Shanghai Ghetto

This is a well made documentary about WW II Jews escaped and took sanctuary in Shanghai, China. In the 1930s, Nazi Germany systematically implemented the Holocaust to get rid of Jews. The lucky ones escaped by ships but found many countries turned their backs and them back to Europe to be exterminated.

The Chinese Consul General in Austria, Feng-shan Ho issued over twenty thousand visas for Jews to flee to Shanghai China. This film tells personal stories of the Jews who valued and treasured this survival experience in an alien land of culture in "among all four seas are brothers and sisters" in practicing "love your neighbors as yourself". Jewish people whether long time settlers of Kaifeng or in 1930s Shanghai never have to worry about anti-Semitism. It was wonderful to hear the Shanghai Ghetto Jews told their stories and returned for home coming. I met a few Shanghai Jews who shared their story, family history and personal belongings in St Louis Holocaust Museum and Learning Center. I had the honor to attend this film premier show with them.

This film reminded that Jews in Europe under Nazi Germany and Chinese in Asia under Imperial Japan suffered heavily in WW II. Germany did the right thing to close the history chapter by apology and compensation with education for the younger generation. However, her Asian Ally - Japan does not have the moral courage to show remorse with attrition. Instead, they systematically worship at the Tokyo Yasukuni Shrine where housed the convicted Class A War Criminals in an attempt to resurrect militarism besides whitewash, distort and deny their aggressive war crimes in slave labor, comfort women, germ/chemical warfare, and massacres.

This film reaffirms the friendship between Jewish and Chinese peoples in difficult war time with mutual support. By working together with people of peace with justice, we will keep vigilant in preventing the horror of crime against humanity from happening again.

This documentary recounts the history of some 20,000 Jews who fled 8,000 miles from Europe to Shanghai during World War II when most all other countries had closed their borders to them. At the time, much of China, including Shanghai, was occupied and controlled by Japan. Because of their own racist stereotypes, the Japanese feared the Jews, and so allowed the refugees to exist in the "Restricted Sector for Stateless Refugees" with the help of wealthy Baghdadi and poorer Russian Jews who had already settled there, along with western aid. A rich cultural life emerged that included schools, theater, newspapers, and music. As one of the poorest sections of Shanghai, life for the local Chinese who lived together with the Jews was often worse. After Pearl Harbor, American attacks on the Japanese in China made the horrible conditions in Shaghai even worse. The film draws upon archival footage, diaries, letters, historians, and, most powerfully of all, interviews with a half dozen survivors who were children of eight to ten years old at the time.

I saw this film initially at the SF Jewish Film Festival. Before this initial viewing I was unfamiliar with the imigration of Jews to Shanghai during the holocust. The film is informative and beautifully made. A must see for WWII, hollocast and documentary film junkies.

Shanghai Ghetto is an intriguing documentary about Jews who were allowed to leave Nazi controlled areas and go to China. The narration is matter of fact. The interviews with survivors are a little repetitive but informative. For people who think they have seen as much as there is to discover about the Holocaust, this is a welcome addition to the archives.

Recently our reading group leader put together an exceptional evening in which we reviewed the book "Ten Green Bottles - The True Story of One Family's Journey from War-torn Austria to the Ghettos of Shanghai" by Vivian Jeanette Kaplan and then saw the video "Shanghai Ghetto", directed by the Mann's. Both the book that we had read and the DVD that we saw were excellent in their own right, but together they so perfectly complemented each other that the total experience was truly outstanding and the best we had ever had.

"Ten Green Bottles" is a beautifully written story about a Jewish family who lived in their highly cultured city of Vienna until the Nazi's came and were barely able to escape to Shanghai. There they tried to survive under Japanese occupation and amid a city of both unbelievable poverty for most and unbelievable wealth for the privileged few. The book is written in the literary non-fiction genre with dialog and in the first person of the heroine, the author's mother, so that you experience her life in Vienna and Shanghai as if you were in her skin. When the old movie footage and pictures, recent interviews and visit to Shanghai of the people of the video "Shanghai Ghetto" were added to this, it made you feel as if you had experienced all of what we had read and saw as if we were actually there.

It was a truly amazing combination.