Escape to Shanghai: A Jewish Community in China - Hardcover

Ross, Alex

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0029273757 ISBN 13: 9780029273753

Publisher: Free Press, 1993

Synopsis

Tells the story, based on interviews with survivors, of the Jewish ghetto of World War II Shanghai, where thousands of refugees lived under abysmal conditions while a courageous Jewish underground conducted sabotage against the Japanese

About this title

About the Author

James R. Ross is an assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University.

Reviews

Although not the first book on the Jewish ghetto in Shanghai, as the publisher claims (the first was the recent Shanghai Refuge by Ernest Heppner), this one nevertheless offers a compelling account of the 20,000 Jews living under Japanese rule in Shanghai during World War II. Shanghai was the only city that would accept stateless Jews without visas, and the Japanese permitted Jewish immigration there until 1941, when the last exit routes from Europe were sealed off. Ross interviewed about 200 survivors and traced down letters and documents in a dozen archives before writing the book. He recounts the lives of four of the survivors: an Austrian doctor, a young man from East Prussia, a boy from Berlin, and a rabbi's daughter from Neukolln, Germany. When Allied bombing raids begin, conditions in the ghetto reached the point where some Jews turned to begging and prostitution. But many of the refugees helped the Allied cause by passing on information about Japanese troop movements and about the damage from American air raids. Escape to Shanghai lacks the intimacy of a firsthand account, but Ross has faithfully recorded the privations, indignities, anxieties, and horrors that make up this little-known chapter in the suffering of the Jews. George Cohen

Edition details

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0029273757
• ISBN 13: 9780029273753
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 314