Jewish Refugees in Shanghai

Experiences, Memories, Interviews, Histories

Steve Hochstadt

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2026
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781836954699
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Between 1933 and 1942, around 20,000 refugees fled to Shanghai to escape Nazi-occupied Europe, most of them Jewish. Unable to assimilate into Chinese culture, the Jewish community spent a decade preserving their own culture and enduring harsh Japanese occupation in Shanghai, before dispersing around the world after the end of World War II. Steve Hochstadt, whose Viennese grandparents were among those who fled, tells their story by weaving together hundreds of sources and dozens of interviews into a series of compelling essays on this unique, but little-known rescue.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction — A Seder in Shanghai in 1989
• Part I — Experiences in Shanghai
• Chapter 1 — The Hochstädt Family of Refugees
• Chapter 2 — Shanghai: A Last Resort for Desperate Jews
• Chapter 3 — Counting Shanghai Refugees
• Chapter 4 — Who Became Refugees? The Demography of the Shanghai Refugees
• Chapter 5 — One Day in Shanghai, 22 June 1939
• Part II — Memories of Shanghai
• Chapter 6 — At the Last Minute: Shanghai Refugees Remember Their Flight from Home
• Chapter 7 — Memories and Memoirs of Shanghai
• Chapter 8 — Rickshaw Reunion in San Francisco, 2002
• Chapter 9 — Refugees and Natives in Shanghai: The Portrait of the Chinese in Jewish Refugee Memory
• Part III — Holocaust Interviews and Holocaust Research
• Chapter 10 — Oral History and the Holocaust: The Necessity of Interviewing Survivors
• Chapter 11 — Using Survivor Interviews Systematically: Social Science and the Holocaust
• Chapter 12 — From Interview to History: Transcription, Editing and Lost Meaning in Holocaust Interviews
• Part IV — Competing Histories
• Chapter 13 — Jewish Studies in China
• Chapter 14 — The Chinese History of Shanghai Refugees
• Conclusion: The Future History of Shanghai Refugees
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index