Shanghai Ghetto
The Shanghai Ghetto, formally known as the Restricted Sector for Stateless Refugees, was an area of approximately in the Hongkou district of Japanese-occupied Shanghai. The area included the community around the Ohel Moshe Synagogue. Shanghai was notable for a long period as the only place in the world that unconditionally offered refuge for Jews escaping from the Nazis. According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a leading authority on the Holocaust, Shanghai accepted more Jewish refugees than Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and India. After the Japanese occupied all of Shanghai in 1941, the Japanese army forced about 23,000 of the city's Jewish refugees to be restricted or relocated to the Shanghai Ghetto until 1945 by the Proclamation Concerning Restriction of Residence and Business of Stateless Refugees. It was one of the poorest and most crowded areas of the city. Local Jewish families and American Jewish charities aided them with shelter, food, and clothing. The Japanese authorities increasingly stepped up restrictions, surrounded the ghetto with barbed wire, and the local Chinese residents, whose living conditions were often as bad, did not leave. By 21 August 1941, the Japanese government closed Shanghai to Jewish immigration.
Emigrant plans
Starting from 1934, one year after the Nazi Party gained control over Germany, some people chose China as a shelter for Jewish refugees. According to Gao Bei, a history professor from the University of Charleston, three plans were listed as the following:The Maurice William Plan (1934)
Maurice William, a Russian Jewish dentist who lived in New York, was the first one to suggest that China could be a shelter for Jewish refugees. William first showed his proposal to Albert Einstein, who was recorded as being impressed by the idea. Later, William sent his plan to China for approval. However, the proposal was likely declined at that time. One possible reason for this may have been that China did not want to stand in opposition to Germany.The Sun Fo Plan (1939)
In his plan, Sun Fo, an official of China suggested accepting Jewish refugees to China, to gain support from both other Western countries which had sympathy for Jewish refugees and from Jews refugees themselves, and to fight against Japan, which was one ally of Nazi Germany that China was opposed to.The Jakob Berglas Plan (1939)
In the same year, Jakob Berglas, a German Jewish businessman also proposed his plan to the Chinese government. The plan included a proposal to ensure 100,000 Jewish refugees emigrated to China, and each person would pay £50, to build up a Jewish social community. Thus an amount of £5,000,000 would be sent to China, which could be used to support the country's war efforts. However, under the fear that a massive wave of migration may draw attention and attacks from Germany, the Chinese government finally decided to modify the plan, only accepting Jewish refugees without citizenship allowed as migrants to live in China. Otherwise, they were only considered foreigners.Background
Jews in 1930s Germany
At the end of the 1920s, most German Jews were loyal to Germany, assimilated and relatively prosperous. They served in the German army and contributed to every field of German science, business and culture. After the Nazis were elected to power in 1933, state-sponsored antisemitic persecution such as the Nuremberg Laws and the Kristallnacht drove masses of German Jews to seek asylum abroad, with over 304,500 German Jews choosing to emigrate from 1933 to 1939. Chaim Weizmann wrote in 1936, "The world seemed to be divided into two parts—those places where the Jews could not live and those where they could not enter."During the 1930s, there was a growing military conflict between Japan and China. However, in the Shanghai International Settlement, there existed demilitarized areas which provided safe havens where tens of thousands of European Jewish refugees could escape from the growing horrors of the holocaust and also a place where a half million Chinese civilians could find safety.
The Evian Conference demonstrated that by the end of the 1930s, it was almost impossible to find a destination open for Jewish immigration, with only the Dominican Republic being open.
According to Dana Janklowicz-Mann:
Shanghai after 1937
The International Settlement of Shanghai was established by the Treaty of Nanking. Police, jurisdiction and passport control were implemented by the foreign autonomous board. Under the Unequal Treaties between China and European countries, visas were only required to book tickets departing from Europe.Following the Battle of Shanghai in 1937, the city was occupied by the army of Imperial Japan, except for the Shanghai International Settlement, which was not occupied by the Japanese until 1941 in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Before 1941, with Japanese permission, the Shanghai International Settlement allowed entry without visa or passport. By the time when most German Jews arrived, two other Jewish communities had already settled in the city: the wealthy Baghdadi Jews, including the Kadoorie and Sassoon families, and the Russian Jews. The latter fled the Russian Empire because of antisemitic pogroms pushed by the Tsarist regime and counter-revolutionary armies. They formed the Russian community in Harbin, then the Russian community in Shanghai.
Ho Feng Shan, Chiune Sugihara, Jan Zwartendijk and Tadeusz Romer
In 1935, the Chinese diplomat Ho Feng-Shan started his diplomatic career within the Foreign Ministry of the Republic of China. His first posting was in Turkey. He was appointed First Secretary at the Chinese legation in Vienna in 1937. When Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938, and the legation was turned into a consulate, Ho was assigned the post of Consul-General. After the Kristallnacht in 1938, the situation became rapidly more difficult for the almost 200,000 Austrian Jews. The only way for Jews to escape from Nazism was to leave Europe. In order to leave, they had to provide proof of emigration, usually a visa from a foreign nation, or a valid boat ticket. This was difficult, however, because at the 1938 Évian Conference, 31 countries refused to accept Jewish immigrants. Motivated by humanitarianism, Ho started to issue transit visas to Shanghai, under Japanese occupation except for foreign concessions. Twelve hundred visas were issued by Ho in only the first three months of holding office as Consul-General.At the time it was not necessary to have a visa to enter Shanghai, but the visas allowed the Jews to leave Austria. Many Jewish families left for Shanghai, from where most of them would later leave for Hong Kong and Australia. Ho continued to issue these visas until he was ordered to return to China in May 1940. The exact number of visas given by Ho to Jewish refugees is unknown. It is known that Ho issued the 200th visa in June 1938 and signed the 1906th visa on 27 October 1938. How many Jews were saved through his actions is unknown, but given that Ho issued nearly 2,000 visas only during his first half year at his post, the number may be in the thousands. Ho died in 1997 and his actions were recognized posthumously when in 2000 the Israeli organization Yad Vashem decided to award him the title "Righteous Among the Nations".
Many in the Polish-Lithuanian Jewish community were additionally saved by Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul in Kaunas, Lithuania, and Jan Zwartendijk, director of the Philips manufacturing plants in Lithuania and part-time acting consul of the Dutch government-in-exile. The refugees fled across the vast territory of Russia by train to Vladivostok and then by boat to Kobe in Japan. The refugees, totaling 2,185, arrived in Japan from August 1940 to June 1941.
Tadeusz Romer, the Polish ambassador in Tokyo, had managed to get transit visas in Japan, asylum visas to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Burma, immigration certificates to Palestine, and immigrant visas to the United States and some Latin American countries. Tadeusz Romer moved to Shanghai on 1 November 1941, where he continued to act for Jewish refugees. Among those saved in the Shanghai Ghetto were leaders and students of Mir yeshiva and Tomchei Tmimim.
Arrival of Ashkenazi Jews
The refugees who managed to purchase tickets for luxurious Italian and Japanese cruise steamships departing from Genoa later described their three-week journey with plenty of food and entertainment—between persecution in Germany and squalid ghetto in Shanghai—as surreal. Some passengers attempted to make unscheduled departures in Egypt, hoping to smuggle themselves into the British Mandate of Palestine.The first German Jewish refugees—twenty-six families, among them five well-known physicians—had already arrived in Shanghai by November 1933. By the spring of 1934, there were reportedly eighty refugee physicians, surgeons, and dentists in China.
On 15 August 1938, the first Jewish refugees from Anschluss Austria arrived by Italian ship. Most of the refugees arrived after Kristallnacht. During the refugee flight to Shanghai between November 1938 and June 1941, the total number of arrivals by sea and land has been estimated at 1,374 in 1938; 12,089 in 1939; 1,988 in 1940; and 4,000 in 1941.
In 1939–1940, Lloyd Triestino ran a sort of "ferry service" between Italy and Shanghai, bringing in thousands of refugees a month—Germans, Austrians, and a few Czechs. Added to this mix were approximately 1,000 Polish Jews in 1941. Among these were the entire faculty of the Mir Yeshiva, some 400 in number, who with the outbreak of World War II in 1939, fled from Mir to Vilna and then to Keidan, Lithuania. In late 1940, they obtained visas from Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul in Kaunas, to travel from Keidan, already Soviet-occupied Lithuania, via Siberia and Vladivostok to Kobe, Japan. By November 1941 the Japanese moved this group and most of the others to the Shanghai Ghetto in order to consolidate the Jews under their control. Finally, a wave of more than 18,000 Ashkenazi Jews from Germany, Austria, and Poland immigrated to Shanghai; that ended with the Attack on Pearl Harbor by Japan in December 1941.
The Ohel Moshe Synagogue had served as a religious center for the Russian Jewish community since 1907; it is currently the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum. In April 1941, a modern Ashkenazic Jewish synagogue was built.
Much-needed aid was provided by International Committee for European Immigrants, established by Victor Sassoon and Paul Komor, a Hungarian businessman, and the Committee for the Assistance of European Jewish Refugees, founded by Horace Kadoorie, under the direction of Michael Speelman. These organizations prepared the housing in Hongkou, a relatively cheap suburb compared with the Shanghai International Settlement or the Shanghai French Concession. Refugees were accommodated in shabby apartments and six camps in a former school. The Japanese occupiers of Shanghai regarded German Jews as "stateless persons" because Nazi Germany treated them so.