Abstract
In the final months before world war and mass murder began, about 16,000 Jews fled Nazi persecution in the new Greater Germany, crossing the globe to Shanghai. Stripped of their citizenship, homes, jobs, and possessions, Jews threw their lives into suitcases and boarded ships or trains headed east.
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Notes
David Kranzler, Japanese, Nazis and Jews: The Jewish Refugee Community of Shanghai 1938–1945 (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1976). See also
James R. Ross, Escape to Shanghai: A Jewish Community in China (New York: Free Press, 1994). Films include Port of Last Resort (1999) by Paul Rosdy and Joan Grossman, and Shanghai Ghetto (2002) by Dana Janklowicz-Mann and Amir Mann.
James R. Ross, Escape to Shanghai: A Jewish Community in China (New York: Free Press, 1994). Films include Port of Last Resort (1999) by Paul Rosdy and Joan Grossman, and Shanghai Ghetto (2002) by Dana Janklowicz-Mann and Amir Mann.
Among the first were Evelyn Pike Rubin, Ghetto Shanghai (New York: Shengold Books, 1993); and
Betty Grebenschikoff, Once My Name Was Sara (Ventnor, NJ: Original Seven Publishing Co., 1993). By combining the details of his own family’s stories with considerable research about the whole community, the late
Ernest Heppner’s Shanghai Refuge: A Memoir of the World War II Jewish Ghetto (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1993) is the best of the memoirs. See the bibliography for this growing literature.
The most successful thus far is Michèle Kahn, Shanghai-la-juive (Paris: Flammarion, 1997).
Vivian Jeanette Kaplan fictionalized her family’s experience in Ten Green Bottles: The True Story of One Family’s Journey from Wartorn Austria to the ghettos of Shanghai (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004). Most recently,
Andrea Alban has written a book for young adults, Anya’s War (New York: Feiwel & Friends, 2011).
Leo Spitzer, Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998) notes the wide spectrum of estimates for German Jewish refugees to Bolivia, ranging from 7,000 to 60,000. Spitzer’s estimate is 20,000 (p. 203, n. 2).
These are generally accepted estimates, cited for example in Walter Laqueur, Generation Exodus: The Fate of Young Jewish Refugees from Nazi Germany (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2001), pp. 20–21;
Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Vol. 1, Years of Persecution 1933–1939 (NY: HarperCollins, 1997), pp. 62, 245;
Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 132;
Yehuda Bauer, A History of the Holocaust (New York: Franklin Watts, 1982), p. 109;
Ino Arndt and Heinz Boberach, “Deutsches Reich,” in Dimension des Völkermords: Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus, ed. Wolfgang Benz, (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1991), pp. 35; and Jonny Moser, “Österreich,” in Dimension des Völkermords, ed. Wolfgang Benz, p. 68. But
Niewyk and Nicosia, Columbia Guide to the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 419, also cites a much higher set of estimates compiled by the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland.
Wolfgang Benz, ed., Das Exil der kleinen Leute: Alltagserfahrungen deutscher Juden in der Emigration (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1994). The poorest Jews were less likely to escape:
Stephanie Schüler-Spangorum, “Fear and Misery in the Third Reich: From the Files of the Collective Guardianship Office of the Berlin Jewish Community,” Yad Vashem Studies 27 (1999), pp. 61–103.
Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3rd edition, p. 260.
Lawrence Langer argues that oral accounts are “rich in spontaneous rather than calculated effects.” Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 129.
A fine general history is Betty Peh-T’i Wei, Shanghai: Crucible of Modern China (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1987).
The relationship among event, memory and retelling has recently been the focus of much analysis. A brief summary of the issues by one of the experts on Holocaust interviews is Henry Greenspan, “Survivors’ Accounts,” in The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies, ed. Peter Hayes and John K. Roth (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 414–27.
On this subject, see also Helga Embacher and Margit Reiter, “Geschlechterbeziehungen in Extremsituationen: Österreichische und deutsche Frauen im Shanghai der dreißiger und vierziger Jahre,” in Exil Shanghai 1938–1947: Jüdisches Leben in der Emigration, ed. Georg Armbrüster, Michael Kohlstruck, and Sonja Mühlberger (Berlin: Hentrich und Hentrich, 2000), pp. 133–46.
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© 2012 Steve Hochstadt
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Hochstadt, S. (2012). Introduction. In: Exodus to Shanghai. Palgrave Studies in Oral History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137006721_1
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