Leo glanced back again, struggling to hold on to the pile of still-damp sheets and blankets he was carrying, and shouted in Chinese, “I’m sorry! No money!” He quickened his pace to catch up with his parents, who were almost out of sight ahead of him. During his first year in Shanghai, Leo had found it impossible to hurry past the begging children with rotting teeth and rashes on their faces, the men missing arms and legs, and other destitute souls of Hongkew, but by 1943 he had learned to focus on his own survival. It wasn’t something that came naturally to him, given both his temperament and his comfortable upbringing, and he still gave what he could to those worse off than he was. But he could move through the city speedily now, a skill he’d found was a key to staying alive in Shanghai’s slums.
He passed insistent vendors hawking stolen goods, women washing tattered clothes in rusting metal buckets in the street, messengers running to deliver the building materials tied to their backs, and then he stopped short before a post on which a number of identical signs had been pasted. He had passed such signs many times since February, when the signs started going up, and he had memorized their message. But they still never failed to chill him: the Japanese authorities who governed Shanghai were forcing all the Jews to move into the city’s restricted area in Hongkew and they had just three months to evacuate their homes and relocate.
Rumors had circulated since 1940, when Japan formally joined the Axis powers, that the Germans were putting more pressure on the Japanese to isolate the Jews in Shanghai, but in the three years that the Hartmanns had lived there, no significant steps had been taken. The Jews in Shanghai knew that while the Japanese could be very cruel, their fury was mostly inflicted on the Chinese and that anti-Semitism was not something the Japanese authorities believed in.
“Maybe the Germans are exerting more influence over them,” said Max Hartmann when he and Leo had first seen the signs. “But I doubt many have truly been indoctrinated. So many have said since we arrived that the Japanese believe that the Jews are very powerful. That they could be a help rather than a hindrance, so please don’t worry too much,” he’d assured his son as Leo reread the notice.
For the Jewish community, life in the city was difficult, but tolerable. And every day the Hartmanns thanked God that they were in Asia, not Europe, where lives were being extinguished as easily as two fingers pinching out a flame. News of what was happening to the Jews in Austria and elsewhere had trickled in, and while they weren’t sure what to believe, they knew it was a miracle they weren’t there.
Hani and Max had tried desperately to persuade the rest of their families to come to Shanghai once they realized their lives were not at risk there, especially in the early days when Ho Feng-Shan was issuing hundreds of visas, but no one had followed them. Some were afraid to travel such a distance, or did not believe that Austria would become more dangerous than it had been in 1939. Some, like Max’s brother and his family, found refuge in other countries. And others, they were sure, were dead.
The Hartmanns had met many Jews who had arrived in China with the visas issued by Ho Feng-Shan in Vienna, as well as others who came with the help of a Japanese diplomat in Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara. Those with Japanese transit visas had traveled through Japan, many living there for weeks, even months, before making their way from Kobe to Japanese-occupied Shanghai.
The Jews in Shanghai had been poverty-stricken, yet their lives were steady. But things began to deteriorate rapidly in the spring of 1943, after those ominous signs went up on every pole and bare concrete wall in Shanghai. According to the decree, Jews who had arrived before 1937 could stay where they were, but those who had come after—most of the city’s Jewish population—were to be corralled in a designated area, a small part of Hongkew.
The Japanese officials did not call it a ghetto, but that’s what it was, Leo’s parents told him. “I’m sure they won’t kill us, but if they tell you where you have to live, control when you can leave, and force you to stay in one of the city’s slums, then that is a ghetto,” Max said.
The Hartmanns were warned by the Jewish community leaders that they would need passes to both leave and return to the restricted area, and that they would have to renew them every month, no longer free to move around the city. They had until May 18 to relocate, but housing was quickly becoming scarce, so they agreed to go sooner.
Leo ripped one of the signs off the post and let it fall in a brown puddle of filth on the ground. “The designated area is bordered on the west by the line connecting Chaoufoong, Muirhead, and Dent Roads; on the east by Yangtzepoo Creek; on the south by the line connecting East Seward, Muirhead, and Wayside Roads; and on the North by the boundary of the International Settlement,” the notices read. The area was less than two square kilometers and there were already one hundred thousand Chinese living there. They lived in dark, damp alleyways, sometimes a dozen in an apartment, full of filth and grime, lice and disease. The Jews were constantly being vaccinated by the Japanese, but they did not bother with the Chinese, not minding at all if typhoid spread through the alleys, killing generations. “It’s the Chinese presence that keeps the Japanese from calling it a ghetto,” Max had explained. But Leo wondered what difference that made. Everyone in Shanghai knew that, to the Japanese military, Chinese lives did not matter.
The rickshaw puller had finally given up on securing Leo’s business, picking up a cigarette butt off the ground, and Leo left the signs and hurried faster after his parents and the Chinese men helping them move into their new room in Hongkew. The Hartmanns had spent the last three years in a one-room apartment on the other side of the neighborhood, but since it was not inside the new restricted zone, they had to cede it to a Jewish family who had come to Shanghai before 1937 but had been living in shabbier, more roach-infested quarters.
Leo ran as quickly as he could, with his arms threatening to give out under the weight of his load, and managed to catch up with his friend Jin, a Chinese teenager who had gone to high school with him for his last year of school in Shanghai. He was helping the family move and had brought the laborers with him, but they had gotten far ahead, impatient to earn a wage.
Leo took one of the cushions Jin was holding, as it was about to fall, and placed it precariously on the top of his stack of sheets, making it even harder for him to see in the narrow alleyways that made up Hongkew’s mess of streets. Lines of strung-up laundry blocked the sun, as did the slum’s low, packed-together buildings. The light that did make it through seemed to be sucked in by the hundreds of bodies zigzagging through, on foot, on bicycles, in rickshaws, and occasionally in something obtrusive and motorized. Shouting was heard constantly, day or night, and the first words in Chinese that Leo had learned were Z?u kāi, get out of the way.
Leo steadied his stack and asked Jin why the rickshaw puller would bother following a Jew living in the restricted area for a fare.
“Because you’re white,” said Jin, his British accent crisp and proper. “Plus, that’s the only line the new rickshaw drivers can say in English. ‘We treat you good, Jewish.’ They didn’t even know what Jewish was before 1939. Now they want your money.”
“But we don’t have any money,” said Leo.