A Vital Part of the Mosaic

Today in bustling Shanghai there is little evidence of the Jewish ghetto that existed on the edge of the city during World War II, a “restricted area” for refugees from Austria, Germany and Poland. But while the physical markings may be gone, the painful memories of squalor and fear remain. Jews who fled the Nazis in Europe before the outbreak of World War II found a place that would take them in, but little else.

With the decades passing and survivors aging, efforts to capture the history of the place called Hongkew, essentially a concentration camp, are intensifying, as Times staff writer Henry Chu has reported.

Survivors of wartime Hongkew, now known as Hongkou, have held reunions, written memoirs, committed oral histories to tape and brought a sort of historical rebirth to that dangerous patch of Shanghai, occupied by the Japanese and bombed by the Americans.

Institutions ranging from the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences to Bates College in Maine have been active in the attempt to record the period.

In 1943, under pressure from their Nazi allies, the Japanese rounded up 18,000 Jews and jammed them into the ghetto: two square miles of disease, lice and near-starvation. It was hard but not a death camp.

The original Jewish settlement in Shanghai goes back to the mid-19th century when Sephardic Jews founded financial empires, trading in silk, tea and opium. Between the two world wars, Jews poured in during the upheavals of Russia. Only Shanghai would accept European Jews without visas or passports.

Many of the survivors say they have been reluctant to share their experiences out of concern that what they suffered pales in comparison to the European Holocaust. But they were part of the Jewish experience, and already they have been embraced by Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Project, a compilation of visual and oral histories of Holocaust survivors. The experiences of 200 Shanghai ghetto survivors are recorded there. We want to--and need to--hear their stories.