Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
SHANGHAI HAVEN..., September 6, 2005
This is a fascinating documentary that takes a fresh look at the holocaust. In the mid to late nineteen thirties, Jews were allowed to leave Germany, provided that they could get a country to take them in. Therein lay the rub. Many Jews were willing to leave Germany at the time but could find no country that would open its doors to them. Then, some of them discovered that China was an option. It seemed that Shanghai would accept Jewish refugees, and eventually about twenty thousand desperate refugees decided that going to Shanghai would be a more viable option to staying in Germany and German occupied lands, where life for the Jewish population was becoming a slow descent into hell.
Traveling by ocean liner, the refugees would disembark in Shanghai, where part of the city was segregated into an international settlement, filled with western foreigners. By the time that the Jewish refugees began arriving, the Japanese occupied that part of Shanghai that included the international settlement, although the Japanese had a hands off policy with respect to the international settlement. So, even though Japan was one of the Axis powers, which included Germany, the Jewish refugees were allowed to settle in Shanghai without incident. Moreover, the Japanese, having criticized the treatment of Asians by Germans, were now constrained to treat the Jewish refugees well in order to be consistent.
In fact, there were already two distinct Jewish groups ensconced and well established in Shanghai, the Baghdadi Jews, who were business people and the wealthier of these two groups, and the Russian Jews. Each had their own communities in the international settlement. As the European Jews began pouring into Shanghai, the Baghdadi, who were Sephardic Jews, helped them, providing financial assistance and support. The Jewish refugees came from Germany, Poland, and Lithuania.
These refugees would band together and form a thriving community with cafes, schools, newspapers, theatres, and sport and social clubs, creating a bustling community with a vibrant cultural life. Still, they were now a poor people living in difficult conditions, as Shanghai was a port city that was teeming with people, many of whom were living in squalid conditions, with poor sanitation and rampant disease. Still, the Jewish refugees felt safe living among the Chinese people with their Japanese captors, never experiencing anti-Semitism from their Asian neighbors. No matter how bad it got in Shanghai, where living conditions were deplorable, it was far worse in Europe for those Jews who remained behind.
Then, after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the Americans entered the war, the Japanese went into the International settlement and interned the Americans and British, who were pronounced to be enemy aliens. This included the Baghdadi Jews, as they carried British passports. This brought great hardship upon the Jewish refugees, who had been dependent upon the largesse of the Baghdadi Jews for their survival. The responsibility of the Jewish refugees now fell upon the Russian Jewish community.
In 1943, the Japanese, succumbing to pressure from their German allies, issued a proclamation that all stateless refugees, who came to Shanghai after 1937, were to be resettled in a segregated area and have curfews. This created, in effect, a ghetto of Jews, as they had previously lived side by side with the Chinese. It was not, however, anything like the European ghettos of Jews that the Germans had constructed, as there were no walls separating them from the community at large.
The filmmakers of this documentary tell the little known story of the Jewish settlements in Shanghai through the moving reminiscences of a number of survivors, archival footage, still photographs, and letters written at the time. The filmmakers also obtained input from historians in order to ground the story in the historical context out of which it arose, creating a historical backdrop for the events and situations described by the survivors. They then traveled to Shanghai with two of the survivors to revisit the city and the ghetto where these survivors had spent so many of their early years and to film the places where they had lived. Remarkably, the buildings still existed, virtually unchanged, very much as they had been so many years ago when Jewish refugees had occupied them.
Winner of the Santa Barbara Film Festival Audience Choice Award, this is a fascinating documentary. It is one that will keep the viewer riveted to the screen. Those who enjoy historical documentaries, as well as those with an interest in the holocaust and World War II, will very much like this well-made documentary, which is narrated by Academy Award winner, Martin Landau.
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19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Lost Story of Painful Escape - A Good Cinematic Experience, March 9, 2005
A couple of years before World War II, Europe and the United States turned their back on millions Jews in Europe that tried to escape an increasing persecution. Nations closed their borders after a political meeting between several nations with Germany in the center that led nowhere. Hitler used the result of the meeting as an invitation to increase the intensity of the Jewish persecution. Some Jews were fortunate enough to escape to neighboring countries while many were escorted back to the German border and handed to the Gestapo. However, far away on the other side of the world some fortunate Jews that had the financial means to escape found a loophole - Shanghai.
Japan and China had been in war, which led to the occupation of Shanghai. The Japanese forces were not checking passports, as people arrived to Shanghai by ships. The Chinese government had been abandoned, as was the passport control. Thus, Jews could leave Germany, even though their passports had been restricted or revoked, to peacefully enter Shanghai. A pleasurable four-week voyage through the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean led the escaping Jews to their destination, Shanghai.
Arrivals were initially shocked by the environment to which they arrived. This culture crash had its foundation in several new experiences such as the extreme humidity, high temperature, different written and spoken language, and new food among many other things. Yet, the 20,000 Jews that arrived found a way to cope in the new society. This is much thanks to the British Jews that had lived in Shanghai since the beginning of the century who had acquired much wealth. In the years before World War II and in the beginning of the war the newcomers basically founded their own miniature society within Shanghai. Coffee shops, newspapers, sports events, and much more offered an outlet where the Jews could live a life much like in Europe.
As the war increasingly intensified the Germans who were allies with Japan pressured the Japanese to create a ghetto in Shanghai for the Jews. The Japanese slowly established this ghetto, but it was very unlike the ghetto in Warsaw, Poland. Nonetheless, food became scarce while starvation and disease made life much more difficult, which even cost several people their lives. Despite the difficulties in Shanghai, the Jews never learned how lucky they were until the end of the war. When the terribly tragic news of the death camps in Europe reached them in Shanghai this moment brought them a heavy sadness, as they realized how lucky they were while reflecting on their relatives and family members' horrific fate.
Shanghai Ghetto offers an interesting cinematic journey, as a number of people offer first hand accounts of what it was like to live in the Shanghai Ghetto. One man tells how traumatic it was to experience the bombing of Shanghai at the end of the war. A woman also expresses her contempt for Germany and how she now has no surviving relatives, which is very hard to hear, as one cannot even imagine the pain she must feel. These stories that the audience experiences through film provides and reinforces an important notion - let this never happen again.
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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating subject, OK production, November 11, 2005
This is an OK production of a fascinating subject.
The information is good. They interview Prof. David Kranzler, the expert in the field, as well as other knowledgeable professors. These are interwoven with interviews of a handful of actual survivors. These, too, are enlightening, real and touch the heart.
The timeline follows these survivors, who all escaped Germany in 1938. It relates their early memories of life in Germany, Kristallnacht, their troubles getting out, their travel to Shanghai, their attempts to making a living and establish themselves there, the effects of Japan's entry into the war in 1941 and their consequent move into the unsanitary, overcrowded poor section of the city known as Hongkew, their difficulties fending off disease, starvation and anti-Semitism (not from the Chinese so much as the Japanese and non-Jewish ethnicities like Russians), the Allied bombing in July 1945, their liberation and discovery of the horrors of the Holocaust in Germany which they, only in retrospect, learned of and learned how lucky they were to have avoided.
It's a compelling story, a case of truth being stranger than fiction.
However, they missed at least one major part of the story. There were more than 2,000 refugees (many of whom had been teachers and students in one of Jewry's most prestigious educational institutions, the Mirrer Yeshiva) that arrived in Shanghai in 1941 who escaped Nazi Germany and then Soviet-controlled Lithuania, who then obtained visas miraculously, traveled on the Trans-Siberian railroad before landing in Japan and then being deported, at the start of the hostilities with the US, to Shanghai. This group was not German. Their experiences before and even during the war (they reestablished their Yeshiva there) were very different. I personally was hoping to learn more about them in this documentary. But there was not even a word about it. Not even a hint.
There was also other parts of the Shanghai experience that were not even hinted to: e.g. how the Nazis sent an SS organizer to get the Japanese to liquidate the Jews in Shanghai but who met resistance because the Japanese believed Nazi propoganda that International Jewry was not something to be dealt with lightly. There were some real heroes: e.g. the Japanese diplomat who risked his life to save Jews. But none of that was touched upon.
All in all, though, it's a valuable documentary with much to offer. There's not a lot of photographs of Shanghai back then, and even less film footage, but that's to be expected. (You had no Fritz Hipplers, i.e. Nazi film producers on hand making a final record of a soon-to-be-exterminated people.) It skips some historical moments, like the end of the war in Europe (I would like to have known of the survivors' reactions to that), but it does cover other major historical moments of the War and Holocaust, including the survivors listening to German, Russian and American radio broadcasts to find out what was happening in the outside world.
This documentary is definitely worth a viewing. I can also see it being something good for a classroom. It's just that the motivated teacher and parent, as well as the individual who wants to be well-informed, will have to fill in some of the gaps with other sources.
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