by Israel Kipen
Not only the older wealthier establishment was under threat. The shop-keepers, too, whom I dealt with, were unlikely to be spared. I observed them closely and came to know their routine. One such routine revolved around the midday meal. This meal would be brought to them by a messenger carrying many dishes in round flat straw baskets balanced on a bamboo rod. A large round table would be hastily set up on the middle of the store and the diverse dishes placed on it. The entire staff, from boss to junior – whether all were of one family or included hired hands as well – would sit around it without any semblance of hierarchy. What struck me about this were two things: first, the general social levelling of all, a phenomenon not normally associated with old societies, and second, the over-supply of people engaged in what were essentially small shops. The latter aspect reflected the over-population of the nation as a whole – 600 million at the time – militating against the productivity and gainful employment of many who simply hung redundantly around establishments which, in turn, could not well remunerate them for inactivity. Such a situation could not last indefinitely, particularly in large commercial cities like Shanghai. Many fell by the wayside, cast towards the fringes of society. There, they represented less a social or moral challenge than a burden for which that society was little disposed to feel any obligation. Those who thus turned to vagrancy stirred revulsion rather than empathy; at best, they were met with indifference by those more favoured. In summer, the destitute somehow managed to survive, or, at least, were not seen to be dying within public view. But with the onset of winter, being without shelter, they were at the mercy of the elements, dying in the streets from hunger, cold and exposure. The only time anyone took interest in them was when civic employees came with hand-drawn platforms to pile up the dead and carry them away. I recall one scene where these “undertakers”, seeing that there was still life left in one body they had picked up, put it back, looked at each other as if to say “this one will have to wait till tomorrow”, and went away. Such a state of affairs could not exist indefinitely; some basic societal change would have to come in time.
So, 1944 came and passed. The war both in Europe and in the East was drawing to a close, with victory swinging towards the Allies. As refugees, we came to believe that, short of some cataclysmic happening, we would survive the war, and, as a consequence, we gave our minds and imaginations rein to contemplate the future. For my own part, I did not make plans or set specific targets as others did – conditioned to dealing with the dayto-day, I had lost all gift for long-range planning – but I did home in on one resolve: that, after the war, I should not remain in Asia but return to some form of European society as soon as I could. That urge was not prompted by any intuition of oncoming political upheaval that awaited China. On the contrary, the immediate post-war period would in all probability offer opportunities particularly attractive and tempting and worth remaining there. But there were other considerations. Grateful as I was to providence for my very survival, I had already lost six years of the best part of my life; I knew that whatever I turned to, I should have to start out from scratch; while, most telling, I had a family still living that relied upon me to restore them to normal living. Given all this, I had no intention being sucked into an alien environment, whatever the temptations.
Although I did harbour doubts about returning to a Western civilisation – Germany in the twentieth century had brought a serious question mark upon the very notion of civilisation – I knew that I had no alternative but to do so. I felt inwardly that, in the aftermath of the Jewish tragedy, which was by then more reliably talked about, the obligation was vested in me in some way to make good the Jewish loss, both individual and national. I was, in a sense, more than one man alone; my value to my people exceeded that which I, as individual, could lay claim to; I thought of the dozens of members of my family who had perished in the war, and, as such, it was only by making good my own life that I could in some way rehabilitate their memory and bring to fruition of a sort the multifold and magnificent potential which had been lost through their deaths. In the hold of this notion, I kept thinking of my namesake cousin, the son of my uncle Avrom Ber, who was a mathematician of great potential. When I contemplated how much intellectual potential must have been lost to humanity through the crematoria of Europe, I felt acutely my own inadequacy in attempting to compensate for such waste, but I knew, also, that I could not desist, however modestly, from trying to salvage something of the name and reputation of my murdered family. This became a compulsion superimposed upon the more customary limited drives and ambitions that were more in keeping with my character.
At that time, I was asked by the vice-chairman of the hospital, Semion Liberman, to help him manage his cafe in Nanking Road. I agreed. It was while working there that I heard of the surrender of the Japanese. I walked outside to note the reaction of the indigenous people. There was none of the spontaneity I had expected to see. The Japanese, although defeated, were still in town, and prudence, a strong and admirable quality among the Chinese, dictated emotional restraint. Meanwhile, the arrogance of the occupiers turned to fear. They walked clinging to the walls and with their eyes downcast, hoping not to be noticed. They had been humiliated; they may also have feared personal retribution.
Once again, with Japan’s capitulation, as had earlier happened with Japanese occupation, the status of Shanghai changed without a single shot being fired. In no time, the American navy came to Shanghai and living took on new forms and offered new possibilities. The coveted American dollar, so long treated as a commodity, was turned into currency. The Americans sought certain goods that needed satisfying, and people quickly learned to make hay while the sun shone. I, too, found myself caught up in the whirlwind. The head of the X-ray department at the Jewish hospital had his own clinic and laboratory. One day, I was approached by one of his partners with the proposition that we distill spirits for the insatiable thirst of thousands of GIs coming ashore. The laboratory was fully equipped to set about production, but wanted me to run the enterprise so that the staff would not be seen to be implicated in an activity that was less than professional. I do not recall the terms of the deal, but I consented and added another trade to the string of occupations I had practised in Shanghai. The work kept me in the laboratory till late at night. The distilling process itself took little time. What drew out the work into the night hours was the phase of purification of the brew which had to be done by particularly primitive methods, the liquid being purified by passing it through a canvas bag filled with charcoal. I did not work long at the task, but it did permit me a living and provided me with the extra means I should require in due time on leaving the place.
A post-war refugee rehabilitation office was now set up by the Joint Distribution Committee to facilitate the departure of those with somewhere to go and find destinations for the others. This office did sterling work.
My own moment of decision, too, had now come, but in the event, my future fell into place almost of its own accord. Early on, in considering where I should wish to move to, I came to confront the first basic dilemma that required resolution. When I left home in 1939, I had done so with the aim of getting to Palestine. This was most consistent with my Zionist upbringing and beliefs. While in Vilna in 1940, I had sent a number of my university papers to the Hebrew University in the hope of being accepted there. Conceivably, if Japan had not entered the war and taken over Shanghai so soon after my arrival there, I might have realised my ambition, for, one day before Pearl Harbour, 100 certificates of entry into Palestine arrived at the British Consulate in Shanghai, these having to be locked away in the Swiss Consulate which represented Britain during the war. Each certificate could potentially have saved a family. Being single, I was at a disadvantage, but I did nurture some hope of receiving one. In 1945, when the full extent of the horror that had befallen the Jews was becoming known and more than anything else validated the basic tenets of Zionism, Palestine once more became for me the first destination to be considered. Ho
wever, Palestine quickly fell by the way as a likely destination. By then, the Attlee Government was in office and Ernest Bevin was Minister for Foreign Affairs. His handling of the Palestine issue was to leave him with the dubious and lasting reputation of notoriety. As early as 1945, it was plain that intending immigrants to Palestine were not destined to be expeditiously accommodated. I, for one, did not intend to stay put in Shanghai waiting for some resolution to the Palestine issue that was clearly distant in the coming.
I was compelled, therefore, to look at other options. Of these, there were two main ones. The one centred upon the Kipen family in Chile; the other involved one of Mother’s cousins, Rivka Dorevitch, who lived in Melbourne. I decided that I would opt for the first opportunity to leave that presented itself. I wrote to both families and received encouraging replies from each. I was placed in the position of having to choose. I knew that Father’s cousin in Santiago had done very well for himself. Not only was he in a position to help, but he would in fact have been more than willing to do so, owing his very success to what he had learned in Father’s knitting firm in Bialystok. Against this, the Dorevitches in Melbourne were unknown to me. Rivka Dorevitch had been a Goldman back home, but had left Bialystok early and come to Australia via Palestine. I had never met her and had little knowledge of her and her family. In the end, however, I opted for Australia. What had truly decided the matter was most simply my disinclination to live in South America, this being sufficient to nullify the benefits to be gained by joining my kinsmen there. I wrote to the Dorevitches and the Kipens in turn, accepting the offer of the one to apply for an immigration permit on my behalf, thanking the other for their willingness to help and asking them to be as generous to Father and the rest of the family, should they in their time need their aid.
The papers from Australia were attended to most expeditiously, along with all other formalities including the purchase of tickets. Together, a total of twenty-seven people, mostly middle-aged and elderly German Jewish refugees, were heading for Australia. The only other Polish family consisted of Kuba Kronenberg, his wife Lilka and their daughter Irene. The Joint placed me in charge of them, entrusting to me all necessary papers and instructions. As the time for departure drew near, one Motie Ruzanski, a permanent resident of Shanghai who had married a refugee classmate of mine, called on me and insisted that I take with me U.S. $500 as a loan which I could repay in my own time. I had scarcely expected such a gesture, but nonetheless accepted it most gratefully. With this capital at my disposal, the idea came to me to order $500 worth of embroidered tablecloth to be paid for at destination against the presentation of documents. I could not take the goods with me, as the journey was to be divided into two stages. We were, first, to fly from Shanghai to Hong Kong, and from there to travel by sea to Australia. The Joint gave me the air tickets, while the boat tickets, they said, would be waiting for us at the shipping office in Hong Kong.
I took leave of Shanghai with mixed feelings. The many friends I had made since leaving Vilna had become my extended family, joined together by the commonality of our destiny. Moreover, other bonds had also been forged, as reflected in the Ruzanski gesture of lending me money.
In the weeks preceding departure, the political climate in Shanghai became more highly charged. I recall General Marshall’s historic mission to China in his quest to resolve the challenge being mounted against Chiang Kai Shek and his entrenched family. We, as refugees, were not fully aware of the high stakes that were being played for in Chinese internal affairs at the time. What we did know was that the old regime was now on shaky ground, that the ruling family was taking full advantage of its remaining power, and that the status quo had become unstable, insecure and transitory. I sensed that some of the smart business people among the Polish refugees were looking at me somewhat differently. My interests and occupations had long made me something of an enigma to my erstwhile friends and acquaintances.
Among the learned and professional, I had been a businessman; among the men of business, I was a melamed (literally, an old-fashioned teacher, but in the pejorative, a person detached from reality). There was, in fact, truth in each group’s appraisal, but, rather than leading to my exclusion from either, each group felt itself reasonably comfortable with me in its midst, in so far as I conformed to its own norms, even while not shedding alternative values and comprehensions of life. Each could claim me as its own, but only up to a certain point. However, as the departure date drew nearer, some of the businessmen who until then had probably not credited me with more that 50% on their scale of values began to talk to me differently. People who had been puzzled by my determination to leave began to seek me out for my views about the situation, ready not to dismiss my single-mindedness as the light-hearted flightiness of a young man but as a well-considered plan. Some begged me to write from Australia to tell them of conditions and opportunities that prevailed in that faraway land.
The Russian Jewish community of Shanghai seemed on the surface to be at ease and enjoying the boom of the post-war period. If any did nurture misgivings about the future – and some of them probably did – they did nothing to betray such thoughts. However, from my reading of the situation, I came to be more troubled for them than for the refugees. The refugees, true, had been destitute during the war. But, given the opportunity, any decision they arrived at to leave would be a relatively easy one, there being nothing either material or sentimental to keep them there. Sad memories and bitter experiences were scarcely the stuff of which homes were made. For the established Jewish community, however, Shanghai was home. Moreover, they had not been affected adversely by the war, while, with the war over, they now actually found themselves in an up-swing stage of an economy which seemed to be opening up new business opportunities to them. It was reminiscent of the period following the Russian occupation of Bialystok. The comparison seemed to me a valid one, but far from seeing in it encouraging signs for the Shanghai community, I felt more of a pessimism on its behalf. I had learnt how quickly situations could swing from one extreme to another, and, intuitively, I sensed that the hour of reckoning for Shanghai in general and for its European contingent in particular was near at hand.
As before, when I had stood at the window of the train taking me from Vilna to Moscow, then again on leaving Japan, I was beset by an acute nostalgia for Shanghai. I had spent three-and-a-half years there – much longer than in Vilna – and, again, I was farewelling a part of my life I knew I was leaving for good.
One morning in May 1946, those of us who were leaving were instructed to assemble at the corner of Bund and Nanking Roads at 5.00 a.m. At that hour of the morning, it was bitterly cold and we were warmly dressed as we waited an hour and a half for a bus to take us to the airport. We were to fly Cathay Airways which was owned by Madame Chiang Kai Shek. The plane itself was an American military plane. Apart from ourselves and the two members of the crew who were Europeans, there were no other passengers in it. We sat strapped along its sides. It was my first flying experience. There was little conversation, everybody, like myself, I guessed, deep in private thought and in a state of mind in which the elation of departure mingled with anticipations and uncertainties. By the time we were given sandwiches, which I did not expect, the mood brightened. The flight to Hong Kong took about six hours. At the airport, the heat was intense, people walked about in shorts, while our own clothes, worn against the Shanghai cold, were an uncomfortable burden. We were taken to the Peninsula Hotel in Kow Loon, which was still under military command, with some of its windows sand-bagged. We were greeted sympathetically by a Captain Davidson. As I served as the appointed spokesman of the group, he invited me to follow him. He showed me the accommodation which consisted of stretchers on the mezzanine floor. I refused to accept these, arguing that many of my companions were elderly and exhausted, they were overcome by the sudden heat they confronted, and were in need of proper accommodation. He looked at me quizzically. Being a military man, he was not prepared for my refusal, but relented.
We were allocated rooms, and after a quick wash and change of clothes, Kuba Kronenberg and I made our way to the shipping office to make arrangements for the sea voyage. When we presented ourselves to collect the tickets that we had been told were awaiting us there, we were informed that no such tickets existed. We were informed, too, that the ship was sailing the next day at 4.00 p.m. That placed us in a difficult situation. I asked who was the leader of Hong Kong’s Jewish community and was advised to seek out Sir Lawrence Kadoorie. Kronenberg demurred about the idea. We were mindful that we may in fact not be received. But decisiveness was necessary as we had only twenty-four hours in which to act. I clearly remember the Kadoorie office. As we entered, I was drawn to a big multi-panelled Chinese screen. A European woman who asked about the purpose of our visit was taken aback by our request – and insistence – to see her employer without an appointment. Much to our surprise, we were ushered into Kadoorie’s office with little delay. Kadoorie was a short man in his forties. He received us politely, though with some wonderment. When I laid before him our position, he asked what I expected of him. There were two things, I said: first, to telephone Shanghai to verify my story, and second, to help us secure the necessary shipping tickets from the shipping line. To that, he raised an eyebrow and studied me intently. He must have been struck by my chutzpah which, while expressed in less than adequate English, made him sit up. As he sat there reflecting over what he should or could do in what seemed an inordinately long time, his secretary knocked at the door and brought in a cable. Kadoorie read the cable and smiled. For what he was holding was a cable from the Joint office in Shanghai confirming our story. The timing of its arrival was near-miraculous. I hate to think what turn events may have taken had the cable not arrived when it did. From then on, we had no further problems. Kronenberg and I parted from Kadoorie with smiles and handshakes, but it took me several hours to overcome my accumulated tension.