out of the area
to work or do anything,
you had to get by the Japanese.
Mr. Ghoya, who was
the worst of the worst --
if you didn't have
the right papers,
he could stand on the corner
with his bayonet
and do whatever the heck
he wanted to do.
Woman: Hongkou was
bordering on despair,
and "hysteria"
was putting it mildly.
It took me a long time
to go to sleep that night.
There was so much
to worry about.
Sasson: There was
so much poverty,
people getting sick,
people dying
of all these rare diseases.
You'd see someone that you would
see on a regular basis,
and the next day,
they were gone.
They died because they got ill,
they didn't have enough food,
they had dysentery.
It was -- It was just dreadful.
And a lot of Europeans
died, as well,
especially the elderly.
Silberberg: They were two large
Jewish cemeteries in Shanghai
with people who passed away.
Newsreel narrator: For over
a quarter century,
The Joint Distribution Committee
has been the main American
source of preserving
and protecting Jewish life
and traditions abroad
wherever and whenever they have
been jeopardized
by misfortune,
disaster, or injustice.
Kaufman: The American Joint
Distribution Committee
was the main organization
trying to deal
with a worldwide refugee crisis
as Jews were fleeing Europe.
There are tens of thousands
of refugees in Shanghai.
The crisis has become so big,
the Joint finally decides
that it has to do something.
And they go to a woman
named Laura Margolis,
who is a representative
of the American Jewish
Joint Distribution Committee,
to try to help the refugees.
She was in Cuba
when theSt. Louis,
which was a ship
carrying European refugees,
had tried to enter Cuba
and been turned away.
And then it went to America
and was turned away,
returned to Europe,
and presumably some of
the refugees were killed.
And she swore to herself
at that point in Cuba
that if she ever had the chance
to help refugees,
that if she ever had the chance
to help refugees,
she would do whatever she could
to make sure
that tragedy wasn't repeated.
She arranges to meet
Captain Inuzuka,
the anti-Semitic captain who's
in charge of Jews in Shanghai.
And she says to him,
"If there isn't enough food,
these refugees are going
to start to riot,
and that will be dangerous
for you
and dangerous
for the Japanese.
I'm completely apolitical.
Let me help them."
So Inuzuka agrees.
She's able to start getting
more food to the refugees,
more housing.
Marcus: They bought
these huge, like, warehouses
that were called Heime.
And Laura Margolis was able
to get $100,000, US dollars,
to bring to the Japanese
in that time.
And with that money,
we spent to get a hospital.
200-bed hospital.
I was a secretary.
I was extremely happy
to be working in a hospital
because I saw people
were being helped.
Hirsch: The JDC set up
a kitchen
which made it possible
for everyone to have
at least one meal a day,
which kept people alive.
Laura Margolis is...
...a saint.
♪♪
Sasson: Even though
it was war years,
life started picking up,
and people tried to re-create
a little Europe.
Kaufman:
They begin to build their own
independent communities
with German newspapers
and German cafés and orchestras.
♪♪
Bloch: One of the things that
my father did with other artists
was create these art shows
to show their art
and re-create their culture,
if you will, in Shanghai.
Fogel: It's very important
to have some culture
so that you don't feel
even though you physically
are alive,
but your mind has gone dead
and you've lost everything
that you've always had.
Community action
can make an enormous amount
of difference.
And that's what happened
when we were finally locked up
by the Japanese
in a kind of a ghetto.
The energy of adversity
ended up in some kind
of creativity, even,
and that helped
the people to survive.
♪♪
♪♪
Sasson: We lived
in a Chinese lane,
and we were the only family
that came from Europe.
And in the lane
lived a gentleman
And in the lane
lived a gentleman
by the name of Mr. Chu.
He really took a liking to me
and kind of adopted me.
[ Speaking Chinese ]
My father became
so close to Mr. Chu,
it was almost like
they were brothers.
And they shared the same values.
A sense of family was
very important to both,
so any differences
just melted away.
Later on, when I started school,
he arranged
for a rickshaw for me
to be picked up every morning.
[ Speaking Chinese ]
His daughter,
who is my little sister,
only spoke Chinese,
so what choice did I have --
I had to learn Shanghainese.
When I think about Mr. Chu,
you can see the tears
just swell up in my eyes.
And it still...
After all these years,
I still have
that connection to him.
It's -- It's just feeling
protected again,
feeling loved,
feeling cared about.
So he's a very, very
special person in my heart.
Woman: The winter of 1944 seems
longer, darker, and tougher.
Perhaps the length
of our confinement,
the endless war
made the cold colder,
the rain wetter,
and made us less agreeable.
Hirsch: One of the things
that people would say was,
"How are you today?"
And the other person would say,
"Well, we're one day closer
to the end of the war."
And that was a favorite saying.
"One day closer
to the end of the war."
♪♪
Tobias: On July 17, 1945,
the ghetto was bombed.
And we were stunned.
Fogel: We were in school,
Fogel: We were in school,
and we went under our desks
for protection.
Silberberg: My mom, she had to
deliver a dress to somebody,
and there was a Chinese man
who ran out, grabbed her arm,
and made her come into the store
and go under the counter.
He really saved her life.
Tribe: When the Americans
liberated Shanghai,
they were trying
to obliterate an area
that the Japanese had occupied.
Silberberg: The bomb dropped
right into the ghetto.
The building it hit
was right next to
a Japanese radio station
which was transmitting,
and the Americans wanted
to hit that radio station.
In doing that, they also hit
that compound
where there were
a lot of Jews living.
Tobias: And I remember
my father saying
that as he walked along
the street,
one of the houses
which had been bombed,
he recognized from the legs that
one of the rubble was a refugee.
So they pulled out the corpse of
a refugee who had been killed.
After that, we suddenly realized
that liberation
would not be easy.
♪♪
♪♪
And then one morning,
I'll never forget
the incredible puzzlement,
because the Japanese
occupying forces
simply vanished.
Sasson: My father came home
and he said, "The war is over,"
and I just chucked up.
Fogel:
And nobody believed it until
we saw planes flying across
and little leaflets
falling down.
That was an unbelievable day.
Whether it was German Jews
or Chinese,
everybody was out
on the streets.
Newsreel narrator: Vast throngs
of grateful, happy people
celebrate the end of fighting,
the dawn of peace.
It's official -- it's all over.
It's total victory.
[ Crowd cheering ]
Fogel: The war was over.
Now what?
Now what?
Marcus: We had no idea.
We had no idea
of concentration camps.
We had no idea
how brutal it had become.
We all guessed that some
of our relatives
probably didn't make it,
but no one had any idea about
the enormity of the Holocaust.
When we heard about it,
horror sort of rattled
through the Jewish community.
♪♪
♪♪
And every day,
people would go and look
and see what new names
were coming down,
to find the people
who had survived.
My father's brother was killed.
My father's other brother,
they were gassed.
So if we had been there,
I think we'd be dead, too.
Tobias: 14 of my aunts, uncles,
or cousins had not survived.
These are people
I had lived with,
I had laughed with,
I'd cried with.
The last time I saw
one of my cousins,
we got into a big fight
and were rolling around
in the dirt.
When we found out
that he did not survive,
I had the sense that the
wrong cousin had perished,
that it had I
who had been deserved
because I had been so brutal
and rough on him.
Fogel: My father's parents died
at Dachau,
and my mother's father died
at Sachsenhausen.
I've never carried a chip
on my shoulder -- why me?
If I ask, "Why me," it's,
"Why me, did I get saved?
And didn't get killed,
and was able to live
in Shanghai and grow up?"
That's the why --
you know, that's the "why me."
♪ Baruch ata Adonai
Tobias: I had my Bar Mitzvah
in Shanghai in November 1945.
Into the Ohel Moshe wandered
an American soldier.
He was wearing the scrolls
and the Magen David,
and we realized he's a rabbi.
He said, "To find a synagogue,
a service, and a Bar Mitzvah
as deeply steeped in Judaism
as this is,
it's a memorable experience."
And he said, "Now for me, the
words, 'Am Yisrael Chai,'"
which means,
the Jewish people will live,
"will mean something
very specific to me
for the rest of my life."
And everybody cried,
including me, of course.
Our very survival had moved him
as much as we were moved
by him being here.
Woman: I didn't hate
the Germans.
I didn't hate the Japanese.
I didn't like
what had been done to us,
that we had been robbed
of our identity,
of living a life of purpose,
of following our star.
Finally, I was free
to follow my star.
Silberberg:
So then the big question
started -- where do we go?
There were maybe a few people
who would have considered
staying in China,
but the majority took Shanghai
as a waiting place.
Sasson: We were stateless.
We could have gone back
to Austria right away,
but my mother didn't want
to take us back there.
So, where do we go?
Kaufman: The Baghdadi Jews
return, Victor Sassoon returns,
Kaufman: The Baghdadi Jews
return, Victor Sassoon returns,
the Kadoories return.
Working with the
Joint Distribution Committee,
these wealthy Jewish families
begin to try to figure out
where these families will go.
They can go to America,
they can go to Palestine,
they can go to Australia.
Some go to Latin America.
And so, in the two or three
years after 1945,
all the refugees
just about leave Shanghai
and they board ships
to these various places
to start their new lives.
Silberberg: It was again
a journey into the unknown.
♪♪
♪♪
[ Singing in Hebrew ]
♪♪
[ Applause ]
Woman:
I would like to ask
all first-generation
Shanghailanders to stand.
This is anyone
who lived in Shanghai.
[ Applause ]
Will all second-generation
Shanghailanders please stand?
[ Applause ]
Will all third-generation
Shanghailanders please stand?
[ Applause ]
And do we have
any fourth-generation?
[ Applause ]
[ Indistinct conversations ]
Helga's son: I have
a question for my mom.
Okay.
Do you think back, if Hitler
wouldn't have happened,
how your life
would have been different?
Silberberg: Oh, way different.
For starters,
I would never have met
your father.
[ Laughter ]
I think what I learned
in Shanghai
has taken me
through my life,
because nothing can really
faze me very much.
Because we know what it means
to have absolutely nothing.
My mom and dad, no matter
what was going on in life,
they just always moved forward
and never complained.
Never complained
about anything.
She didn't --Idid.
[ Laughter ]
I'm very proud of you
for what you went through
and what you made
of your life.
Helga's daughter:
If I can say something, too?
My mom has taught me
so much in life.
Whenever anything is down,
she brings me right up.
And that's made me,
you know, a tough lady.
I mean, she is a tough lady
to compete with,
I mean, she is a tough lady
to compete with,
but her motto in life is,
"There's always worse things."
Yeah, that's what
she always says.
Thank you, Mom.
Silberberg: Welcome.
I've been able to install that
in you, that's good.
-[ Laughter ]
-Yes. Yes, you did.
Silberberg: The whole experience
taught me
that nothing is for sure.
Everywhere I live,
I know that any day,
it might not be home anymore.
And it's not that devastating
if it does happen.
Blumenthal: I always knew that,
at heart, basically,
I was still
Werner Michael Blumenthal,
whether I was
the Secretary of the Treasury
or whether I was
a United States Ambassador
or a CEO or a professor
or whatever.
I always knew, tomorrow,
that could all be gone.
And what's important
is what kind of person I am,
how I conduct myself.
That's one of the
important lessons
that I learned in Shanghai.
When all those are gone,
what kind of a human being
will you be?
Most people think
that in order to be
a Holocaust survivor,
you have to have
a number on your arm
and you have to have spent time
in a concentration camp.
But that's not so.
It was time.
It was time that
I started to speak,
and to talk about
what happened.
I've lost track
of the thousands of students
that I have spoken to.
We live in an age now
where there are people
that need to escape
their countries
because of the horrors
that are going on.
It breaks my heart to see people
trying to come to our country,
that is plentiful,
being turned away.
This never happened to us
when we went to Shanghai.
Shanghai
opened their arms to us.
Tribe: For me, the Jewish
culture that I grew up with
embodies the importance
of being truthful,
of seeking justice, of doing
what you can to help others.
We all probably have some
elements in ourselves
that could make us,
under other circumstances,
treat people horribly,
which is what makes it
all the more important
to have a structure of law
and a system of rights
and a system of commitments
to the equal human rights
of everybody.
We are one of the lucky people
who had a door open
when so many others
have doors shut.
Opening those doors
is an obligation,
not just an opportunity.
[ Knocking ]
Ho: Lotte!
Ho: Lotte!
Oh, wait a minute.
Yay, I'm so glad
to see you.
Marcus: [ Laughs ]
Have a seat. Sit down.
Nobody can really imagine
what it was like
for me to meet you
and find out
who your father was.
That was what,
17 years ago, Lotte?
You came here
with your lemon cake,
and I brought out
my passport.
And you opened it up,
and there was
all this Chinese writing.
And you said, "See that number
that's there?
That's the number of visas
my father gave that day."
I figure, at least that day,
they issued --
the Chinese consulate
issued or stamped
at least 100 visas that day.
I was overwhelmed
that after 70 years,
or 60 years...
Yeah.
...my story turned
upside down.
I believed before
that some clerk
had just stamped
this Shanghai visa,
but now I saw that somebody
knew it to save people.
That's totally different.
Ho: My father was
never reunited
with any of the people
that he helped.
He was unknown to most of them.
And so when I meet these people,
I feel that my father's efforts
were worth it.
I jokingly call them
mymishpacha,
which in Yiddish
means my family.
It's like a miracle to me,
and you and I have become
very good friends.
And it doesn't change
the darkness,
but it gives light
into the darkness.
[ Indistinct conversations ]
-Remember where it is?
-Ah, ah, ah, ah...
Look over here.
You see it?
-Yeah, that's right!
-That's my nana.
Boy: That's my nana.
That was her brother.
That's the whole family.
This is the list of all
the people
that were able to come here
when your great-great-grandma
came here.
Kaufman: This miracle occurred
because certain people
stepped up at the right moment.
I think the Baghdadi Jews did,
I think Laura Margolis did,
Ho Feng Shan,
so I think there were
individuals who did it.
But more than that,
this was a place,
the most unexpected of places,
that saved these Jews
when they needed help the most.
Beyond politics,
beyond,
you know,
rivalries and economics
and military things,
in the end,
there was a human connection
that was established between
the Chinese and the Jews.
that was established between
the Chinese and the Jews.
And I think that created
a common bond
that you certainly didn't see
anywhere else in the world.
♪♪
Woman: The years fell away
and I saw myself --
I saw the young girl
and her parents
walk off the gangplank
eight years before.
Coolies in sweat-stained rags
were hauling loads,
children shrieked and chased
each other on the docks.
It hadn't changed.
And as I looked at the city
that had sheltered us
from the horrors
of Hitler's war,
all I saw in front of me
was a fine city
bathed in sunlight
under a China-blue sky.
I saw dainty Chinese ladies
in long silken gowns
strolling
in beautiful gardens.
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