Escape to Shanghai: A Jewish Community in China [Hardcover]

Alex Ross (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 27, 1993

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

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

Product Details

• Hardcover: 314 pages
• Publisher: Free Press (December 27, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0029273757
• ISBN-13: 978-0029273753
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #226,169 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Incredible nonfiction, April 16, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Escape to Shanghai: A Jewish Community in China (Hardcover)

As readable as a novel, but based on painstaking research, Ross's account of the Jews who lived out the Holocaust in Shanghai focuses on four individual and their families. There is another book that deals mostly with the religious Jews in Shanghai (which Ross, disappointingly, ignores except for one or two disparaging remarks), but this book presents an excellent overall picture by following the lives of specific people. Highly recommended.