Despite dozens of Holocaust museums and memorials in the United States and extensive education and other programming about the Holocaust, the story of the some 20,000 Jews who fled from the Nazis in Central Europe to Shanghai remains little known, according to Jerry Lindenstraus.
“Even though there were books and talks about Shanghai, still a lot of people don’t know—not even Jewish people,” the 96-year-old survivor told JNS. “That is why I talk about my life.”
Those experiences in Japanese-occupied Shanghai later strengthened Lindenstraus. “Going through something like that, not having enough to eat and the diseases, it makes you stronger,” he told JNS.
That sort of endurance makes Lindenstraus optimistic even as Jews struggle amid antisemitism that has been surging throughout the United States and abroad.
“You will come out stronger,” he told JNS. “Even people in concentration camps. I know several people personally, one close friend in Auschwitz. He came out much stronger.”
Lindenstraus shared his story on July 17 with his senior living community, Inspir Carnegie Hill, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
‘The beginning of a hard time’
The nonagenarian told fellow seniors, their families and staff at the senior community about being born in a small town, then part of Prussia and now Russia, to a family of assimilated, middle-class German Jews.
Before he was 5, his family was forced to sell its profitable department store for a fraction of its worth after the Nazis came to power. The family moved to different parts of the region, where life was tense and often difficult amid rising Jew-hatred, Lindenstraus said during the event. After his parents divorced, his mother and new husband found out that the Nazis were going to arrest them, so they fled to Bogotá, Colombia.
“She and her husband had to leave suddenly because she was told she was going to be arrested,” he said at the event. “So she left in 1938 with her new husband without saying goodbye to me.”
After Kristallnacht in November 1938, his family learned that they could emigrate to Shanghai without a visa. A ship set sail for Shanghai in July 1939, but tragedy came with it. That December, when Lindenstraus was 10, his father Louis Lindenstraus contracted pneumonia and died.
Life was challenging in Shanghai, although the occupied Japanese city was a haven for Jews fleeing the Nazis. The Japanese set up a ghetto in Hongkou, where Lindenstraus and his family and some 18,000 Germans and Austrian Jews lived. (Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese envoy in Kaunas, Lithuania, issued between 2,100 and 3,500 transit visas to Jews fleeing the Nazis, knowing that they would arrive in Japan without being able to travel to destinations in Curaçao and other Dutch territories.)
“That was the beginning of a very hard time,” Lindenstraus told the audience at the event.
‘We got an excellent education’
Conditions were harsh and unsanitary, with overcrowding and minimal resources. At one point, Lindenstraus told the audience that he, his stepmother and her new husband lived in half a room, divided by a Persian carpet. A Chinese family lived downstairs in the house.
“We had no running water,” he said. “We had an outhouse on the roof where we also had to cook. It was not pretty.”
The hardest part of life in Hongkou was the lack of food and rampant tropical diseases: “I had malaria and jaundice for two years until they found the right medicine,” he said.
But Lindenstraus also remembers being happy going to school in Shanghai.
Wealthy Sephardic Jews, some of whom had been in Shanghai for a century, helped the Jewish refugees. One converted a building outside the ghetto into a school, the Shanghai Jewish Youth Association.
“We got an excellent education,” Lindenstraus told the audience, noting that there were “free lunches and afternoon sports.”
After World War II, Lindenstraus’s mother sent him a ticket to Colombia and asked him to come live with her.
“I didn’t even remember her. It was 10 years in the meantime,” he said at the event. “I certainly didn’t want to go.” He agreed and remembers his time in the country as happy. He learned to speak fluent Spanish, and “to party and dance,” he said at the event.
In 1951, his mother died. Two years later, Lindenstraus moved to the United States, settling in New York City, where his stepmother and her husband lived. He leveraged his fluency in Spanish to work at a small export company.
He met his wife, Erica, and the couple had a son. He subsequently started his own export company.
Lisa Walsh, director of resident experience at Inspir Carnegie Hill, told JNS that she was raised Episcopal and, working at the senior living community in Manhattan, she spends more time with Jews than she ever did before.
“I’m obviously very aware of the Holocaust, but I wasn’t aware of the Shanghai aspect until I learned about it from Jerry firsthand,” she said.