The Fugu Plan

by Marvin Tokayer

  The Japanese were still unmoved. Their definition of "stateless refugee" included those from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and "former Poland." The Nazis didn't recognize the London-based Polish government in exile; and since the entire designated-area affair had been intended principally to mollify the Nazis, the Poles must necessarily be redeemed as stateless. Ultimately, the Polish Jews like the other "stateless" refugees, prepared to move.

  For their part, the Japanese also responded to all those protests by pointing out - correctly, if somewhat ingenuously - that the relocation order made no mention whatsoever of Jews. The refugees, and all other foreigners in the city, they said, were to be treated according to nationality. And, in fact, those Jews - principally Sephardim who held passports of Allied nations had already been interned along with their non-Jewish countrymen in unused factories and schools on the outskirts of Shanghai. Some internees would ultimately be repatriated; some would die, and some would remain in the camps for the duration. Living space was greatly restricted in the internment camps, and both boredom and diseases were endemic. But, with a few horrifying exceptions, the internees were not mistreated.

  Other foreigners, Jews and non-Jews alike, managed to obtain the money and connections to produce passports from neutral nations. All this the refugees could accept. But what really rankled the seventeen thousand Jews who were eventually shut up into the ghetto was that the city's four thousand Russian Jews, since they held citizenship in a nation recognized by Japan, should remain exempt from the ghetto - and, in fact, totally free of restrictions.

  The refugees resentment was soon further exacerbated. Within two weeks of the proclamation's appearance, Kubota's bureau had announced that the Russians themselves would be put in charge of moving the refugees into the ghetto. This step was one tangible result of the long conversations between Kubota and Dr. Cohn. During the early winter, before the proclamation had been released, the two men had spoken briefly about the ghetto concept.

  Cohn's hope was that such a major upheaval would be less traumatic if it were kept within the Jewish family. "If you close up all the stateless Jews in Shanghai in a restricted area," he had said, "it's going to cost you a tremendous amount to relocate them, feed them, house them, etc. Instead why not let us organize ourselves into a group, with representatives from your office on hand at every meeting, of course, and we will take care of the relocation? After all, who knows better than a Jew how to get another Jew to do something?"

  A similar thought had also occurred to Kubota, but he was delighted that once again a Jew had made the necessary offer. Within the Japanese government itself, no one department had wanted to take the sole responsibility for forming the designated area - the final decision had been endorsed jointly by the army, the navy and the Ministry of Greater East Asia with the prior approval of the central government. And now here was a chance to broaden the responsibility further by making Jews themselves a party to it. Kubota had a drawerful of reports on the problems Jews had in working together, but this did not seem an opportune time to allude to that. Besides, Cohn was even now improving on his offer. The Russian Jews, the physician was hinting, would be glad to contribute at least part of the cost of this expensive relocation of their fellow Jews.

  Of course, the exclusion of the Russian Jews from the designated area had already been discussed at length among the policy makers.

  At this point in world affairs, the Japanese were particularly anxious not to upset the Russian government. A mutual neutrality pact which had been signed with Stalin in mid-1941 had given Japan some sense of security on her northern borders that was much too important now to Japan's foreign policy to be threatened by such a small matter as the living arrangements of four thousand Russian Jews. Now Cohn was offering to let the Russian Jews do the work of relocation and supervision. Had word of all this reached the Russian Jewish community? Was Cohn now here as its agent? Kubota was familiar with duplicity in many forms. The physician looked innocent, though it was hard to tell with a foreigner. Still, Kubota had nothing against the Russian Jews. And the idea of using them - and their money - to accomplish Japanese ends appealed to him.

  "It is something perhaps to be considered," Kubota said. Then the two moved on to other topics.

  Within a week of the ghetto proclamation, Kubota was invited to speak at a general meeting of the Shanghai Russian Jewish Club. In the course of his talk, he mentioned that it was due to his own personal intervention that the Russians had been exempted from the proclamation. It was hoped, he said meaningfully, that in return the Russians would cooperate fully in the job of organizing the relocation of those people who were not exempt. That very evening a committee of eighteen men was elected to oversee the cooperation. Unlike all the other Jewish committees that had been formed over the past eight years, this group had an emblem: a Star of David which was surrounded - as if being protected - by a stylized cherry blossom. The cherry blossom, one of the symbols of imperial Japan, is called in Japanese, sakura. The name of the committee of eighteen was SACRA - the Shanghai Ashkenazi Collaborating Relief Association. The name, so close to the Japanese word, was the suggestion of Dr. Cohn. The emblem, with its symbolic overtones, was a design created by Dr. Cohn. And the chairman chosen by SACRA was Dr. Cohn.

  As Kubota had foreseen, SACRA was not an internally harmonious committee. The same suspicions and disdain that had colored Cohn's dealings with Topas and the other community leaders immediately surfaced in SACRA. The question of Cohn's loyalty was never answered to the satisfaction of the other men. The fact that Kubota's representative, a Mr. Kano, was always present as secretary, and that Cohn often chatted with him in Japanese added to the strain.

  SACRA'S external relationship with the "stateless" community ran even less smoothly. The committee was deeply resented; it was believed by most of the refugees that the Russians had sold out to the Japanese to save themselves, at the possibly fatal expense of their fellow Jews.

  To all this, SACRA had no answer. Its overriding purpose-refined in dozens of small get-togethers, unattended by either the chairman or the secretary - was to stall. Its other seventeen members knew they had no choice but to go along with the Japanese; but they would go along as slowly as possible. Maybe the Japanese would have another change of heart. Maybe the German retreat from Stalingrad, triumphantly reported by TASS shortwave, did signal a turning point in the war. SACRA was in a position to play for time but if that position became public knowledge. If Kubota ever suspected that SACRA was, in the words of one of its members "using every form of sabotage that was possible ... to stall the implementation of the relocation," he would immediately have dismissed the committee and imprisoned its members. Then, as he had threatened at the initial Russian Club meeting, the Japanese would "take matters into their own hands and do it their own way." In spite of their true feelings, SACRA formed its committees, recruited refugees to man the subcommittees, which would do most of the actual work, and set out with an apparent will to meet the May 18 deadline. By this date, the eight thousand or so refugees who did not already live in the "designated area" were to be moved into it.

  The area, slightly under one square mile of Hongkew, was already jammed with some nine thousand refugees, several thousand Japanese and nearly a hundred thousand Chinese. In theory, as 'was "requested" in the proclamation order, the Chinese and Japanese would simply trade their Hongkew apartments for "comparable quarters" among the apartments which would have to be vacated by the stateless refugees. In practice, there was very little comparability. Many of the refugees, particularly the earlier arrivals, scrimped for years to be able to afford small apartments in the French Concession or the International Settlement - places with electricity, phone service and Western-style bathrooms. Few such palaces were available in the Hongkew slum; and those that were were often available only upon payment of "key-money," amounting to four or five months' rent. The most an average refugee could hope for was a couple of tiny, s
unless rooms, badly in need of fumigation and separated from the next unhappy family by a plywood partition. Flush toilets were rare in Hongkew; electricity was limited; even phone service could not be transferred without a lengthy appeal through the Bureau for Refugee Affairs.

  From SACRA'S point of view, the May 18 deadline approached with unnatural speed. Not only did reluctant individuals have to be assisted in transplanting their residences (and, in a few hundred cases, also their businesses); but virtually everything had to be done for the refugees in the heime. The higgledy piggledy Chinese style housing was not at all suitable for heim living. New residences had to be created virtually from scratch, out of unused warehouses or factories with every stage of construction needing to be supervised and, of course, paid for. And what of the establishments that had served the whole community? Clinics, schools, meeting halls, the semi-charitable Polish Refugee Kitchen Number One Kosher Restaurant - everything had to be relocated. Primarily for those refugees who held jobs outside the ghetto, an incredibly cumbersome pass system had to be established in order to allow those within the designated area to venture out at certain times, along certain routes. Even if SACRA had worked with the best will in the world, it would have been impossible to do so much so quickly. By the end of April, with less than three weeks to go, only about two thousand of the refugees had been relocated. Among the six thousand still free were the students and faculty of the Mir Yeshiva.

  SACRA'S business headquarters was on an upper floor of an unimpressive building in the International Settlement. It was a small space, scarcely larger than the Kobe Jewcom headquarters. Standing in the middle of it, Yankel Gilbewitz found that it shared very little else in common with Kobe Jewcom. Certainly the two obstinate and totally unreasonable SACRA committeemen attempting to deal with the yeshiva delegation bore no resemblance to Mr. Hanin or Mr. Ponve.

  The yeshiva's position was adamant: The rabbis and students had absolutely no intention of living or studying in the Hongkew Salvation Army compound. When Yankel had first heard this SACRA proposal, he'd thought it was a joke. There were still inmates living in the compound drunkards, crazy people, prostitutes. . . . The Mir Yeshiva was one of the most illustrious centers of Jewish education in Europe! How could this devoted congregation of scholars, with its reputation for dedication, be asked to study in such a place? Yankel had immediately joined the group going to protest at SACRA'S downtown headquarters.

  "What are we?" one of the boys was now declaiming. "Are we beasts? Pigs? Are we nothings that we should be pushed off into some toilet of the world of sin?"

  The confrontation had been going on nearly an hour, tempers and voices rising, goodwill diminishing.

  "If you will let me say . . ." the SACRA committeeman began.

  "Those people are still there!" The yeshiva boy was beyond listening. "Drunkards! Convicts!"

  ". . . something, I will explain to you our predicament and perhaps ..."

  "Women of the street! The dregs of this abysmal pit of a city! Our yeshiva cannot be insulted this way! It is the total denial . . ."

  Even Yankel himself joined the battle.

  "What kind of a Jew are you?" he shouted. "Do you consign the elite of Jewish scholars to such a place? Have you no respect for Torah? Apikores !"

  The SACRA man gave up and turned away. It was enough that he had been forced to volunteer for this thankless, unpopular and misunderstood labor, that he was being forced to contribute most of what little money he still had after the war had closed off his markets and the Japanese had all but taken over his office. It was enough that he was quite convinced that the Russian Jews would also be consigned to the ghetto once they had accomplished the unpleasant task of moving all the refugees into it. But it was too much, too much, that his loyalty to Judaism should be questioned, that he should be cursed as an apikores - a worldly, anti-Jewish, anti-God Epicurean!

  The first yeshiva boy paused to catch his breath. Yankel, hearing only his own voice, stopped too. The second SACRA man seized the opportunity of silence.

  "You will not be sharing the compound with the 'dregs of society.' The few unfortunate people still living there will be separated from you as far as possible. You need a school in the designated area. And you need a place to live, don't you?"

  "We have a school," Yankel said. "And we absolutely do not need to live together. We need to live apart, separately. Don't you see how easy it will be, if we are all in one place, for them to come and round us all up while we are sleeping? The danger is too great!" This fear, of being forced into a situation where they could all be seized at once, was in fact more of a drawback to the compound than the continued presence of its "inmates."

  The SACRA speaker laughed deprecatingly. "No one is going to come and 'round you up.' Think how convenient it will be for you to ..."

  The laughter was the final straw. Yankel jerked his head back just in time to get out of the way of a straight-backed chair that flew past him on its way toward a window. In the silence that followed, he could hear the tinkle of glass pieces as they hit the pavement below. Miraculously, none of the passersby was hit.

  "You will not behave that way in this office," the SACRA man said. "We have not got the time or patience for these childish outbreaks! You will simply have to . . ."

  The students never heard what they would simply have to do. Another chair went the way of the first. Tables were kicked over, drawers yanked from their desks and emptied out onto the floor. Two lamps were seized, the shades shredded, the bases hurled out of another window. And then everything was flying through the broken panes. What was too large was first smashed and then thrown out. The SACRA committeemen fled in terror.

  The Japanese police were not long in coming. But by the time they arrived to seize every one of the thirty students, the office was a shambles, SACRA did not protest the arrest.

  It was several days before Rabbi Ashkenazi, one of the leading figures among the Ashkenazim, and the principal of the yeshiva could persuade the Japanese authorities not to impose long and probably fatal prison terms for these "revolutionary activities." Apologies were made; SACRA headquarters were cleaned up and refurnished; money changed hands; and one afternoon, the boys turned up again at the yeshiva.

  Yankel spent much of his time in jail pondering with a few Mir Yeshiva cellmates the suitability of their response. However, they had won their point. The Yeshiva would have nothing to do with the Salvation Army compound; it would, at its own expense, rent private rooms within the designated area, but would be given passes to study daily at their Beth Aharon Synagogue. Yankel sensed a new fullness to his spirit, a new strength in his devotion. This was, at least, a partial compensation for the typhus he contracted there.

  In the course of his leisurely discussions with Dr. Cohn, Tsutomu Kubota had softened his attitude toward the Jews. He had gone so far as to suggest in a letter to Prime Minister Tojo that some of Japan's suspicion of the Jews might be "erroneous." But the ghetto proclamation had come down from the highest authorities-Kubota had no choice but to carry it out. So, in spite of extensions and SACRA'S foot-dragging, in spite of die Arroganz der Polnischen Fluchtlinge (the arrogance of the Polish refugees) a few of whom, to the admiration of the other Jews, continued to defy the order till they were finally jailed (where six of them died of disease), the relocation proceeded. The May 18 deadline passed with no great fanfare; but by the early autumn of 1943, all but a few hundred stateless refugees were confined behind the guarded gates of the Hongkew designated area.

  Now began the darkest days for the Jews of Shanghai. The ghetto - though the Japanese never referred to it as such - had been carved out of the city's most dismal area. Within the square mile, there were no parks, not even a tree; the closest thing to nature, one refugee noted, was a bench painted green. Aside from the Cafe Louis and the Roof Garden Restaurant, which were patronized by successful blackmarketeers, and a few people, like the owner of the local bakery, who made a good profit in supplying absolute essential
s, poverty was everywhere in Hongkew.

  The pass system was the only way out. Three-month passes and one-month passes were issued to those who had jobs on the outside (and to the Mir Yeshiva) by a Japanese official named Ghoya. Ghoya was infamous. An exceedingly ugly man, and so short he had to stand on his desk to reach eye level with some of the refugees, Ghoya was a psychotic who gloried in his position of power. "I am the King of the Jews!" was one of his favorite announcements; yet simultaneously wanted to be loved by them. Ghoya's moods shifted like quicksilver. When he happened to be in good humor, word of it spread rapidly throughout the ghetto: Hurry, now is the time to get your pass renewed! Outside his office, refugees would line up to apply for another three months' possession of the precious little metal lapel button that said "May Pass" in a Chinese character. But suddenly something would seem to go wrong: Ghoya would seize on some imagined slight, jump up on his desk, and slap some unfortunate refugee across the face . . . and the line of pass applicants would quickly dissipate.

  This bully and tyrant could sometimes be manipulated, however. One refugee invariably wore a tall top hat when applying for his pass renewal. Initially, Ghoya believed the man was making fun of him and threatened to shoot him on the spot. "But Ghoya-san," the refugee said with wounded innocence, "I always wear this hat when approaching a great man!" Thereafter, the refugee received his pass with no difficulty.

  Ghoya slapped people, screamed at them, threatened them, insulted them; everyone in the ghetto was terrorized by him; yet actually he never seriously hurt anyone. The official in charge of daily and weekly passes, was more dangerous, however. His name was Okura and on most occasions refugees would have to stand for hours in the scorching sun just to see him. He often beat those he didn't like, and with very little provocation would throw a man into the Ward Road Jail which, as conditions there deteriorated, became the equivalent of a sentence of death by disease.