“A coolie without feet in Shanghai? I hope he’s not. I think he’d be better off dead,” said Leo.
Leo had seen many people in the last few years who he hoped were just days from death. Children who had had their chests cut open under suspicion that they were hiding rice in their clothes, women so frail that they could barely stand under the weight of a baby on their hip, and old men who seemed suspended on the street somewhere between illness and the afterlife.
“Don’t think that way,” said Jin. “If that were the case, then half the city should be shot. Certainly every Chinese person in Hongkew.”
“I’ll focus on the glorious life all around us on Yuhang Road,” said Leo of the road they were walking down, the road his new house was on. It was chaotic and pungent with the smell of filth, but it was the geographic center of the ghetto and couldn’t be avoided. And like Shanghai so often was, on that day it was flooded, with fish bones and rotten vegetables floating next to his feet.
“At least there hasn’t been a policed ghetto until now,” said Jin when they passed more signs directed at the Jews stuck to a lamppost. “A restricted area,” he corrected himself. He stopped to drop a coin in the hand of a young blind girl begging on the street. She could not have been more than eight or nine, and her bare feet showed signs of severe frostbite, probably years in the making. Leo reached into his pocket to give her a coin, too, but it was empty. Jin’s father’s nightclub was still thriving, even though most of the Brits were confined in Lunghua and the French hold on their concession was in peril. There were the Japanese and still enough rich Chinese who wanted women and alcohol in large quantities. Jin’s father always had money to give his son, and luckily for Shanghai’s poor, Jin often gave it straight to them.
When the Hartmanns had first arrived in Shanghai in February 1939, they stared from the deck of their ship with trepidation at the mass of buildings and people. They hadn’t forgotten the hell they had left behind in Vienna, but their trip had been a thoroughly comfortable one. Norio Kato had bought them first-class tickets on the luxury liner. From the moment they boarded, they had a porter to tend to their needs, hearty meals at any hour of the day they pleased, and a staff that treated them with reverence, a welcome change from their recent treatment in Vienna. But what lay before them now?
“Before the war, Shanghai was known around the world as a mythical place,” Max had told Leo as their boat docked, patting down his thick gray hair as if he had somewhere nice to be. Already, from a distance, they could tell that on land, it was pandemonium. “It was lawless, exotic. And there was a place for everyone—a section each for the French, for the Americans, and for the British. The neighborhoods for the foreigners are not separated by walls; the boundaries are just geographic. From what I’ve been told, everyone mixes with everyone else. And among it all, they hide drugs and prostitutes and worse. Now we are sailing right into it.”
He winked at Leo and said, “Try not to lose your innocence too early.”
Leo thought about the passionate afternoons he’d spent deep in the recesses of the Hartmanns’ Vienna home with Emi, beautiful, naked, and very much his, and shook his head no. His innocence may have been gone in the physical sense, but he looked back on those days next to her as the most innocent of his life. As soon as they docked, he would write to her in Vienna. Tell her that they were safe now, the feeling of being thousands of miles from Europe the best feeling in the world.
Leo looked at his father and asked, “Where will we go, since we are none of those things?”
“We are going to a place called Hongkew,” Max said, putting his hand on his son’s dark hair, which was out of sorts from the wind.
“Hongkew.” Leo said the word aloud for the first time soon after they were on land. It sounded mysterious and full of promise on his lips. He would soon see that it was a place of poverty and hopelessness, both for the Chinese who had long lived there and the Jews who had joined them.
The family’s anxiety eased a little when they found a committee of Jews waiting to greet them and their Jewish fellow passengers. The new arrivals were all taken to a building where they would be put up for the time being in a warehouse-sized room full of bunk beds. They dropped their few things and then were shepherded by the volunteers to a soup kitchen.
There were two groups of Jews who had been in Shanghai for years, the exceedingly rich Baghdadi Jews and the Russian Jews. It was the Baghdadis, especially a banker named Victor Sassoon—the Third Baronet of Bombay and a Cambridge graduate who had been a pilot for the British during the Great War—who were looking after the Jewish refugees. Sassoon had built the city’s beautiful Cathay Hotel and much of its iconic Bund. Himself a Sephardic Jew, he hadn’t lost his commitment to the community along the way. The Shanghai Jewish aid group was also heavily funded by donations from American Jews, and it was those donations that kept the arriving refugees alive and more or less healthy as they settled in and looked for work.
At the soup kitchen, Max and Hani had trouble accepting the handout.
“What is this?” Max asked Leo when they walked in and saw the spread of food. He was still wearing a nice traveling suit and all three Hartmanns realized right away that it was a mistake. The dress, it seemed, was closer to rags.
“They will feed us here for free,” said Leo.
Hani reached for her husband in shock. “We should have brought more money with us,” she hissed. “I told you. We left too much with our families. Will it even help them escape Austria?”
“There was barely any we could move,” Max reminded her at a whisper. “Our accounts frozen, and everyone too scared to buy our possessions. I tried; you know I tried,” he said, rubbing his red eyes.
“They weren’t scared,” said Hani. “They just knew they could take our things for free as soon as we left. Why would they bother paying us?” Hani looked at the food with dread, but she finally managed to swallow her embarrassment, accept the meal, and thank the men serving it. “We used to give money to support such places in Austria and now we are eating in one,” she whispered when they’d sat down with their tin plates. She uncovered her head, placing her hat on the table, and rumpled her curls a little bit. “We are the beggars. I’m not good at this, Leo,” she’d said, her spoon shaking in her hands. “I’m very thankful, but I’m not good at it.”
“You will be,” he replied.
They got used to the handouts very quickly, as there was no alternative.