We will start with the (somewhat accidental) compassionate side of history when the world was ablaze under Hitler. This also should explain that Jews are not all Zionists nor all support Israel. Meanwhile, the Rise of China is creating a major upheaval in the Western nations that have been used to control other nations and are on the warpath to dominate the world. We have explored this in various instalments but for the moment we shall stay on the narrow path of niceness... until the yin and the yang of "morality and money" becomes a corrupt wrecking ball rather than a cooperative alliance of forces.

The legacy of exile: The Jews of Shanghai

The story of a man who started a new life in China, and a daughter whose life has been shaped by his persecution.

Shanghai, China – Sara Imas leaned forward, her jovial humour gone. She had been speaking English, but this was one story she could only tell in her native Chinese. 

It was 1961, she remembers, a time when Shanghai relied on ice blocks to cool houses in the summer. The iceman would come, and Sara would escape into the back garden to play.

Sara, who was a young girl at the time, observed a worm fall from one of the garden’s trees. She felt sorry for it, so rushed forward to pick it up and return it to the tree. 

“I was being merciful to that worm, but the worm wasn’t doing the same for me. It hurt me, and my hand became swollen,” she said. 

Sara presented her wound to her father, Leiwi Imas. But if she expected sympathy, she didn’t get it.

“Sometimes it’s good that you want to offer help, but do others really need help? Look at that worm. That worm doesn’t need your help. So you should mind your own business,” Sara remembers him saying. “You should not be curious about everything. If you are, you end up being hurt.”

The Jews of Shanghai 

These words might seem strange, even contradictory, given that Leiwi was a refugee. As a Jew, Leiwi was forced to flee the Holocaust in 1939. He crossed the border from Germany to Poland and then to the Soviet Union, before finally reaching a safe haven in Shanghai.

His daughter Sara, now 65 This story was written in 2015], was born in China, and she’s very clear: she is not a refugee herself. But in many ways, she has become the face of the community of persecuted Jews who resettled in Shanghai. She has published books, done national interviews and even sung in an anti-war music video. Her father’s past survives in her present.

An estimated 340,000 Jews escaped Nazi Germany and Austria between 1933 and 1945, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. But then, as now, there were more refugees than visas. 

In 1938, US President Franklin Roosevelt called together 32 nations for a conference in the resort town of Evian-les-Bains, France, to find a solution. Over nine days they deliberated. By the end of the conference, only the Dominican Republic agreed to raise its refugee quota.

Still, there was one unlikely place where Jews could flee, where no quotas or visas stood in their way: Shanghai. European powers had imposed extraterritorial rights on the city, which meant that, until late 1939, foreigners could come and go as they pleased. No other major metropolis could boast such relaxed immigration laws.

But ultimately, only about 20,000 Holocaust refugees came to Shanghai. The culture, the language, the distance – it could all seem overwhelming to the Jews facing exile. The majority chose to relocate elsewhere.

“People who had a lot of money, or who had good foreign connections, or had a name for themselves like the Mann brothers, who were writers, and the Freuds and the Einsteins – they mostly did not go to Shanghai,” explained Steve Hochstadt, a history professor at Illinois College. The ones who came were generally middle class individuals, with no grand riches or titles to their name, he added.

Like Leiwi Imas, Hochstadt’s own grandparents made the voyage in the late 1930s. They had managed to secure one affidavit to go to the US, but it wouldn’t cover the entire family. Sacrifices had to be made. They would part ways: their 18-year-old son to the US, and they to Shanghai, aboard a Lloyd Triestino steamship. 

“Refugees try to stop being refugees,” Hochstadt observed in our telephone interview. His own father – that 18-year-old sent alone across the Atlantic – avoided the word entirely. He lost his accent, settled in California and rarely spoke about his ordeal. 

But the situation was different for the Jews who landed in China. “In Shanghai, they were not going to assimilate. Much too difficult,” Hochstadt said. “Chinese is incredibly difficult [to learn], and they didn’t necessarily even want to become Chinese or stay the rest of their lives in Shanghai.”

Collecting stories

After the war, most of them left Shanghai. The Imas family was one of the few that remained. As the Shanghai refugees were once again scattered across the globe, their stories started to fragment and fade. Hochstadt said it was only in the 1990s that Shanghai’s role in harbouring Jews became well-known.

“The people who had been in Shanghai had suffered but had not lived in danger of dying,” Hochstadt said. “They didn’t want to compare themselves with concentration camp survivors. It took them a long time to be willing to say, ‘Yeah, I had a Holocaust experience, too. It wasn’t as bad, but it’s worth telling.'”

Hochstadt himself collected 100 of their stories, in an effort to fill the historical gap. He noticed that books hardly mentioned Holocaust refugees like his grandparents or Leiwi Imas. Instead, the books concentrated almost exclusively on the genocide, which Hochstadt found to be problematic. 

“If you just focus on genocide, that’s something where other people are acting badly, and we didn’t have anything to do with it,” he said. “But a refugee crisis implicates everybody. That was true then, and that’s even truer today.”

Recent events have brought the Holocaust refugees back to the fore. Over four million refugees have poured out of Syria since 2011, when civil war erupted. World leaders, grappling with how to describe the crisis, have turned to the Holocaust as a metaphor. The Evian Conference is in the back of their minds, Hochstadt said.

A beacon of tradition in a foreign land

Back in Shanghai, Sara had other reasons for remembering the past. This year, China celebrated 70 years since Japan surrendered in World War II – or, as the Chinese call it, the War of Japanese Aggression. 

With all the festivities came a new wave of attention. State media organisations, like China Central Television and Xinhua, marked the anniversary with articles featuring Sara, and she was asked to introduce a new statue for the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum.

READ MORE:

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2015/11/13/the-legacy-of-exile-the-jews-of-shanghai

We have already mentioned the Jews in Shangai: 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW. HE DESERVES AN ETERNAL STATUE IN THE HALL OF TRUTH AND JUSTICE.

Image at top from Bird's Eye China — Shangai.