An Unlikely Refuge: Jewish Refugees from Nazi Europe in Shanghai, 1933-1945

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