The Integration of Jewish Refugees from Shanghai into Post-World War II San Francisco

The transnational story of "Shanghai Jews" began in 1938 after the Nazi annexation of Austria (Anschluss) and the November pogroms (Kristallnacht), when German and Austrian Jews sought to escape the inferno. Shanghai, which was one of the few places in the world that did not require an entry visa, offered one possible route out.² In their quest to get there, more than 16,000 Jews rode on trains through the Brenner Pass on the Austrian-Italian border and embarked on ocean liners in Genoa. After that path closed in June 1940, they traveled on the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok, where they boarded ships bound for Shanghai via Japan.³ Those trains and ships carried them to safety in Asia's largest port, a city with over 5,000,000 Chinese and 50,000 foreigners. Over the next decade, as China experienced military and political turmoil, these German-speaking Jewish refugees formed a cohesive community of families and unaccompanied men, who were either unmarried or had left their non-Jewish wives behind. The Chinese Civil War (1945–1949) and the refugees' hope that Shanghai would serve only as a waystation led all but a few to emigrate from China after the collapse of the Axis powers in 1945. Approximately 7,000 refugees traveled to San Francisco. Unlike Canada and Australia, which ran selective labor schemes, the United States permitted corporate affidavits with no labor contracts.⁴ The US government also offered transit visas to those journeying onward to Canada, Europe, Palestine/State of Israel, or Latin America. The rest of the group traveled directly to Australia, Canada, and Europe.⁵

Little is known of Shanghai Jews' post-World War II emigration and resettlement processes. After spending an anxious decade together, including twenty-eight months confined in a Japanese-sanctioned "designated area," which the refugees called the "ghetto," it is striking that so many refugees' memoirs, diaries, and testimonies were silent about their transition to freedom outside of China.⁶ Their stories instead frequently conformed to the Holocaust survivor narrative of experiences under Nazism, flight, survival, and grief. Those who spent their childhood in Shanghai frequently employed this literary strategy and supplemented their stories with what they learned from their parents.

The absence of Shanghai Jews' post-Holocaust stories in memoirs, diaries, and testimonies raises questions concerning their postwar transition from Shanghai to their new homes in Australia, Europe, Israel, and the Americas. How did the refugees experience their first days of arrival? How did they interact with the local Jewish community and other Holocaust survivors? How did the former groups perceive Shanghai Jews while still reeling from the news in Europe? How did Shanghai Jews negotiate their refugee experiences as they attempted to find a place for themselves socially and economically in their new locales? In turn, how did the broader society treat these traumatized new migrants?

These questions can be answered through the framework of diaspora: Shanghai Jews carved out their own space within the German-speaking Jewish diaspora of over 250,000 refugees from Nazism.⁷ They constructed a "microdiaspora," grounded in their shared trauma of uprooting, and in experiences and memories of surviving in and emigrating from Shanghai during a catastrophic moment in Jewish history.⁸ While not a "home" in a literal sense, Shanghai served as a nexus for experiencing and remembering their Holocaust survival.⁹ As white Europeans, they grappled with cultural shocks; as impoverished and stateless residents, they struggled with hyperinflation, scarce goods, and uncertainty without consular protection; as Jews, they were confined in a "ghetto."

Amidst these difficulties, Shanghai's transcolonial and cosmopolitan nature afforded new arrivals a chance to create economic, political, social, and cultural activities with German-Jewish flair. In "Little Vienna"—as English-language Shanghai newspapers described the German-Jewish community—they spoke German while learning English and "pidgin English," a blend of Chinese and English.¹⁰ Compared to other transient communities that had escaped Nazi persecution, Shanghai lasted the longest, from 1938 to 1950. This protracted wait for resettlement elsewhere contributed to formations of...