In 1939, as Nazi persecution escalated in Eastern Europe, “a window of hope opened as all other doors closed” for Jewish refugees. The unlikely spot was the Chinese port city of Shanghai, occupied at the time by the Japanese army, where the authorities required no immigration visas. Seizing this opportunity for survival, tens of thousands of Jews found their way to a strange culture halfway around the world.
The documentary film Shanghai Ghetto, narrated by Academy Award winning actor Martin Landau, tells the story of this little-known exodus. Filmmaker Dana Janklowicz-Mann’s father, who escaped to Shanghai during World War II, inspired the story. To create Shanghai Ghetto Janklowicz-Mann and Amir Mann, her husband and creative partner, interviewed several Israelis, including her father, and Americans about their childhood memories of escaping to China. To recreate the extraordinary survival tale the Israeli filmmakers complement these accounts with period photos, personal letters, and footage taken in modern-day Shanghai.
In a series of intense interviews, the escapees recount landing in Shanghai penniless but dressed in top European fashion. Since the primary route to Shanghai was via a luxury cruise, only the most fortunate who had adequate liquid funds on hand (the Nazis froze all Jewish bank accounts) made their way to China. Upon arrival in Shanghai, they confronted an unbearably hot and humid climate, unfamiliar food, and an unintelligible language. Period footage shot by refugees shows the recent European immigrants crammed into the over-populated redlight district with no sewage system, no running water, little food, and rampant disease. Remarkably, even in these challenging circumstances, the immigrants found a tolerant refuge in China. “When you’re always on the bottom and everyone spits and laughs at you, finally you’re on even keel. It was important,” recalls former ghetto resident Alfred Kohn.
But as the war progressed, the escapees recount, the devastating uncertainty about family members left behind in Europe increased. Evelyn Pike Rubin remembers how her mother tried to get her uncle out of France: “The papers got to Marseille the day France fell, they never reached my uncle and to the day she died my mother said—Leo’s gonna think his sister deserted him.”
It was not until after the war when the Shanghai ghetto disbanded and its residents found their way to Israel, North America, and Australia, that the Jews of Shanghai uncovered the extent of the Nazi devastation. “After the war they discovered that they were living in paradise compared to what happened to their brethren in Europe,” says Professor David Kranzler, author of the book Japanese, Nazis, and Jews: the Refugee community of Shanghai.
The film seamlessly weaves together memories of Shanghai with images from the ghetto today—which, despite the departure of the Jews, has remained almost structurally unchanged. The filmmakers traveled to Shanghai with some of the former residents of the ghetto and revisited the refugees’ old homes. The refugees recount the astounding will with which the Jewish community created their lives in China—building schools and synagogues, organizing boxing and soccer teams, and creating theater groups.
Films in the Holocaust genre generally tell the story of devastation in Europe. What makes Shanghai Ghetto so compelling is that it brings the Nazi persecution to a very personal level with scenes of daily life, astonishing perseverance and tragedy. It reminds us that the “lucky” ones who escaped Nazi persecution did not escape suffering.
