Shanghai Museum Unveils Memorial to Jews Who Found Haven in City

The Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum unveiled a memorial wall on Wednesday listing the names of 13,732 Jews who found a haven in the Chinese city during World War II.

In the 1930s and 40s, thousands of Jews escaping Nazi Germany arrived in Shanghai, a place they could enter without a visa. After the Évian Conference of 1938, when the major powers shut their doors to nearly all Jewish immigrants, the city remained one of the few available places of refuge. By the beginning of World War II, more European Jews had fled to Shanghai than any other city in the world.

The memorial consists of a 111-foot-long copper wall etched with the names and featuring a sculpture of six allegorical figures representing faith, suffering, love, determination, light and hope, designed by the Chinese artist He Ning.

Chen Jian, the museum’s director, said the names on the memorial were compiled with the help of former Jewish refugees in Shanghai, as well as Chinese and foreign scholars, according to China Daily.

Many of the names were taken from a list found in the German book “Exil Shanghai: 1938-1947,” co-authored by Sonja Mühlberger, 75, who was herself born in Shanghai to refugee parents in the 1930s and has been involved in the memorial project. The list in her book was first compiled during the war by three teenage Jewish girls hired by Japanese military officers to undertake an informal census. Most of the Jewish population then was relegated by the Japanese to an overcrowded district called Hongkou, a “designated area for stateless refugees.”

In a museum press release, Ms. Mühlberger comments, “My parents’ experiences in Shanghai were certainly not the easiest, but if they had not been exiled there, I wouldn’t even be alive today, let alone have the chance to tell this history.”

Werner Glass, 87, now lives in Mercer Island, Wash., but spent 14 years, from the ages of 6 to 20 as a Jewish immigrant in Shanghai, and so also owes his and his family’s survival to the city. He recalled the Ohel Moshe Synagogue, the site of the new memorial, as well as the harsh realities of life under Japanese occupation. His most vivid memory of wartime Shanghai was the aftermath of a Japanese air raid on Aug. 14, 1937, when he watched open trucks cart away body parts from his fifth-story window. “At first I didn’t recognize that they were people. I thought it was butchered animals or something.”

Although his immediate family arrived in 1933, when they were considered immigrants rather than refugees, his grandparents, aunts and uncles arrived later, and so may be listed on the memorial wall. He was excited by the prospect of someday looking up his relatives in the museum’s new online database. “That’s the main thing I would be looking for,” he said. “I would like to visit, although I think my traveling days are pretty much over.”

CHEN JIAN, HOLOCAUST AND THE NAZI ERA, JEWS AND JUDAISM,
MONUMENTS AND MEMORIALS (STRUCTURES), REFUGEES AND DISPLACED PERSONS SHANGHAI (CHINA )WORLD WARII (1939-45)