Shanghai Ghetto

Based on Wikipedia: Shanghai Ghetto

In 1938, as embassies across Europe slammed their doors on desperate Jewish families, a rumor began spreading through Vienna like wildfire: there was one place left on Earth where you could go without a visa. One city that would take you in, no questions asked. The catch? It was on the other side of the planet, in a war zone, in one of the most crowded and impoverished neighborhoods imaginable.

That place was Shanghai.

The Only Door Left Open

The story of the Shanghai Ghetto is one of history's strangest acts of refuge—a tale involving Japanese occupiers, Chinese diplomats, Italian cruise ships, and a tiny patch of land that saved more Jewish lives than Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and India combined.

To understand how roughly 23,000 Jews ended up in a one-square-mile slum in Japanese-occupied China, you need to understand just how thoroughly the rest of the world had abandoned them.

By the late 1930s, German Jews faced an impossible choice. After the Nazi Party consolidated power in 1933, antisemitic persecution escalated relentlessly. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped Jews of citizenship. Then came Kristallnacht in November 1938—the Night of Broken Glass—when Nazi paramilitaries destroyed thousands of Jewish businesses and synagogues across Germany and Austria, killing nearly a hundred people and arresting 30,000 Jewish men for concentration camps.

The message was clear: leave or die.

But leave for where? The Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann captured the cruel paradox perfectly 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."

The Évian Conference of 1938 made this heartbreakingly concrete. Representatives from 32 countries gathered in France to discuss the refugee crisis. Thirty-one of them, including the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, refused to accept Jewish immigrants in any meaningful numbers. Only the Dominican Republic offered to help.

A City Without Walls

Shanghai was different, though not because anyone planned it that way.

The city's unusual legal status created an accidental sanctuary. After China's defeat in the First Opium War, the 1842 Treaty of Nanking had established the Shanghai International Settlement—a zone administered by foreign powers rather than the Chinese government. This arrangement, part of what historians call the "Unequal Treaties," meant that passport control worked differently there. You needed a visa to book passage from Europe, but once you arrived in Shanghai, the foreign autonomous board that ran the Settlement didn't require entry papers.

The Japanese occupation complicated matters. Imperial Japan had seized most of Shanghai after the Battle of Shanghai in 1937, but the International Settlement remained a peculiar island of foreign control until Pearl Harbor in December 1941. With Japanese permission, the Settlement maintained its open-door policy.

This bureaucratic quirk became a lifeline.

The Diplomats Who Said Yes

One man understood the opportunity better than most. Ho Feng-Shan was a Chinese diplomat who had been appointed Consul-General in Vienna just as Austria was absorbed into Nazi Germany in 1938. Suddenly, nearly 200,000 Austrian Jews needed to escape, and escape required paperwork—specifically, proof that you had somewhere to go.

Ho began issuing transit visas to Shanghai. Technically, you didn't need a visa to enter Shanghai. But you needed one to leave Austria. The Nazis, with their perverse attachment to bureaucratic process, would let Jews go if they could prove they had a destination. Ho's visas provided that proof.

In his first three months as Consul-General, Ho issued 1,200 visas. By October 1938, he had signed his 1,906th. The exact total is unknown—he continued issuing visas until he was recalled to China in May 1940—but the number may have reached into the thousands. Many of the families who received his visas eventually made their way to Hong Kong and Australia.

Ho died in 1997. Three years later, the Israeli organization Yad Vashem honored him as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, the title given to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.

Ho wasn't alone in this work. Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul in Kaunas, Lithuania, issued transit visas to thousands of Polish and Lithuanian Jews, allowing them to escape through the Soviet Union to Japan and eventually Shanghai. Jan Zwartendijk, a Dutch businessman serving as acting consul in Lithuania, provided the crucial companion documents claiming the refugees could enter Curaçao, a Dutch colony in the Caribbean. Together, their visas saved over 2,000 lives.

The Polish ambassador in Tokyo, Tadeusz Romer, performed similar miracles, securing transit visas through Japan and onward destinations to Palestine, the United States, Canada, and Latin America. When Japan's patience with the refugees wore thin, Romer moved to Shanghai in November 1941 to continue his work.

The Surreal Journey

For those who escaped early enough, the journey to Shanghai could be bizarrely luxurious. Italian and Japanese cruise lines ran regular service from Genoa, and the refugees who could afford tickets found themselves on three-week voyages with abundant food and onboard entertainment.

The contrast was almost impossible to process. One week you might be watching your father get dragged off to a concentration camp; the next you might be eating dinner in a first-class dining room somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Some passengers, as their ships passed through the Suez Canal, tried to slip away in Egypt, hoping to smuggle themselves into British-controlled Palestine.

Most continued to Shanghai.

The numbers tell the story of desperation. In 1938, 1,374 Jewish refugees arrived in Shanghai. In 1939, that number exploded to 12,089. The pace slowed slightly as war spread across Europe—1,988 in 1940, 4,000 in 1941—before Pearl Harbor closed the door entirely.

A Community Takes Shape

The refugees didn't arrive in a vacuum. Two other Jewish communities had already put down roots in Shanghai, and their presence would prove crucial.

The Baghdadi Jews had arrived in the mid-1800s, following British trade routes from Iraq. Families like the Sassoons and Kadoories had built fortunes in opium, cotton, and real estate. By the 1930s, they were among Shanghai's wealthiest residents. Victor Sassoon, whose family had built the famous Peace Hotel, helped establish the International Committee for European Immigrants to assist the newcomers.

The Russian Jews had come later, fleeing the antisemitic pogroms of the Tsarist regime and the chaos of the Russian Revolution. They had first settled in Harbin, in northeastern China, before many moved south to Shanghai. Less wealthy than the Baghdadis but well-established, they knew how to build community in exile.

These earlier arrivals did what they could to help. The Kadoorie family helped establish the Committee for the Assistance of European Jewish Refugees. Housing was arranged in Hongkou, a relatively affordable district compared to the International Settlement or the French Concession. The Japanese occupiers, treating German Jews as "stateless persons" because that's how Nazi Germany classified them, allowed the settlement.

The conditions, though, were grim.

Life in Hongkou

Hongkou was one of Shanghai's poorest neighborhoods, and it had been heavily damaged during the fighting in 1937. The refugees were crammed into shabby apartments and repurposed buildings—former schools converted into dormitory camps. Ten people to a room was common. Sanitation was disastrous. Employment was nearly impossible to find. Starvation was a constant threat.

The neighborhood was roughly 2.5 square kilometers—about one square mile—centered around the Ohel Moshe Synagogue, which had served the Russian Jewish community since 1907. Into this space, the authorities eventually concentrated some 23,000 refugees.

And yet, against all odds, a community flourished.

Schools were established. Newspapers were published. Theater groups produced plays in German and Yiddish. Sports teams formed and competed. Cabarets opened, offering dark humor as a salve against despair. In April 1941, the community even managed to build a new Ashkenazi synagogue.

The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, known simply as "the Joint," sent aid and personnel. Laura Margolis, a young social worker from the organization, arrived in Shanghai and worked tirelessly to stabilize the situation, navigating the complex politics of Japanese occupation to keep relief funds flowing.

Some refugees found unexpected connections with their Chinese neighbors, who often lived in equally desperate circumstances. A few Jewish men married Chinese women—not common, but notable given the conservative traditions of both communities. These marriages testified to a genuine cultural exchange amid the shared hardship.

The Japanese Question

Why did Japan allow any of this?

The Japanese military had allied with Nazi Germany, but Japanese society lacked the deep antisemitic traditions of Europe. Some Japanese officials even entertained the idea that cultivating Jewish support could prove strategically useful—a notion informed by their somewhat fantastical belief in Jewish financial power and influence.

The Nazis tried repeatedly to change Japan's approach. Josef Meisinger, a Gestapo officer stationed in Tokyo, pushed the Japanese to take action against the Shanghai Jews. Since straightforward antisemitism didn't resonate with his Japanese counterparts, Meisinger reframed his argument in terms they might find more compelling: espionage. He told Japanese officials that "anti-Nazis" among the German community in Shanghai were also "anti-Japanese" and therefore security threats.

The strategy worked, at least partially. According to testimony from Meisinger's interpreter, Karl Hamel, the Japanese eventually accepted this logic and began investigating "anti-Nazi" elements among the refugees. Meisinger provided lists of names he had compiled as early as 1941.

The Ghetto Tightens

After Pearl Harbor, everything changed. Japan seized full control of Shanghai, including the International Settlement. The wealthy Baghdadi Jews, many of whom held British citizenship, were interned as enemy aliens. American charitable funds, which had been keeping the refugee community afloat, stopped flowing as communication with the United States became impossible.

In February 1943, the Japanese authorities issued the Proclamation Concerning Restriction of Residence and Business of Stateless Refugees. The bureaucratic language masked a brutal reality: all "stateless refugees" who had arrived after 1937 were required to move into a designated area of Hongkou within three months. The Shanghai Ghetto, which had been an informal concentration of refugees, became an official restricted zone.

Barbed wire went up around the perimeter. Movement in and out required passes. The ghetto's population—both the Jewish refugees and the Chinese residents who had lived there before and weren't required to leave—pressed ever more tightly together.

Unemployment and inflation made life increasingly desperate. Food grew scarcer. Disease spread more easily in the crowded conditions.

But the systematic murder that was consuming European Jewry never came to Shanghai. The death rate in the Shanghai Ghetto remained far lower than in the ghettos of Warsaw or Łódź. Most of the refugees survived.

The Mir Yeshiva's Impossible Journey

Among the survivors were some of the most unlikely refugees of all: the entire faculty and student body of the Mir Yeshiva, one of the great centers of Jewish religious learning in Eastern Europe.

When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the yeshiva fled from the town of Mir to Vilna in Lithuania. When the Soviets occupied Lithuania in 1940, they fled again to the town of Keidan. There, they obtained visas from Chiune Sugihara—the same Japanese consul who was issuing papers to thousands of other refugees.

The yeshiva's escape route reads like something from a spy novel. They traveled east across the vast expanse of Soviet territory, by train through Siberia to Vladivostok, then by boat to Kobe, Japan. Roughly 400 scholars and students made the journey.

The Japanese allowed them to stay in Kobe until November 1941, when all Jewish refugees were transferred to Shanghai. There, in the ghetto, the Mir Yeshiva continued its work. Students studied Talmud in cramped rooms. Rabbis delivered lectures. The chain of learning, stretching back centuries, remained unbroken.

The yeshiva would later relocate to Jerusalem and Brooklyn, but its survival—a direct result of that improbable journey through the Soviet Union to Shanghai—meant that an entire tradition of scholarship continued when so much else was lost.

Liberation and Aftermath

The Shanghai Ghetto existed until Japan's surrender in August 1945. Most refugees did not stay long in China afterward. Some went to the newly established State of Israel in 1948. Many emigrated to the United States, Australia, or other countries that had once refused them. A small number remained in Shanghai, though the Communist victory in 1949 prompted most of them to leave as well.

The Ohel Moshe Synagogue still stands in what is now called the Tilanqiao Historic Area. It serves as the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum, preserving the memory of those strange, desperate, remarkable years when one of the world's most crowded cities became the last refuge for people the rest of the world had abandoned.

What Shanghai Tells Us

The story of the Shanghai Ghetto resists simple morals. The city that saved tens of thousands of Jews was under the control of a brutal occupying army allied with Nazi Germany. The door that remained open did so partly through bureaucratic accident, partly through the courage of individual diplomats, and partly through the complex calculations of Japanese officials who never fully embraced their allies' ideology.

The refugees survived not because the world rallied to help them, but because they found their way to a place that wasn't quite controlled by anyone—a crack in the system of borders and papers and official indifference.

Ho Feng-Shan, writing years later about his decision to issue visas, offered a simple explanation: "I thought it only natural to feel compassion and to want to help. From the standpoint of humanity, that was the right thing to do."

In a world that had largely decided the right thing was too inconvenient, that one man's sense of what was natural helped save thousands of lives. The Shanghai Ghetto stands as testament both to the cruelty of closed doors and to the possibility that, somewhere, a door might still be open.