My actual destination in Shanghai is the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum.
If it hasn't been made clear before: yes with an exclamation mark! My theme takes me around the world and (helps) choose most of my travel destinations. And: I absolutely love that.
When I read about a place, I want to go there. Somehow that happens automatically to me: to see for myself what it looks like - even if it is decades later. I find that extremely exciting.
I'm just interested.
And for me it is part of it.
Being there makes history more tangible, and when I meet people who are connected to it and hear both general and personal stories, all of this makes what happened more accessible. Or, and this is probably more accurate, it at least gives me the feeling of being closer - to my topic, to the stories themselves. I imagine that this also makes writing easier for me.
Now Shanghai - Awesome!
I've heard about Shanghai from time to time, seen exhibitions, learned about people's lives. Shanghai comes up again and again when it comes to emigration, World War II and DPs, displaced persons. Anyone who deals with the subject will sooner or later learn something about it. It's not insider knowledge. So I know something about the history of Shanghai - and actually nothing at all.
To be honest, I don't really know anything about Shanghai, except a little about the Jewish refugees, mainly from Germany and Europe, who spent and had to spend some of their lives here. From the end of the 1930s to the end of the 1940s, around 20,000 Jewish people lived in Shanghai. They found a certain refuge in the Hongkou district in particular. Under Japanese occupation (Japan was allied with Nazi Germany), these stateless Jewish refugees were no longer allowed to leave the Hongkou area from 1943 onwards. It is also known as the "Shanghai Ghetto". However, the conditions here were completely different to those in the German Nazi ghettos in Eastern Europe.
At some point I wanted to go there, to Shanghai, to this former Jewish quarter. My plan was actually to take the train via Moscow and Beijing.
The idea still excites me today. But Putin's Russia would still be possible at the moment, but would probably be difficult for me to bear. I understand too much Russian and my last visit there in 2016 was already more than emotionally demanding. I don't feel like it at the moment. The train to Shanghai option is therefore on hold.
I was excited when I saw that I could fly from New Zealand to Europe via Shanghai quite cheaply. Some Chinese airlines have just started new routes from Down Under and are almost unbeatably cheap in comparison. “Cool, then I'll just go to the Jewish Refugee Museum,” I thought and booked. I'm such a freak! :D But so much and with great enthusiasm and passion! :D
I had asked around beforehand to see who knew who in Shanghai and, if possible, at the museum. There was no one in my first circle of contacts, and only to a limited extent in the wider circle. I thought of a scientist who I had never met in person, but it was worth a try: This storyboard is great: https://blog-dgg.univie.ac.at/?p=35
So people I've never seen in my life have helped me and connected me with English-speaking people who are dealing with the issue in Shanghai. There's nothing like asking!
I couldn't afford the exciting city tour on the topic that was offered to me in one day, but at least I was able to meet a few people for a coffee. And now I know people in Shanghai too - great!
In the Jewish Refugees Museum itself, not everyone speaks English, but some do. The exhibition is bilingual anyway, Chinese/English.
Kira, one of the curators, takes time for me. She studied English and came into contact with the topic of Jewish Shanghai through an exchange with Israel as a young student. She has been part of the team for over three years and also helps with translation. The museum director says that the biggest challenge is establishing contact with descendants. The museum goes back to an initiative in the 1990s. More and more foreigners were coming to this part of the city and the local residents were wondering why. At some point the western foreigners came with translators and in 1994 there was a large meeting of "Shanghailanders" and their descendants on the former ghetto site. A memorial stone was erected in a park, now not far from the museum.
"After that, it was clear that we needed a museum," Kira translates her boss into English for me. He was there from the beginning, he reports proudly, Kira translates. We sit in a large room, far apart, each of us has a large armchair that we half sink into.
"Back then, there were no objects or stories here in Shanghai. You can't see that today, but it took a lot of work over the last few decades to have an exhibition like this today," he says, Kira translates. I can understand that very well. Today, things really look very different. The museum is surprisingly large: two floors full of stories (and text), digital stations, but above all, lots of beautiful objects.
Some are on loan from other museums, including Sydney, but most have been donated by former "Shanghailanders" and their descendants. The first object came from Hamburg, Kira explains enthusiastically, knowing that I worked there.
Her favorite object is Betty's wedding dress. Here, too, there is a connection to Australia, as I later read.
Most of those who called themselves “Shanghailanders” moved to North America, Australia or back to Europe in the late 1940s. Many did not stay in China.
But even if the exhibition narrative tries to paint a very positive picture of Jewish-Chinese friendship, it remains unclear why almost everyone left when it was finally possible...
From top to bottom, it is about the mainly German-speaking Jewish refugees in the “Shanghai Ghetto”. Others have reported to me critically that the other Jewish groups who lived there and outside the “ghetto” at the same time are too few, actually hardly featured. There were Sephardic Jews who stayed here much longer than the German-speaking people from the mid/late 1930s. And there were “white Russians” who fled to Shanghai after the Bolshevik Revolution during and after the First World War. An estimated quarter of them were Jewish, I was told by a non-museum guide and outside the museum walls. “These Jewish “white Russians”, i.e. anti-communists, hardly feature, because their lives and attitudes were different. The museum is a Chinese state project with the aim of showing that the Chinese were the good guys and Jews liked (and like) the Communist Party.” But it’s not that simple, my counterpart on the other side of the Jewish Refugees Museum reminds me.
The Jewish refugees from German-speaking countries came here with the prejudices against Asian people, and thus also Chinese, that were also common throughout Europe at that time: most Europeans looked down on Asia.
"Sure, there were friendships, help and some marriages, but that was not normal," the non-museum employee tells me. He also reminds me: "It was not China or the Chinese who saved the 20,000 or so Jews, but above all the Jewish people who had already been in Shanghai and these networks plus entry without visas made their rescue possible in the first place." Of course, the museum is important and does good work. Since the work began, the (half) Jewish history of Shanghai has become much better known, worldwide. Much more than before. But as always: it is just an exhibited story with a specific purpose. "What doesn't fit in, stays away. A 'normal' visitor and especially the many Chinese visitors will not (be able to) see this," I am told by my coffee date far away from the museum.
I agree. I had not heard or heard anything about the "other" stories, especially about the Jewish refugees to Shanghai from Soviet communism during and in the First World War - or I no longer remember them. Fascinating, that's true. And of course you won't find that in a state-run Chinese museum. But you will find stories about Jews in the Chinese army, which, however, had very little to do with the Jewish quarter of Shanghai, if anything.
I found it striking how strongly the museum includes descendants of the former “Shanghailanders” in the exhibition - and also describes their stories and their (positive) relationship to the museum.
Some photos at the very beginning of the exhibition remain particularly memorable for me: a Szczecin story.
Sure, I know Stettin, I come from the region. But even more so because the German-Jewish history behind the Oder and Neisse is only slowly being rediscovered. Because: Who is “responsible” for it?
Stettin is now Szczecin and for decades German history up to 1945 was taboo in the People's Republic of Poland; Jewish-German history was also taboo.
Many local history groups in Germany are also mostly interested in the place where they live. Dig where you stand. But what about the places where, due to migration and border shifts, hardly anyone digs anymore? Does anyone even know about such stories? Often history is written primarily by those who stay and are there, and those who have left or have been left are forgotten, consciously and unconsciously, intentionally and unintentionally.
According to the photos in the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum, Walter Jacobsberg obviously enjoyed swimming in Stettin. In November 1938, he and his father were deported to a concentration camp. They were released from prison after claiming to have a ship passage to Shanghai. They moved to Berlin a short time later.
When they took the car from Stettin, they drove past my parents' house. It was already there back then. The motorway was there too; one of my great-grandfathers helped build it. It was one of the Nazi pioneer projects: the Berlin-Stettin route.
The Jacobsbergs, originally from Stettin, did not stay in Berlin for long: They moved on to Trieste and in the summer of 1939 they actually took a ship from Italy to Shanghai. They had actually found a way to travel there.
Walter became a German-English translator. His father worked as a tailor in Shanghai. I couldn't find anything about their later lives in the exhibition. Most "Shanghailanders" took the first opportunity to leave China after the Second World War. Who knows where the two Stettiners ended up and whether they ever returned to Shanghai or Stettin. I would be interested to know!
