Where did 20,000 Jews hide from the Holocaust? In Shanghai
In the late 1930s, as the Nazis stepped up their persecution of German and Austrian Jews, many countries in the West severely limited the number of visas they granted to refugees.
But there was one place refugees could go without even obtaining a visa: Shanghai.
Long known as an "open city," the Chinese port was tolerant of immigrants. Much of it was controlled not by the nationalist government, but by foreign powers – including France, Britain and the United States – that had demanded their own autonomous districts. Jewish people had been moving there since the mid-1800s, and as long as people could reach it – at the time, most likely by boat – they could live there.
Shanghai would go on to harbor nearly 20,000 Jewish evacuees from Europe before and during World War II. But life there was not always pretty. Japan had invaded China earlier in the decade and eventually seized control of the entire city. The Japanese army forced Jewish refugees into one working-class district, Hongkou, leading to crowded, unsanitary conditions in which disease spread rapidly.
https://www.npr.org/2023/08/06/1192118339/jewish-refugees-shanghai-world-war-ii
My Israeli friend was born there in 1946. His mother's family had been there since 1905; his father was a teenage refugee from the Russian Revolution, riding the rails to get there (I never heard the whole story). Attorney Laurence Tribe was also born there.
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