Exodus to Shanghai Stories of Escape from the Third Reich

Of the 400,000 German-speaking Jews that escaped the Third Reich as refugees, approximately 16,000 ended up in Shanghai, China, as part of one of the more remote enclaves within the Jewish diaspora. The stories of the Shanghai Jews contain extremes of the suffering and endurance that defined the refugee experience. Nobody wanted to go to China, and because Shanghai was the last choice of refugees, those who went there had nowhere else left to go. They had endured every stage of escalating Nazi persecution, including the mass arrests during Kristallnacht, the real beginning of the Holocaust. This groundbreaking oral history volume is based on 20 years of interviews with over 100 former Shanghai refugees. It offers a moving and at times astonishing collective portrait of courage, culture shock, persistence, and enduring hope in the face of unimaginable hardships.

Steve Hochstadt has been a professor of History at Illinois College since 2006, after teaching at Bates College in Maine for 27 years. He earned a BA in Mathematics and a PhD in History from Brown University. His first book, Mobility and Modernity: Migration in Germany 1820-1989 (1999) won the Allan Sharlin Prize of the Social Science History Association in 2000. He has also written Sources of the Holocaust (2004) and Shanghai-Geschichten: Die jedische Flucht nach China (2007). Forthcoming is an oral history, Death and Love in the Holocaust: The Story of Sonja and Kurt Messerschmidt.