by Karin Tanabe
“Maybe the Germans are exerting more influence over them,” said Max Hartmann when he and Leo had first seen the signs. “But I doubt many have truly been indoctrinated. So many have said since we arrived that the Japanese believe that the Jews are very powerful. That they could be a help rather than a hindrance, so please don’t worry too much,” he’d assured his son as Leo reread the notice.
For the Jewish community, life in the city was difficult, but tolerable. And every day the Hartmanns thanked God that they were in Asia, not Europe, where lives were being extinguished as easily as two fingers pinching out a flame. News of what was happening to the Jews in Austria and elsewhere had trickled in, and while they weren’t sure what to believe, they knew it was a miracle they weren’t there.
Hani and Max had tried desperately to persuade the rest of their families to come to Shanghai once they realized their lives were not at risk there, especially in the early days when Ho Feng-Shan was issuing hundreds of visas, but no one had followed them. Some were afraid to travel such a distance, or did not believe that Austria would become more dangerous than it had been in 1939. Some, like Max’s brother and his family, found refuge in other countries. And others, they were sure, were dead.
The Hartmanns had met many Jews who had arrived in China with the visas issued by Ho Feng-Shan in Vienna, as well as others who came with the help of a Japanese diplomat in Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara. Those with Japanese transit visas had traveled through Japan, many living there for weeks, even months, before making their way from Kobe to Japanese-occupied Shanghai.
The Jews in Shanghai had been poverty-stricken, yet their lives were steady. But things began to deteriorate rapidly in the spring of 1943, after those ominous signs went up on every pole and bare concrete wall in Shanghai. According to the decree, Jews who had arrived before 1937 could stay where they were, but those who had come after—most of the city’s Jewish population—were to be corralled in a designated area, a small part of Hongkew.
The Japanese officials did not call it a ghetto, but that’s what it was, Leo’s parents told him. “I’m sure they won’t kill us, but if they tell you where you have to live, control when you can leave, and force you to stay in one of the city’s slums, then that is a ghetto,” Max said.
The Hartmanns were warned by the Jewish community leaders that they would need passes to both leave and return to the restricted area, and that they would have to renew them every month, no longer free to move around the city. They had until May 18 to relocate, but housing was quickly becoming scarce, so they agreed to go sooner.
Leo ripped one of the signs off the post and let it fall in a brown puddle of filth on the ground. “The designated area is bordered on the west by the line connecting Chaoufoong, Muirhead, and Dent Roads; on the east by Yangtzepoo Creek; on the south by the line connecting East Seward, Muirhead, and Wayside Roads; and on the North by the boundary of the International Settlement,” the notices read. The area was less than two square kilometers and there were already one hundred thousand Chinese living there. They lived in dark, damp alleyways, sometimes a dozen in an apartment, full of filth and grime, lice and disease. The Jews were constantly being vaccinated by the Japanese, but they did not bother with the Chinese, not minding at all if typhoid spread through the alleys, killing generations. “It’s the Chinese presence that keeps the Japanese from calling it a ghetto,” Max had explained. But Leo wondered what difference that made. Everyone in Shanghai knew that, to the Japanese military, Chinese lives did not matter.
The rickshaw puller had finally given up on securing Leo’s business, picking up a cigarette butt off the ground, and Leo left the signs and hurried faster after his parents and the Chinese men helping them move into their new room in Hongkew. The Hartmanns had spent the last three years in a one-room apartment on the other side of the neighborhood, but since it was not inside the new restricted zone, they had to cede it to a Jewish family who had come to Shanghai before 1937 but had been living in shabbier, more roach-infested quarters.
Leo ran as quickly as he could, with his arms threatening to give out under the weight of his load, and managed to catch up with his friend Jin, a Chinese teenager who had gone to high school with him for his last year of school in Shanghai. He was helping the family move and had brought the laborers with him, but they had gotten far ahead, impatient to earn a wage.
Leo took one of the cushions Jin was holding, as it was about to fall, and placed it precariously on the top of his stack of sheets, making it even harder for him to see in the narrow alleyways that made up Hongkew’s mess of streets. Lines of strung-up laundry blocked the sun, as did the slum’s low, packed-together buildings. The light that did make it through seemed to be sucked in by the hundreds of bodies zigzagging through, on foot, on bicycles, in rickshaws, and occasionally in something obtrusive and motorized. Shouting was heard constantly, day or night, and the first words in Chinese that Leo had learned were Zŏu kāi, get out of the way.
Leo steadied his stack and asked Jin why the rickshaw puller would bother following a Jew living in the restricted area for a fare.
“Because you’re white,” said Jin, his British accent crisp and proper. “Plus, that’s the only line the new rickshaw drivers can say in English. ‘We treat you good, Jewish.’ They didn’t even know what Jewish was before 1939. Now they want your money.”
“But we don’t have any money,” said Leo.
“You have more than they do.”
Jin pointed to a mess of human excrement in the road and Leo stepped around it, used to such obstacles, since none of the buildings in Hongkew had flush toilets. He tried to move the bedding to the top of his head so he could see in front of him, but he didn’t have the dexterity to keep his head straight under the weight.
“Before the Europeans and the Americans were put in internment camps, the coolies said, ‘Take ride, sir,’ and a few other phrases, but now most of the white people around this neighborhood are Jews,” said Jin. “They had to learn a few more words. Maybe they’ll be speaking German soon. Or Yiddish.” Jin nodded to the next row of rickshaw drivers waiting for fares close to the Hartmanns’ new apartment. They were thin as reeds, with clothes so ripped, Leo felt he could see straight through to their bones. “Listen, they’ll say the same thing.” As if planned, another driver screamed out, “We treat you good, Jewish!” as Jin mouthed along and grinned. “Come on, Jewish,” he said. “We better hurry or you know who won’t treat you good? Your father.”
The two young men, both in their early twenties, tried to skirt the chaos of people, vendors, and trash in front of them but got stuck behind a military car pushing its way through the narrow street. There were few cars on the roads, since most Westerners had been made to turn theirs in to the government. They moved closer to the rickshaw pullers to be out of the way. The pullers kept yelling at passersby, oblivious to the soldiers, until the car stopped in front of them and a Japanese officer climbed out and approached them. He bent to examine the worn carts, then took the pillows out of the rickshaw belonging to the oldest of the men, who was leaning on his cart as if he could barely hold his weight up otherwise. The officer was shouting furiously, and Leo turned to Jin for an explanation.
“The soldier—whose Chinese is surprisingly good—said the man is standing on the wrong part of the road. That the rickshaw line can only be so long and since he is on the end, he’s at fault.” Jin listened for a minute more and said, “He says he has the right to punish the driver by confiscating his pillows.”
They watched as the officer took the worn seat cushions in his hand and ripped out the stuffing, letting it drop on the dirty road. The driver fell to his hands and knees, scrambling to pick up the cotton that was being shredded. Leo again looked at Jin for translation, as he had been doing almost every day since the two became friends at St. Francis Xavier’s. They were two non-Catholics in a Catholic school, just as he and Emi had been.
“The driver. He’s saying what they all say. That
he’s a nobody from the country and has nothing but the clothes on his back. No home, no family, and that he won’t be able to eat tonight because of the officer taking his pillows and shredding them. No customers will ride on the bench without pillows when they can just climb into another rickshaw in the line.”
Jin shook his head and gestured for Leo to keep walking. “People here, the Chinese and especially the Japanese, view the coolies as one step above animals. And even then, it depends on the animal. They are the faceless donkeys who keep this city going. And they’re always going to be treated badly, no matter what we try to do about it. So stop staring and let’s go.”
“Their desperation,” said Leo, walking on the other side of the car, away from the officer. “I’ll never get used to it.”
“Of course not,” said Jin. “I’ve never lived anywhere but Shanghai, and I’m not used to it. To be sickened by their treatment is what keeps you human. Half the men here, they are no longer human beings. I may have more money than you, Jewish, but I get treated far worse than you do, money or not.” Leo thought about the bridge between the International Settlement and Hongkew. There were two Japanese soldiers placed on it at all hours and while he was allowed to walk past them without any acknowledgment, as all Westerners were, Jin and the other Chinese had to bow deeply before the guards, every time they crossed the bridge. Even rickshaw pullers had to stop, suspend their loads, and bow. Leo shook his head in agreement and tried to look away from the line of men and their carts.
Before the war, Jin had been educated in the British school system. He had finished in the Catholic school since most of the British schools were being abandoned as the teachers were locked up in the Lunghua internment camp, a camp full of Brits, and a few Aussies, out of town on Minghong Road. They were corralled and imprisoned there by the Japanese after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The Japanese authorities policed the British school, controlling the curriculum and locking up teachers at random, so Jin’s father moved him to the Jesuits. Now Jin’s role had gone from student to teacher, given the hours he spent every week writing down Chinese and English words for Leo. Leo’s English had been poor when his family had arrived, and he’d had to improve it quickly. With Jin’s help, he was able to finish school with far better than passing grades.
Jin looked at Leo and told him to hurry. “I know what you’re thinking when you stand in the street quiet like that,” he said. “Don’t. It won’t help anyone.”
Leo nodded and resumed walking, but he couldn’t stop his thoughts turning back to that awful day.
Two years before, when Jin and Leo were walking from school toward the French Concession, where Jin’s father owned a very popular and sordid nightclub, they saw a poor Chinese laborer, his back permanently bent at a 45-degree angle, step on the heel of a Japanese officer’s boot with his bare foot. The officer had turned and yelled at him, then slapped him in the face when he apparently deemed the man’s apology not respectful enough. Then, in the shuffle of the crowd, the Chinese man had accidentally done it again, kicking the officer in the calf the second time. Irate, the officer spun around, took his pistol from his hip, and shot the man twice, once in each foot from less than a yard away. The Chinese man fell to the ground, screaming in agony, and Leo and Jin could see one of his big toes, severed from his foot, lying next to them on a pile of rotten vegetables. The soldier had walked away, stopping to buy a length of the delicious braided dough boiled in oil that was sold on the street. He ate it while watching the man scream and writhe in pain and then left the area whistling, as calm as if he were picking flowers.
“It’s terrible to be a coolie,” Jin said to Leo. He pointed at Max and Hani, who were within their line of sight again. “It’s terrible to be anyone living under the Japanese, but at least we are all alive. That’s what the world has come to now hasn’t it? Living or not living. It’s no longer living well, living humbly, it’s just life or death. Even the coolie we saw that day. He could still be alive.”
“A coolie without feet in Shanghai? I hope he’s not. I think he’d be better off dead,” said Leo.
Leo had seen many people in the last few years who he hoped were just days from death. Children who had had their chests cut open under suspicion that they were hiding rice in their clothes, women so frail that they could barely stand under the weight of a baby on their hip, and old men who seemed suspended on the street somewhere between illness and the afterlife.
“Don’t think that way,” said Jin. “If that were the case, then half the city should be shot. Certainly every Chinese person in Hongkew.”
“I’ll focus on the glorious life all around us on Yuhang Road,” said Leo of the road they were walking down, the road his new house was on. It was chaotic and pungent with the smell of filth, but it was the geographic center of the ghetto and couldn’t be avoided. And like Shanghai so often was, on that day it was flooded, with fish bones and rotten vegetables floating next to his feet.
“At least there hasn’t been a policed ghetto until now,” said Jin when they passed more signs directed at the Jews stuck to a lamppost. “A restricted area,” he corrected himself. He stopped to drop a coin in the hand of a young blind girl begging on the street. She could not have been more than eight or nine, and her bare feet showed signs of severe frostbite, probably years in the making. Leo reached into his pocket to give her a coin, too, but it was empty. Jin’s father’s nightclub was still thriving, even though most of the Brits were confined in Lunghua and the French hold on their concession was in peril. There were the Japanese and still enough rich Chinese who wanted women and alcohol in large quantities. Jin’s father always had money to give his son, and luckily for Shanghai’s poor, Jin often gave it straight to them.
When the Hartmanns had first arrived in Shanghai in February 1939, they stared from the deck of their ship with trepidation at the mass of buildings and people. They hadn’t forgotten the hell they had left behind in Vienna, but their trip had been a thoroughly comfortable one. Norio Kato had bought them first-class tickets on the luxury liner. From the moment they boarded, they had a porter to tend to their needs, hearty meals at any hour of the day they pleased, and a staff that treated them with reverence, a welcome change from their recent treatment in Vienna. But what lay before them now?
“Before the war, Shanghai was known around the world as a mythical place,” Max had told Leo as their boat docked, patting down his thick gray hair as if he had somewhere nice to be. Already, from a distance, they could tell that on land, it was pandemonium. “It was lawless, exotic. And there was a place for everyone—a section each for the French, for the Americans, and for the British. The neighborhoods for the foreigners are not separated by walls; the boundaries are just geographic. From what I’ve been told, everyone mixes with everyone else. And among it all, they hide drugs and prostitutes and worse. Now we are sailing right into it.”
He winked at Leo and said, “Try not to lose your innocence too early.”
Leo thought about the passionate afternoons he’d spent deep in the recesses of the Hartmanns’ Vienna home with Emi, beautiful, naked, and very much his, and shook his head no. His innocence may have been gone in the physical sense, but he looked back on those days next to her as the most innocent of his life. As soon as they docked, he would write to her in Vienna. Tell her that they were safe now, the feeling of being thousands of miles from Europe the best feeling in the world.
Leo looked at his father and asked, “Where will we go, since we are none of those things?”
“We are going to a place called Hongkew,” Max said, putting his hand on his son’s dark hair, which was out of sorts from the wind.
“Hongkew.” Leo said the word aloud for the first time soon after they were on land. It sounded mysterious and full of promise on his lips. He would soon see that it was a place of poverty and hopelessness, both for the Chinese who had long lived there and the Jews who had joined them.
The family’s anxiety eased a little when they foun
d a committee of Jews waiting to greet them and their Jewish fellow passengers. The new arrivals were all taken to a building where they would be put up for the time being in a warehouse-sized room full of bunk beds. They dropped their few things and then were shepherded by the volunteers to a soup kitchen.
There were two groups of Jews who had been in Shanghai for years, the exceedingly rich Baghdadi Jews and the Russian Jews. It was the Baghdadis, especially a banker named Victor Sassoon—the Third Baronet of Bombay and a Cambridge graduate who had been a pilot for the British during the Great War—who were looking after the Jewish refugees. Sassoon had built the city’s beautiful Cathay Hotel and much of its iconic Bund. Himself a Sephardic Jew, he hadn’t lost his commitment to the community along the way. The Shanghai Jewish aid group was also heavily funded by donations from American Jews, and it was those donations that kept the arriving refugees alive and more or less healthy as they settled in and looked for work.
At the soup kitchen, Max and Hani had trouble accepting the handout.
“What is this?” Max asked Leo when they walked in and saw the spread of food. He was still wearing a nice traveling suit and all three Hartmanns realized right away that it was a mistake. The dress, it seemed, was closer to rags.
“They will feed us here for free,” said Leo.
Hani reached for her husband in shock. “We should have brought more money with us,” she hissed. “I told you. We left too much with our families. Will it even help them escape Austria?”
“There was barely any we could move,” Max reminded her at a whisper. “Our accounts frozen, and everyone too scared to buy our possessions. I tried; you know I tried,” he said, rubbing his red eyes.