I am pleased that there is enough interest in Strange Haven: A Jewish Childhood in Wartime Shanghai to publish a paperback version.  Frankly, I’m also a little surprised by the positive reaction to the book.  After its publication (1999) I was invited to speak about the book and the Shanghai Jewish refugee community many times both locally and in other parts of the country, and speaking requests continue to dribble in to this day.  Partially as a result of writing the book I was asked to participate in two films. The first, Shanghai Ghetto, came out in 2002 and played in both New York and Los Angeles for a month and had shorter runs elsewhere.  CDs of the film are available from commercial lending outlets.  The documentary’s reception was surprising for a very low budget film filled mainly with talking heads, backed up by archival photographs and film clips.  I received a new round of speaking invitations about the Jewish refugee community in Shanghai during the Second World War as a result of Shanghai Ghetto’s release.

The second film, The Last Refuge—The Story of Jewish Refugees in Shanghai did not attain wide distribution.  However, an interesting sidelight of this documentary was Rabbi Morris Gordon’s appearance as an interviewee.  He had been a Chaplain, with the rank of Captain, in the U.S. army and, as described at length in the book, surprised us by showing up unexpectedly at my Bar Mitzvah in Shanghai after the War’s end in 1945.  Rabbi Gordon’s interview in The Last Refuge revolves mainly about having accidentally stumbled on my Bar Mitzvah during his brief stay in Shanghai prior to being repatriated to the U.S.  The student filmmakers were unaware that he was speaking about my Bar Mitzvah, one of his fellow interviews in the film.  Once I told them about the coincidence, the film could no longer be altered to include that information.

I subsequently met Rabbi Gordon almost 50 years after my Bar Mitzvah, a meeting arranged by Michael Berenbaum who wrote the introduction to my book.  We spent a pleasant afternoon reminiscing about our earlier encounter in Shanghai and our lives after that.  Another surprising development occurred during one of my subsequent speaking invitations from a Synagogue in Bethesda, Maryland.  I met with that synagogue’s Rabbi before the talk and was surprised to learn that the founding Rabbi of that congregation was none other than Rabbi Gordon.

As mentioned in both the book and films, the Japanese segregated us in a ghetto during World War II and made no provisions for our health care or nourishment.  Our Jewish refugee community received some assistance from a number of sources and mobilized itself to take care of its own as well as could be expected under difficult circumstance.  The Germans pressured their Japanese allies to impose the same final solution of the Jewish problem they were inflicting on Europe’s Jews.  Research, of which I was unaware prior to Strange Haven’s publication, has indicated that Col. Josef Meisinger, a German SS officer known as the “butcher of Warsaw” because of atrocities he committed in Poland, pressured the Japanese to force the refugees onto junks, tug them out to sea, and sink them.  The Japanese resisted these pressures. Colonel Meisinger was captured at the end of the war by American forces in Japan.  He was returned to Poland where he was tried and executed as a war criminal.

Even though circumstances during the war were harsh, our treatment by the Japanese was better than that received by our Chinese neighbors.  Thus, compared to the fate suffered by Jews in Europe during the Holocaust our treatment was comparatively benevolent.  Even though three cemeteries were filled with refugees in the decade or so we spent in Shanghai, these deaths were not attributable to atrocities but to the many diseases to which malnourished Europeans had little resistance.  As indicated in the book, a number of refugees were arrested and jailed for alleged violations of Japanese rules concerning the ghetto.  Some of them contracted typhus in jail and died from the disease.  Upon my return to Shanghai in 1988 as a Visiting Professor, also described in detail in the book, the Chinese were embarrassed that during the Cultural Revolution these cemeteries had been desecrated and the tombstones removed for use in construction projects.

I do not think that the positive reviews for both the book and the films are fully responsible for the interest in the subject.  Instead, the story of the Jewish refugee community in wartime Shanghai is one of the few relatively positive stories emerging from the Holocaust, since most of us survived and subsequently emigrated mainly to Israel and the United States.  I believe that this is the real reason for the popularity of Strange Haven and Shanghai Ghetto.

Update 3/24/2010: 

A recent incident is one surprising indication of the book’s popularity.  I was having a computer problem and was routed to speak with a technician, located in Manila.  We paused while I was rebooting to see if his suggestions worked, and he asked me what I did with the computer.  I answered that I did a lot of writing.  He asked whether I had written any novels, and I said “No,” though I had written a memoir about growing up, near where he was located, in Shanghai.  He responded with “You wrote ‘Strange Haven’.”  I was surprised and asked whether he had Googled me while we were both waiting.  He assured me that he had not, and told me it was the favorite book of one of his friends.

Small world, isn’t it?

*****

Sigmund Tobias, Eminent Research Professor, Division of Educational Psychology and Methodology, University at Albany, State University of New York, is author of the newly available paperback Strange Haven: A Jewish Childhood in Wartime Shanghai.