An Unlikely Refuge: Jewish Refugees from Nazi Europe in Shanghai, 1933-1945
Permanent Link
Author/Creator
Author/Creator ORCID
Date
Type of Work
Department
Program
Citation of Original Publication
Wachtel, Jennifer. “An Unlikely Refuge: Jewish Refugees from Nazi Europe in Shanghai, 1933-1945.” UMBC Review: Journal of Undergraduate Research 18 (2017): 134–55. https://ur.umbc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/354/2017/05/umbc_Review_2017.pdf#page=120
Rights
This item is likely protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. Unless on a Creative Commons license, for uses protected by Copyright Law, contact the copyright holder or the author.
Subjects
Abstract
Born in Berlin in 1934 and now living in New Jersey, Peter Engler feared the sound of breaking glass well into his twenties. Engler was only four years old on the night of Kristallnacht, November 8 and 9, 1938, when Germans attacked and destroyed Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues. Like thousands of other Jews, the Englers desperately sought a means of escape. In 1939, Engler and his parents fled Germany after Kristallnacht bound for an unlikely refuge: Shanghai. Stripped of their German citizenship, Jews like the Englers sought a refuge they could enter without visa documents. Historian David Kranzler, recognized as a founder of the field of scholarship pertaining to Jewish Holocaust refugees to Shanghai, claimed in 1976 that 18,000 Jews fled to Shanghai between 1938 and 1941. In 2013, scholar Gao Bei raised that estimate claiming that between 1933 and 1941, nearly 20,000 Jewish refugees, including the Englers, fled to Shanghai from Germany, Austria, and Eastern Europe as most Western nations barred their entry