'Shanghai Ghetto' began as dinner tales

By Gary Gentile
Associated Press

This photograph, from about 1940, shows Jewish refugees arriving in Shanghai, then under Japanese occupation. The film "Shanghai Ghetto" chronicles the flight of thousands of Jews from wartime Europe. Associated Press/Courtesy of Beth Hatefotsotah Museum

Filmmakers Dana Janklowicz-Mann and her husband based "Shanghai Ghetto" on her father's experience.

Harold Janklowicz's daughter, Dana, listened to his memories of the little-known colony of Jews who sought refuge from Hitler in China. He was one of 20,000 Jews who made their homes in Shanghai from about 1939 to 1946.

As an adult, Dana Janklowicz-Mann spent five years turning those stories into a film — now screening at the Art House at Restaurant Row in Honolulu — that documents the experiences of the Jewish refugees from Russia, Germany, Poland and other countries, and of their Chinese hosts, Japanese overseers and the loved ones they left behind.

"It started off as a small movie I wanted to make about my dad and a few others, and my grandmother and her life," Janklowicz-Mann said. "It's part of who we are."

Her brother, Gilad, hosts Hawai'i's own "Bodies in Motion," a beach aerobics show syndicated nationally.

The film documents the flight of European Jews in the late 1930s from the growing Nazi threat. Few countries would take them in, imposing strict quotas or turning them back altogether. Jews in Germany were deprived of their passports.

Then word began to spread of a loophole: Shanghai — then an international city under Japanese occupation — did not require visas or other papers for entry.

Thousands of European Jews made the trek to China, most by ship, some traveling 6,000 miles through Siberia.

What they found was a bustling but destitute city. The Jews were crowded into one of Shanghai's poorest neighborhoods, but their lot was much better than that of the local Chinese, who faced poverty, disease and stricter Japanese control.

The Japanese treated the Jews carefully, even after Japan allied itself with Germany. They feared angering America by mistreating their "guests."

For several years, Jews were allowed to move about the city, and some set up businesses, repairing typewriters or selling household goods. They started newspapers and even theater companies.

That changed after America entered the war in 1941. Two years later, the roughly 20,000 Jewish residents of Shanghai were corralled into a one-square-mile ghetto.

Despite poverty and hunger, life there was not as bad as in such notorious European ghettos as Lodz or Warsaw.

"The word 'ghetto' means people lived in a segregated area. It's not the kind of ghetto the Nazis built as a precursor to extermination," said Amir Mann, Janklowicz-Mann's husband and producing partner in Rebel Child Productions.

Perhaps the worst torment for Shanghai's Jewish refugees came after the war, when they learned what had happened to loved ones who had stayed behind in Europe. During the war, Shanghai's Jews had heard nothing of the horrors of the Holocaust.

"So they concentrated on the misery of life in Shanghai, and lo and behold, after the war they found out they were living in paradise compared to what happened to their brethren in Europe," David Karanzler, a former professor, says in the film.

After the war, many boarded troop ships for America, or settled in Australia or other countries. Survivors now hold occasional reunions.

"Shanghai Ghetto," narrated by actor Martin Landau, cost less than $100,000 to produce. Filmmakers used their savings and credit cards to pay for it.