2005年8月犹太人访问团在虹口霍山路寻访 (郭大公)

Eva Hirschel’s Shanghai Story

I knock, and I hear her voice: “the door’s open,”

It’s a two-bedroom apartment in Rohnert Park, California and she’s a little lady, sitting in the corner by the window, watching kids scream outside.

I call her Eva, though she could be my grandmother. I set the tape recorder down, and without prompting, she speaks. She is ready to tell her story.

Eva was born in Breslau, Germany to Jewish parents less than five years before Hitler became chancellor in 1933. They were ordinary people, who watched with a mixture of fear, disbelief, and awe as a madman came to power. As a child, she stood witness to the blind hatred and shattering cruelty of Kristallnacht or “the night of broken class”. Her brother was beaten up in school and she was humiliated and spit upon by the Hitler Youth.

She was eleven years old in 1940, when after her father spent six weeks in Buchenwald concentration camp, she and her parents, along with younger brother set sail for Shanghai by way of Genoa, Italy.

Shanghai, China was the only place that would take them, an open port city ruled jointly by the Chinese and an international municipal council which required no visa for entry. Eva would later discover that their Italian liner, the Conte Verde, was the last one out of Europe. Italy joined Germany in WWII midway through the voyage, and the rest of her family was trapped.

For over 20,000 European Jews in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, Shanghai was once home. It meant desperate conditions, constant hunger, and strange languages. It meant traversing thousands of miles of uncertain ocean to reach a crime-infested, chaos-accustomed city. But most importantly, Shanghai meant a safe haven from Hitler and the Holocaust at a time when the Nazi flag flew from Paris to the Baltic.

Eva spent her teenage years in Shanghai, living in conditions that were impossibly cramped and disease-ridden. The Japanese occupiers bayoneted Chinese for the slightest infractions, and in 1943, Jews were herded into the poverty-stricken Hongkew “ghetto”, where corpses wrapped in newspapers appeared on the streets every morning, dead from starvation or diseases.

Eva quit school at fifteen to support her family: her mother was an invalid, her father a drunkard, and her brother a mere boy. She recalled that “[her] family lived in a house shared by 24 other people with one bathtub, cold water and two small toilets. [They] lived in one room, which was separated in half by a tiny plywood wall in order to accommodate another couple.”

Yet not all the memories of Shanghai were bleak. Eva, like millions of pre-teens around the world in 1930s, idolized Shirley Temple, and saw the American child star as a reflection of herself – a German Jewish girl.  

 “I had been in Shanghai only a few weeks when one day, walking down Wayside Road, I happened to pass a cinema and there to my utter joy and delight was a large poster from which Shirley’s eyes smiled at me. I could have hugged her. I was so happy and relieved.”

Eva ran home and told her mother about the news.

“Shirley. Shirley Temple. Isn’t that wonderful? She got out of Germany. She is safe and living right here in Shanghai. I know. I saw her picture.”

Thousands of other Jews survived much as Eva did -- with determination, resourcefulness, and a sort of relentless spirit that allowed them to prevail over the many challenges presented by the city. A thriving, boisterous Jewish culture developed with first-rate theatre, ballet and concerts. Newspapers were printed in half-a-dozen languages, and intramural sports teams were organized.

The Jewish quarter of Shanghai became known as “Little Vienna.”

The Jews of Shanghai knew nothing of what happened to their families in Europe, as all information was censored by the Japanese. It was not until after the war that images of Eisenhower inspecting the death camps came through, and they were given knowledge of the horrors that had come to pass.

“Who could have imagined? It was so quiet in our ghetto that you could have heard a pin drop. There wasn’t a single person who hadn’t lost somebody. In 1940? In Germany, the country of Goethe and Nietzsche and Brahms and Beethoven? I can never understand it.”

Every member of Eva’s extended clan left in Europe was lost to the Holocaust, if not in body, then in mind. In the 1970’s, she traveled to Berlin to see the lone survivor, her mother’s sister, who had been in concentration camp. “My aunt, who I knew since I was a little girl; I always spent my vacations with them, she didn’t know who I was. What was I doing there?”

She has never since gone back to Europe.

After the end of the WWII, most Jews looked towards new lives in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Israel. A few stayed behind to weather three more years of Chinese civil war, and the early days of Mao. But by the late 1950s, the once thriving Jewish ghetto in Shanghai had all but vanished.

Despite the hardship and the starvation, Eva thinks of her experiences in Shanghai as overwhelmingly positive: “We grew up so fast -- we learned responsibility; we learned to help each other. I don’t envy the kids here [in US] at all. I wouldn’t have traded it for the world.”

Eva’s life is as ordinary as it is extraordinary. She pulls out her dusty photo albums, and from the yellowed pages peers out a vivacious young woman, drinking at a bar with friends, perched on the wing-tip of a B-29 bomber, giggling on the arm of a New Mexico sweetheart in an American army uniform. Her smile, her demeanor, her utter vibrancy belied what she was suffering.

When I first met her at a conference at the Ner Shalom synagogue in Cotati, California, these were the things that defined Eva the most. I have read many books on the Holocaust, heard many speakers, and watched many videos. But Eva was the first survivor I interviewed. And despite her denial, she is a survivor. I left with a strong conviction that personal communication is far more powerful than anything that the media can produce. Communication is what we, as students, can instigate to ensure that the Holocaust is indeed, “never again”.

I will forever carry in my heart the image of a little girl in a cold, bare Italian train station, not knowing whether she would be allowed to leave and live. These are the images that remind us that we live in a world ridden with prejudice, hatred, and violence. Thus it is our responsibility, that we not only say, “we remember” but live by that phrase every day. In remembering those who were victims of prejudice and discrimination, we must learn to relinquish the weapons of prejudice and hatred ourselves.

Sometimes it seems near impossible.

Then I asked Eva whether she or Jews of Shanghai ever thought of vengeance. She shook her head furiously: “There was sadness. There was sorrow. There always will be sorrow. But revenge - no, no, never.”

This statement will never cease to inspire me.