During the WWII, the first refugees came from White Russia for their failure in Russian revolution. They became the major part of the population of foreign migrants in Shanghai, and then it became the center for refugee from Europe again.
6 million Jews were inhumanely killed by Nazi allies in Europe. Shanghai was the only one in the world to accept those homeless and poor Jews unconditionally at that time. More than 32000 survivors escaping from that earthly hell to Shanghai survived miraculously with an exception of those who died of disease and oldness. Besides, there are also 408 people born at that hard time. To the Jews all over the world, Hongkou of Shanghai is the warmest place in Far East. In Israeli and Jewish culture, Shanghai has been recorded as the symbolization of retrieval and refuge like Schindler and Knut Wallenberg. According to some elders’ recollection, the locals lived with Jew succeeding in fleeing from that holocaust together were willing and glad to help them look for the temporary jobs and inhabitancies and borrow them some living appliance, even accepted the Jewish children to attend school with local children in the same school.
In 1994，Shanghai Jews began to come back to Shanghai for reunion from different places of the world. These old people shed their tears freely when they found their old memory in houses, streets and discoveries. On 17. November 1994, Pan Guang, as the director of Jewish research center met an old Jewish madam from Australia. Pan said“the Jewish research center keeps relations with thousands of Jews all around the world by mail. Such a thing happens every month, but as the time goes, half Jewish old people have past away”. Several years ago, a 78-year-old famous Jewish female writer came to visit Shanghai from America. The current landlord of house, a 90-year-old retired doctor pointing at the nearby westernized furniture said to her” if this is what your left, you could take all away. ”
No matter what side of an argument you're on,
you always find some people on your side
that wish you were on the other side.
——Jascha Heifetz
The former Secretary-General of United Nation, Kofi Annan, once said on the celebration for completion of the new memorial on Israeli massacre in 2005-- Memory is one part of people’s pursuing for wisdom. We should search for the new angle from memory to treat the value and significance of humane existence, if Nazi allies’ dehumanized holocaust to Jew releases the evil and ugliness of humanity, the experiences of Jewish survivals in Shanghai will show the kindness and mercifulness of humanity glittering in the midnight of human history. It offers us the other mirror for self-check and autocriticism.
