Photos give rare glimpse of history: They fled the Nazis and found safety in Shanghai

They sailed into Shanghai in July 1939 during the worst of the summer heat, finding a patchwork city of 4 million people throbbing with rickshaws, beggars, opium dens and malaria.

For Gerd "Jerry" Lindenstraus, who was just 11, the scene was a far cry from his small-town, upper-class upbringing. It was also a welcome relief to his Jewish family, who’d had no choice but to flee their native Germany.

“We were very much assimilated German Jews,” he said. “We kept the holidays. I had a nanny. We had a good life until the Nazis came.”

Lindenstraus and his family were among an estimated 20,000 Jews who would escape persecution and find refuge in Shanghai as Hitler’s Nazi Party strengthened its grip on Germany. The refugees would remain largely unscathed as the Holocaust claimed the lives of some 6 million Jews in Europe. Their experience – though challenging – would imbue in them a lifelong affection for Chinese customs and tastes.

Even as Jews were increasingly brutalized by the Nazis and desperate to leave in the late 1930s and early 1940s, antisemitic attitudes throughout Europe and the U.S. raised roadblocks to entry for Jewish refugees. Shanghai put up no such restrictions.

“This wasn’t about adventure or tourism,” said Kevin Ostoyich, a history professor at Valparaiso University in Porter County, Indiana. “The only reason they went to Shanghai is because the rest of the world shut their doors to them."

Ostoyich, author of a forthcoming book about the subject, has interviewed close to 80 Holocaust refugees, including several dozen who escaped to Shanghai.

"When they got off the boat, interviewees say the thing they remember most was the stench and the filth," he said. "Many were from professional classes – professors, doctors and lawyers, people with furs and chauffeurs. They get off the boat and they're put on a truck, and they're looking around and they see rats and realize they are in a completely different world with no understanding of the culture and no idea what this place is."

An exhibit offering new glimpses into that time opened last week at New York’s Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum. “Shanghai, Homeland Once Upon a Time,” featuring 200 photographs and other memorabilia showcasing the Shanghai refugee experience, runs through Aug. 14.

The exhibition is among a series of cultural initiatives highlighting that historic time and the memories of those who lived it. The lineup includes a documentary, an oratorio presented in collaboration with the New York Philharmonic and a musical about Jewish refugee musicians who helped fuel the growth of classical music in China.

“The importance of Shanghai is that if only some other doors had been open, we would be talking about a lot more people who were saved,” Ostoyich said. “Unfortunately, we’re only talking about 20,000.”

Acknowledgment of their serendipity would be a common refrain of those who made it to Shanghai, including Lindenstraus. At 94, he lives in Manhattan, where he still gives talks about the experience.

“Once we got out of Germany, we were able to breathe freely,” he said. “I tell people, if it hadn’t been for Shanghai, I wouldn’t be here.”

'That was the beginning of the end'

The turning point, Lindenstraus and others said, had been the night of Nov. 9, 1938, when the Nazis laid rampage to synagogues and Jewish schools throughout Germany – an event known as Kristallnacht, or The Night of Broken Glass.

“That was the beginning of the end,” said Lindenstraus. “When I went to school the next day, it wasn’t there anymore. My father and many other Jews decided it was time to get out.”

Until 1941, the Nazis practiced a policy of forcible migration, Ostoyich said.

“They wanted Jews to get out of the country," he said. "It would be onerous and expensive, and you would lose all your valuables and property, but that was the option.”

It fell to many women to navigate a bureaucracy of proper forms and stamps to get their husbands and male relatives out of the camps to which they had been sent. Frantic, they purchased whatever means were available for passage to China, with some splurging for deluxe steamship cabins.

“It’s an interesting irony among many people who were children then that they remember that ship journey as being a wonderful one,” said Ostoyich, who has interviewed close to 80 Holocaust survivors, including several dozen who escaped to Shanghai. “But it was luxury on the way, and destitution once they got there.”

Elizabeth Grebenschikoff of St. Petersburg, Florida, said her Jewish grandfather, a German military veteran living in Berlin, had received a summons in 1939 to meet with the Gestapo. Realizing the gravity of the situation, she said, he quickly applied for passage from Germany to Shanghai.

Told there was a six-month wait, he returned the next day with a wad of Reichsmarks wedged into his application and asked the shipping company official to take another look.

“All of a sudden a cabin appeared,” said Grebenschikoff, 71.

The family of four – including Grebenschikoff’s mother Betty, who was then 9, and her 11-year-old sister Edith – slipped away two days before her grandfather’s scheduled meeting, escaping through Italy with whatever they could carry and boarding a boat to Shanghai in Naples.

“A whole lifetime of fighting for Germany in World War I, of being German to the core, was gone,” Grebenschikoff said. “So they started a new life in Shanghai.”

Lindenstraus’ father had owned a small department store, and while his family temporarily procured a small apartment in a nice neighborhood, they eventually ended up in Hongkou, a one-mile-square district known as the Jewish Ghetto that would house most Jewish refugees until well after the end of World War II.

Adapting to a strange new world

China hadn’t so much opened its arms as had its arms opened, Ostoyich said, a result of the opium wars that had left many locals addicted and colonial conquest that had divided the city into a mishmash of districts controlled by Western powers. Japan was also encroaching, forcibly taking over the city after the December 1941 attack on Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor.

Many Jewish refugee children attended English-language schools set up by wealthy Sephardic Jews already settled in China.

“Our parents had a harder time because they had to make a living,” Lindenstraus said. “But the Chinese people were worse off. The Japanese treated them badly.”

His family lived in an upstairs room with an outhouse on the roof and no running water, occasionally taking up offers by Chinese families to sell them water.

“They had dirty water for washing and clean water for drinking,” he said. “We got along. They had their own problems, but they were nice to us.”

Ostoyich, of Valparaiso, said that was one positive that many took away from their Shanghai experience.

“Refugees were experiencing antisemitism all over the world, and yet they felt their experience in Shanghai was devoid of that,” he said.

Grebenschikoff said that was her mother’s experience as well, one that eased the adjustment to a new world with unfamiliar tongues, weather, food, insects and diseases.

“The Chinese people were so welcoming, even though they were in wartime conditions,” she said. “… None of our family would have been alive had it not been for the Chinese people.”

Chinese influences live on, years later

According to Ostoyich, the refugees largely kept to themselves, making limited efforts to learn Chinese or connect with the local population. A “Little Vienna” of sorts sprouted in Shanghai, with Viennese cafes and vaudeville theaters.

“What you had primarily was people who were not there by choice,” Ostoyich said. “It was a completely alien world and they did not see it as a new home, so in a sense they built a bubble, trying to recreate and stay connected to their European origins.”

Nonetheless, many of their children would go on to fondly maintain Chinese customs and tastes they learned there.

“We didn’t have ketchup at our tables; we had soy sauce,” said Grebenschikoff, whose mother would meet and marry her husband Oleg, a Russian refugee, in Shanghai. “We always gravitated to restaurants with round tables and lazy Susans. We celebrated Chinese New Year.”

For those refugees who grew up as children in Shanghai, the experience was in many ways positive, and some don't want to have their childhoods painted strictly in tragedy. At the same time, as with other Holocaust survivors, many have had to deal with feelings of guilt.

“They survived outside of Europe, away from the main theater, and for a long period of time were uneasy about being survivors,” Ostoyich said. “That is a personal, emotional, psychological journey that they have had to travel over the decades. It’s difficult for them to compare their experience, as unpleasant as it may have been, to what they know happened to their grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles and siblings who did not escape.”

Some of the more well-known Shanghai refugees include W. Michael Blumenthal, who served as President Jimmy Carter's treasury secretary, and pop artist Peter Max.

Ostoyich said one Shanghai refugee who’d settled in San Francisco told him that he habitually carried diamonds in his pockets for decades afterward, so panicked was he with the possibility that his life might be again completely disrupted without warning.

Lindenstraus said the experience “changed my life forever,” thickening his skin and teaching him to appreciate life, while Grebenschikoff said her mother always felt like China was home despite the hardship, returning to visit many times over the years.

Betty Grebenschikoff often spoke to classrooms about her experience, eager to share the acceptance she’d felt as a refugee from people in Shanghai.

“That was her life’s work here in the U.S.,” Grebenschikoff said. “She felt obligated to give back.”

She said she’s taken up the mantle, working with China’s Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum and helping other refugee descendants to spread her mother’s message.

“We tell people, if we’re not going to stand up for justice, we will be doomed to be bystanders,” she said.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Shanghai's Jewish refugees: Exhibit highlights little-known history