Visiting Shanghai More Than 70 Years After My Grandfather Fled East From the Holocaust

Yosl Mlotek was 21 years old when only a few days after the Nazi invasion the newspaper where he worked, the Folksaytung, moved its offices to Lublin. En route, he heard that the city’s roads were blocked, so he traveled to Vilna. He lived there for a year, working on war refugees’ testimonies. When he discovered that the paper’s editor and other writers were arrested by the Soviet government, he went into hiding. It was then that he heard that one of his brothers had managed to escape Warsaw. A mutual friend arranged their reunion. My grandfather didn’t know which brother he would see until he opened the door and saw Avram. This would be the only family member my grandfather would see until after World War II. Besides a sister, Sore, the rest of his family died in the Holocaust.

While in Vilna, my grandfather heard a Japanese diplomat was granting travel visas to Curacao in Kaunas, Lithuania. The two brothers waited in line for days before finally receiving them from Chiune Sugihara, Vice-Consul at the Japanese legation—a righteous gentile eventually recognized by Yad Vashem, the Israel Holocaust Authority. After a long trek from Vilna, the brothers lived in Kobe, Japan, for about a year before learning that their exodus was still unfolding. The Japanese government reprimanded Sugihara for his traitorous act of rescuing more than 6,000 Jews and would not host the Jewish refugees any longer. They sent them to Shanghai, to the Hongkou ghetto.

The ghetto was established for Jewish refugees in the first wave from Germany in the mid-1930s, and it was there that my grandfather and his brother made their home for the next several years. They wrote to Sore, who was living in Siberia, and learned the devastating news of their family’s and the Jewish people’s fate back in Poland.

Having been welcomed by the Sephardic and Ashkenazi communities who had lived in China for generations, the war refugees from Poland recreated their cultural life in the ghetto. My grandfather worked at the Russian library and wrote for Yiddish magazines. Concerts, lectures, communal gatherings, synagogues and newspapers were all part of my grandfather’s milieu in a whole new part of the world.

Fast forward to 2013. My father Zalmen and I with my wife and baby daughter wait anxiously at the Chinese consulate to hear whether our visas have been granted. I’d been invited to participate in the 70th Anniversary of the Hongkou ghetto and at Limmud Shanghai, but complications caused us to miss our flight out of Newark’s Liberty Airport. Our visas wouldn’t be ready until the next day. As we headed home I thought of my grandfather, wondering what his painstaking wait for a visa must have been like, being uncertain if he would get his lifeline out of Europe.

We arrived in China on a Friday afternoon, not believing we would be spending Shabbat in Shanghai. Dazed by jetlag, we walked to one of the city’s three Chabad centers, and experienced the kindness of a free kosher meal.

“Lechu neranenah!” We sang the words of the Psalmist, words that have been part of the Shabbat prayers for centuries. I wondered if my grandfather ever walked into a synagogue while in Shanghai. What would he say? What does one say to God while one’s family perishes in the fires of Auschwitz? My grandfather rarely spoke of his refugee experience or of his family from before the war, but he did write poetry and prose published in newspapers and anthologies of war refugees’ testimonies.

We reread my grandfather’s Yiddish letters to his sister while in Shanghai. We deciphered his handwriting and tried not to weep. At first, my grandfather gently berates his sister for not writing more and then explains just how thirsty he is for news from home. Rumors are spreading in the ghetto about the “misfortunes” of the Jews in Poland. He wrote to her of roaming the streets of Shanghai and feeling the burning stares of the locals. What do these looks mean? he wonders. Are they glances of pity, of compassion? I think of Moses’ words: “For I have been a sojourner in a foreign land,” and wonder what my grandfather’s source of comfort might have been during these tumultuous times—if he even had any.

The next morning we went on walking tours of Shanghai, the largest city in China, home to more than 20 million people. We viewed the varieties of architecture, skyscrapers up against flimsy apartments. Our 9-month-old daughter, Ravi, was treated like a celebrity, as people stopped on the street, smiling, pointing, and some even asking to take a picture with her. It was a relief to walk through these foreign streets on Shabbat without snapping photos on our cell phones. Instead, we pushed ourselves to be present in the present and took mental photographs, all the while wondering, “Did my zeyde walk here?”

Sunday marked Yom HaShoah. We started the day at the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum where we were greeted by security guards saying Shabbat Shalom, a peaceful Sabbath. We walked through the streets of the ghetto with our tour guide who pointed out old refugee homes. My father shared photographs my grandfather had taken during his time in China and showed them to our guide.

“You are on this street now,” the guide said holding the photograph.

We looked around and noticed the similarities: the narrow road; the old terraces. In another photograph stood a large castle-like building that apparently used to house the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in Shanghai. We found the old building as we turned the corner. Our touring felt more like a detective’s adventure, uncovering my grandfather’s past footsteps.

Our performance was set to start at 3 p.m. There were emissaries from the Israeli consulate and rabbis who spoke, along with a representative from the Joint Distribution Committee. He talked of the Joint’s work and the rabbinic phrase, kol yisrael arevim zeh lazeh. He shared an anecdote about the Shanghai mayor who, when Israel and China established diplomatic relations in the 1990s, stood at a memorial site with Prime Minister Rabin in a park in the ghetto and thanked the Israeli government for acknowledging Shanghai as a haven for Jews during the war. He said, “From the oldest and largest community on earth to the oldest and smallest community on earth, we thank you.”

My wife’s cousin, Rebecca, one of the coordinators of the weekend program, invited us to take an extended tour. We jumped at the opportunity, taking along papers that listed my great uncle’s address as well as the address for a concert my grandfather organized while in the city. As we walked through the bustling streets, we passed vendors selling live frogs and birds along with an array of spices. From the prison to our left, it quickly became clear that buildings had been torn down and rebuilt and the streets had changed.

While others left for lunch, my father and I stayed on with the tour guide, searching. Surely, seeing a whole new part of the world was thrilling, but what were we really looking for? Buildings that no longer exist? A grandfather who has since passed and a story which he can no longer tell? We walked for half an hour; a hunt in futility. I wondered if perhaps this is how memory is maintained, how a collective consciousness is formed: walking through the streets of one’s history, simply trying to feel something.

When we came back to perform, we sang folk songs, ballads by Mordkhe Gebirtig, songs of frustrated fathers and wild sons, and shared music from the ghettos, forests of the partisans and concentration camps. Our voices filled the old synagogue, Ohel Moshe. In my grandfather’s papers we found an invitation to the inauguration of that very shul. His photograph of the synagogue matched the one in which we stood. As we sang, I realized: this music, these words were his lost home. He had been lucky enough to share his journey with his brother Avram, my namesake, reveling in a culture that reflected his family and a world the Nazis sought to destroy. That world continues to live.

Our next days were spent sightseeing and taking photos endlessly. I wish I could show my zeyde these pictures of China, of his son and grandson and great-granddaughter walking through the streets of his refuge, if for nothing more than to say, “Zeyde, we were here, we’re trying to remember.”

As our whirlwind adventure came to an end and I reflected on our short journey, I can only hope that in some way, our trip served as a tiny tikkun, a spiritual fixing, to a wound that can never fully heal.

By Avram Mlotek