A Life To Live...

by Israel Kipen

  In the weeks immediately preceding Lederman’s departure, I worked with him as he instructed me in my task. I met the approval of the ladies’ committee, but the adjustment to the daily routine demanded by the job proved less easy. On six days out of seven, I had to rise at 3.00 a.m. to go to the market. In the face of the large quantities of food needed and the fact that refrigeration facilities were not available, the food had to be obtained fresh daily. I had to learn to differentiate between meat cuts and become expert on the desirable qualities of live chickens. There was at the market a Chinese kosher butcher who had learnt the intricacies involved in the handling of kosher meat. A shochet for the killing of chickens was also at hand. Further, one required expertise in the buying of rice. One particular street in Shanghai was reserved for the rice trade and, there, Chinese dealers lined the path with bags of rice open for display. One learnt quickly to draw up a handful of rice from the bottom of the bag and compare it with that on top. By the time all the vegetables, meat and rice had been laden on a hand-drawn platform, it was usually 7.00 a.m. The kitchen staff had already arrived to take delivery of the goods and had five hours in which to prepare the meal – usually ample helpings of thick and nourishing soup, a main course of meat and vegetables, followed by a cup of tea. The job was a full-time one. There were books to be kept, moneys to be accounted for, staff to supervise, public relations work among the daily diners to engage in and a working relationship to be maintained with the ladies committee. Often, evening meetings were called by the ladies to discuss particular problems. On such evenings, I could consider myself fortunate if I grabbed four hours’ sleep.

  Overall, I adapted to my role with ease and succeeded in rendering the transition phase of the kitchen from Lederman’s more autocratic hands to my own less experienced ones trouble-free. I often wondered what my mother would have thought had she seen me handling chickens and debating the commodities with the wily Chinese dealers. When I took up my rounds of the market, it was still autumn and I found it easy to deal with the weather. But winter, involving as it did rising in the middle of the night and spending three hours or more in freezing conditions amidst market smells and nerve-racking noise, tested my stamina. There was also the purely economic consideration. The budgetary constraints were obvious, but so also was the dependence of the refugees on the daily meal for sustenance. I had to stretch each dollar to its fullest while ensuring that maximum nutrition was extracted from all the ingredients used by our Chinese chef. The chef was an out-going amiable fellow always ready to oblige, this lightening my task. In fact, the Chinese as a whole were seen as obliging, clever, enterprising, wise and self-effacing, being bearers of an old culture. We found it easy to get on with them. We understood how they thought, we could anticipate their attitudes, and we held their age-old ingrained national characteristics in high regard.

  The social milieu of the ladies involved in the auxiliary is worth noting. None of them belonged to the well-to-do, none of them carried themselves with any pretensions. The leader of the group, Madame Podolskaya, was perhaps the most representative of them. Her husband was a paid employee and they lived in a small flat with their only daughter. Originally from Bulgaria, Mrs Podolskaya exuded self-confidence and authority without undue effort. She knew her mind and commanded the allegiance of her committee. Among the others were two sisters-in-law, the Madames Rabinovitch, one of whom was short and wiry and the wife of the editor of the Russian Jewish weekly, who owned a children’s toy shop where she had to make special arrangements for its management on her rostered day on kitchen duty, the other tall and well-groomed and the wife of an architect. Another volunteer, Madame Radomistelskaya, who was related to the Rabinovitches was the wife of a lawyer who served as chairman of the community council. She was always modestly dressed, reflecting her simple way of living. I established close rapport with them. The new responsibility I acquired also gained me a number of fringe benefits, though none of them financial. By virtue of my central position within the Jewish refugee community, I had become something of a public figure. Everybody knew me, while I, in turn, came to know not only the diners at the kitchen, but also the families of the auxiliary ladies and an increasingly widening circle of Russian Jews whose club I began in time to frequent. My social standing in the community thus became enhanced.

  One afternoon, about midway through my stewardship of the kitchen, two Japanese officials arrived, requesting to speak to the manager. I was in the office attending to paperwork at the time. I invited them in. They proved to be from the secret police. One of them, after asking how many people attended the kitchen and what other activities were engaged in there, proceeded to suggest that the kitchen was in actual fact a camouflage for organised Zionist activity which, by its very orientation, was dependent upon Britain and therefore, by definition, an extension of enemy activity perpetrated under Japanese rule. I did my best to explain the real function of the kitchen in maintaining the nutrition and health of the refugees, but the official accepted none of this. He repeated, with slight variation, his original charge. Again I replied that the function of the kitchen was to feed the needy whose efforts simply to survive left them with little concern for political issues. Indeed – I went on – many of the people had been so assimilated in Poland that they had no interest in organised Jewish life, let alone in Zionism to which a large number had in fact been opposed and had done whatever they could to thwart it. This remark clearly irked one of the officials who turned upon me and said: “Do you expect us to believe that there are Jews who do not want a country of their own?” The fact clearly did not make sense to him. As a Japanese nationalist, he found such a possibility beyond conceiving. The very idea was irrational, and with the limited English at my disposal I could scarcely persuade him of its actuality. I could only stand my ground and invite the two Japanese back some other time to see for themselves that their allegations were without foundation.

  By the time they left, I was drained and worried – not because there was anything to fear in so far as the kitchen’s activities were concerned, but because we had come under political surveillance and official suspicion, this presaging grave danger to us all. The more I reflected upon the matter, the more I came to understand that the visit could not be dealt with in isolation from all else that was taking place. It was merely one component of a wider storm that was descending upon us, clearly recognised by the communal leaders to whom I tendered a report of the event.

  A manifestation of it was already evident in relation to the Sephardi community in Shanghai. Following the Japanese seizure of Shanghai in early 1942, the British subjects of that community – who had also been its most prominent members – had been ordered to wind down their interests and prepare for internment as enemy subjects for the duration of the occupation. The Kadoorie family faced an additional problem pending their internment. That family had established and funded a Jewish day school for German Jewish refugees in Hong-Kew. That school had some 550 pupils. On the eve of their internment, the Kadouries turned to the Russian Jewish community with the request that it take charge of the school during their internment. The proposition was a sensible one. However, the Russian Jews possessed little expertise in Jewish education and were at a loss as to how to administer the school and assess its work. As it was known that I had been a graduate of a Hebrew gymnasium, I was invited to join in an inspection tour of the school. The community’s leaders wanted my views before they were prepared to commit themselves to a responsibility of this nature.

  The school we were led through by our host, Sir Horace Kadoorie, was a modern building with large vented classrooms which were more impressive than those in the other Chinese school I had seen some time earlier. In the course of our inspection tour, we came across one class where a Hebrew lesson was in progress. A short thin man wearing a kippah (skull-cap) and holding a Hebrew primer stood before about a dozen pupils, the boys too wearing kippot, teaching them about trees and birds. I was struck by a certain novelty here a
nd lingered on in this room longer than in the others, probably to the annoyance of my co-visitors and our host. On leaving, I asked our host why the teacher and pupils wore kippot in this class while I had not seen kippot in any of the other classes, particularly as the lesson was neither in religion nor in Bible studies, but in something as secular as birds and trees. Our host, who was tall, broad-shouldered and bore himself with full self-assurance, clearly appeared embarrassed by the question and lost for an answer. When he finally collected himself, he said, “I do not know the reason, except that this is how Hebrew is taught in England.” I made a mental note of the answer, little suspecting at the time how valuable that snippet of information was to be much later on a different continent and in different circumstances. In the event, I supported the idea of the Russian Jewish community taking responsibility for the school.

  While we were in Hong-Kew, we elected to pay a visit to the offices of the Joint Distribution Committee and visit the “homes”, the communal living quarters known as Heime, not far away. Some 5,000 hot meals per day were provided there. As the situation deteriorated, the quality of the meals fell to 1350 calories. The JDC also provided a wide network of social supports which in some way assisted up to 7000 refugees, this representing one in every two inhabitants of the Hong-Kew ghetto. We were well received, all our questions were generously answered, and we were then invited to visit the dormitories. For me, this was a depressing experience. The building which housed the dormitory must at one time have been a warehouse, the space now being occupied by a succession of double-storied bunks. There, we found people, at the height of day, just whiling away their time lying in their cots or playing cards on the lower bunks. To me, this conveyed a sorry picture of the debilitating and corrosive effects of existing in a state of dependence and lack of purpose. I was troubled that time might be working against us all to the same conceivable end.

  As 1942 drew to an end, Mrs Aida Rabinovitch gave a New Year’s Eve party in her home to which I and others among my refugee friends were invited. Being Russian Jews, our hosts and their acquaintances were relatively well-off and, unlike the British subjects, were left alone by the Japanese. They continued in their business and professional concerns and were grateful at not being caught up in the war. For me, that evening was different on several counts. First, in our home in Bialystok, there was no such thing as celebrating a December 31st New Year’s Eve. We lived by the Jewish calendar, the New Year being an occasion not for celebration but for soul-searching. On leaving home, I had ushered in the year 1940 illicitly crossing the border into Vilna. In turn, entry into 1941 saw me fretting over the impending decision of the NKVD vis-a-vis the issuing of an exit visa. Those festivities were therefore novel and, in a sense, for me, unreal.

  On the 18th February 1943, another blow came in the form of a military Proclamation ordering all refugees to move into a small designated area of Hong-Kew where many of the German Jewish refugees had lived since their arrival. This was to be both a de jure and de facto Jewish ghetto, the first in the history of the Far East. Though daily living became more repressive and difficult under the new laws, it did not match that which was happening in Europe in the wake of a more sinister plan by Germany with regard to the Jews.

  The Gestapo chief for Japan, China and Manchuko was a Colonel Josef Meisinger, who, as Chief of the German Secret Police in Warsaw, had earned himself the title of “Butcher of Warsaw” and had so excelled himself in his murderous enthusiasm that, in 1941, he was posted to the Far East to oversee the loyalties of non-Jewish Germans to the Reich. In mid-1942, he was sent on to Shanghai to assist the Japanese in “solving” their Jewish problem. Shortly after arriving, he unveiled his plans vis-a-vis the refugees to two Japanese, the Japanese vice-Consul in Shanghai and specialist in Jewish affairs, Mitsugi Shibota, and the director of the office for refugee affairs, a former naval officer, Tsutoma Kubota. The details of this episode – the Meisinger Plan, Shibota’s humane act in warning Shanghai’s Jewish leaders of the scheme, and the subsequent cloak-and-dagger manoeuvres undertaken to foil it – are contained in Tokayer and Swartz’ already-mentioned book “The Fugu Plan”. My own recollections of the affair hark back to my acquaintance with the head of the Russian Jewish community, Boris Topas, a proud, self-assured and impressive man, who was to pay a high personal price for the ultimate neutralisation of the Meisinger plan. He was arrested with a number of other leaders, but was the only one held in custody and subjected to brutal treatment at the hands of the Japanese secret police. On his release, I scarcely recognised him. His face was disfigured and he was a broken man.

  Compared with the possible implementation of the Meisinger Plan, the Japanese military Proclamation confining Jews to Hong-Kew must in retrospect be viewed as a benevolent act. We were given three months in which to move into the designated ghetto. This involved considerable uprooting of our re-established lives and adjustment to already overcrowded conditions and other difficulties. But the initial distress and panic attending the transfer soon gave way to a necessary pragmatism. Each person in his or her own way, recognising the futility of lamenting the situation, learned the lessons needed for survival. What had to be done was to secure new accommodation within the ghetto and find someone willing to verify that they were being employed at the time, this enabling an exit pass from Hong-Kew to be obtained to cover the hours of work. As a consequence of the new situation, the kitchen of which I had been in charge was disbanded. It had played its role. But for the vision of Lederman who had established it in the first place, many of the Jews who attended it for their daily noon-day meal would not have survived their first winter in Shanghai.

  With the creation of the Hong-Kew ghetto, a sad chapter was written into the history of the Jewish refugees of Shanghai. Where, before, they had enjoyed freedom of movements and activities, they now became subjected to new and harsh military regulations which were something of a nightmare for everyone. In accordance with the Japanese Proclamation of 1943, a new office for refugees was established in Hong-Kew with which all refugees had to register and all requests, applications for visas and other concerns had to be lodged. It was manned by Japanese officials who, while they were civilian in appearance, conducted its affairs with relentless military brutality. The man in charge, one Ghoya, to whom everyone had to present, was a manic sadist who was forever in a rage and given to physical violence. His power over the refugees was total, and no appeal was possible against his whims, capricious decisions and outrageous behaviour. His assistant, a man named Okura, went beyond mere kicking and punching, and imposed jail sentences that were often paramount to death sentences, the jails to which he sent the refugees being infested with typhus to which more than one person succumbed and died. I, too, had to face them one day. In preparation for the worst, I placed a small bag of camphor crystals about my neck as a precaution against typhus in case I earned their displeasure. Luck was with me that day.

  Where, earlier, living in the French Concession, the Polish Jewish refugees had set up their own assistance schemes, in Hong-Kew, where they constituted less than ten percent of the refugee population, they were compelled to yield up their separate group identity and rely on such established aid societies as existed for the benefit of all Jewish refugees. However, once again, as far as they could, many individuals from within this stream proved independent and resilient. By and large, the Polish Jews did not let themselves fall back on communal dormitories. With whatever meagre resources they possessed, they secured alternative accommodation, obtained the required employment papers from the permanent residents with whom they had had commercial connections before the Proclamation, and gained exit passes from the Hong-Kew ghetto to their place of work beyond. To the best of my knowledge, they were not molested by the Japanese authorities.

  My personal situation following the closure of the kitchen was again in flux, as was that of many others. But, as before, the invisible hand of good fortune favoured me. Shortly before our arrival in Shanghai, the Ru
ssian Jewish community had opened a Jewish hospital in the French Concession. It was located in Rue Pichon. The building belonged to the Catholic Church and was occupied by the Polish diplomatic mission which vacated it as a result of the war. The Jewish community took out a lease on it and installed a hospital containing sixty beds, an operating theatre and other support facilities. The building stood surrounded by beautiful spacious gardens. At the time of the Ghetto Proclamation, the management of the hospital was in the hands of a middle-aged refugee from Poland. It appears that his performance did not meet the hospital committee’s expectations, for scarcely had the kitchen closed than I was offered the post of general manager of the hospital. As part of the deal, I would be provided with a room, full board and some payment in cash. There was in the offer an extraordinary silver lining. While the Japanese Proclamation was all-embracing, it did permit one exception; namely, that people working in hospitals with quarters on the premises were exempted from the general regulation and permitted to remain at their place of work. After giving the appearance of thinking the matter over, I accepted the post; so that, at the very time when most people moved into the restricted and overcrowded conditions of Hong-Kew, I moved to the gardens of Rue Pichon, settled into my room and threw myself into the new task with enthusiasm.