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Additional support provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Philip Chosky Charitable and Educational Foundation, the Posner Foundation of Pittsburgh, and by viewers like you.

Thank you.

(gentle piano music) - My uncle Hy was able to get a visa to go in what, you know, in certain ways would be the most surprising direction.

- In the early 1930s, as Hitler was coming to power, many German and Austrian Jews fled to Shanghai.

- They rode out the war upwards of six or seven years in Shanghai.

- February 12th, 1941.

I was born in Shanghai.

- After 1938, after Kristallnacht, there were thousands and thousands of Jewish refugees who were attempting to flee Europe.

- I'm 14 years old.

It never occurred to me that my father had a story.

- It was a sort of moment in time that opened and then quickly shut.

But while it was open, Jews were able to pour in.

Shanghai actually became a place of refuge.

It was sort of a little wrinkle in time.

(piano music intensifies) - My name is Harry Waldbaum and my family was from Germany.

My dad had several brothers and sisters.

My mother had another sister.

Eventually when the Holocaust came, some of them perished and some of us survived.

(glass shatters) Kristallnacht came around 1938.

And after my dad was turned in at Buchenwald, it was decided he had to get out of Germany as fast as he could.

(crowd shouting) He had the waiting list to go to various countries.

He had a ticket for United States, or something, and there was a long number and he was able to trade this American tickets for Shanghai.

And that's how we wound up in Shanghai.

That was in thirty nine.

- Shanghai was an open city.

You didn't need a visa to get into Shanghai.

If you could get there by boat or by train and you were in.

You didn't have to show any papers or anything.

- They had to go with whatever they had on their backs.

Later on it was worse for the refugees, because they had nothing, absolutely nothing.

Nothing at all.

- [Male Narrator] In order to conquer the world, we must first conquer China.

- The Japanese began invading China in the 1930s, and they started in the North in Manchuria, and gradually come closer and closer.

And Shanghai is the prize.

It's the wealthiest city of China.

- Thousands and thousands of Chinese eventually died from execution, diseases, or whatsoever.

February 12th, 1941.

I was born in Shanghai.

There was a proclamation in 1943 in February, and they had to be in a certain area called the Hong Ko section.

- One reason the Jews are put in Hong Ko is that it was the worst part of Shanghai.

It was a poor community.

And then it had been bombed very heavily by the Japanese earlier in the 1930s.

- It wasn't only 15,000 people that live in Hong Ko, there were a hundred thousand people which included some Japanese families and Chinese.

So I remember going to school or synagogue to the O'Hare Moshe.

And I remember sometimes walking through bodies.

I had to cross over dead bodies.

And there were still people dying and starving, mainly Chinese, I believe.

There were two big schools.

The main one was Kadoorie School.

So the kids went to school, kindergarten, excursions and etcetera.

And in the evenings I would be outside because it was so hot in the summer.

That's how I spent a lot of the time.

And then I remember the monsoons.

And sometimes we went to the Youth center.

Life went on.

We had a lot of diseases.

We had to worry about the malnutrition.

So it was pretty bad because everything was, how you said, rationed.

And eventually it got even worse.

A year later, you had to learn how to boil water.

Actually, a lot of people didn't boil water and of course got real sick.

We had tuberculosis.

We had dysentery, malaria, name it.

I eventually wound up having malaria.

I was living, I believe in the ghetto in Ward Street Mantra.

If I looked outside the window, about a hundred feet across.

The streets were real wide.

I could see the courtyard, the big jail and possibly the hospital.

The other thing I remember, there was another group housing, which we called Hines.

And these people were living like 200 or more in one area, I mean one home.

(wind blowing) End of 44, maybe early 45, we got some air raids.

I lived right across of course, the bomb shelter.

I remember the first time going in.

And I remember it was my last time because I think I got claustrophobia.

So whenever there was an air rate I'd hide.

July 17, I would believe 1945 and the big raid.

And I remember that day very well.

I was in school, one of the Kadoorie school.

And I think that it might've been elementary or something.

I think I was about five at that time.

Next thing I heard one of the girls, one of the big girls come running and said, "Harry run run!"

I heard the planes and I start running.

As soon as I got out of the building and we're running, the explosion and debris went flying all over us.

Miraculously, we didn't know, we just kept running.

And I saw hundreds of people who were wounded and killed, and buildings burning, and the Japanese, Chinese, and immigrants were helping the wounded A few weeks later, something big happened in the world.

(bomb blows) The first bomb was on Hiroshima.

Second bomb was on Nagasaki.

Actually the war was over, then came the soldiers.

I remember them very well.

The Americans, they were giving out Hershey bars.

As they started getting the news about what was going on in Europe.

Well, that hit them harder than while they were living in Shanghai.

They couldn't believe it was worse.

They found out how bad the Holocaust was and they lost their relatives, etcetera.

And that was the worst news they ever got.

We were eventually sponsored to go to America and we left in 1947.

Somewhere around June I believe.

We wound up in Cleveland.

There's my mother in baby pictures.

Okay, this a album of me in Shanghai.

Some of the pictures of my mother and I as a baby.

I met my wife in Erie, and then she got a job here in Pittsburgh at the VA.

And I followed her and I've stayed here since then.

My parents, my dad, they never talked about World War One, or Kristallnacht, or World War Two, never.

I think it changed our life completely, from something to nothing and all the property being taken away and the hate of the Germans on the Jews at that time.

And I just feel that I'm lucky I survived it.

(gentle music) - [Female Narrator] Why would some Chinese guy save a bunch of Austrian Jews?

He really had no reason to.

- It's who he is.

I am Feng Shan Ho's granddaughter.

My father was his son.

In 1938 after Anschluss, when the Nazis took over Vienna, he became the Consult of the Chinese Consulate.

And at that time then, my grandfather was responsible for the Chinese Consulate in Vienna.

He understood very quickly that according to an agreement that was signed by all the countries, that there was a limitation to the number of Jews that the countries would accept.

There was a quota and he did not agree to this.

He thought it was wrong.

At the time, a lot of the Jews were lining up on the sidewalks surrounding all the consulates.

My grandfather then began to sign visas for anybody who wanted them.

- The Germans, allowed the Jews to leave Germany, if they knew they had these visas, and he knew that not all the Jews would go to Shanghai.

They just needed a visa to leave.

- These actually were entry visas.

Basically, it's just a stamp in a passport that enabled the Jews to get a train ticket, or to get a bus ticket, or a boat ticket or anything.

It just proved that another country would take them in.

And understandably my grandfather realized that probably a great number of the Jews to whom he gave visas would not go to China because of the distance.

But he also realized that with just this stamp, they were able to at least leave Nazi occupied countries.

- The whole reason that Shanghai was able to be the place in the world that was open and able to accept Jews, was that within the chaos of the war, within these two theaters, Europe and China, there was this small window of opportunity.

- In 1937, Japan invaded Shanghai and took over the Chinese portions of the city.

After 1938, after Kristallnacht, there were thousands and thousands of Jewish refugees who were attempting to flee Europe.

And there weren't any ports open available for them.

Shanghai was a port in which nobody was really paying attention.

- Unfortunately, very few people did help the Jews and diplomats were in a slightly different position because they could issue visas.

But unfortunately, very few diplomats did.

The character for Shanghai and his name.

So here, this would have been, let's see.

- I recognize his name.

- We don't know the exact number of visas but given the number on the visas that were discovered it is speculated that he wrote well into the thousands.

They were very unhappy with him, and he was sent from Vienna.

- Why do you think Yeye never mentioned any of this while he was still alive?

- I don't think my grandfather meant to keep it as a secret.

It just, it would've never occurred to him to talk about something like this because he just didn't think of it as anything spectacular, I think.

He thought of it more as something I think that anybody should have done in his position.

That's kind of scary, isn't it?

All you needed was a stamp and a passport.

- Yeah, and he knew that by issuing these visas, he was saving a life.

(somber music) - So for my family, this is really our heirloom of my aunt and uncle's sojourn in Shanghai.

This is, as far as we know their Chinese marriage document.

My name is Daniel Yolkut.

I'm the Rabbi of Poale Zedeck in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh.

My great grandparents, Yaakov and Sima Wind built their family in Berlin.

All of their children survived in different ways.

Two boys made the United States in the early thirties.

There were two children who made it to, what was that time British controlled Palestine.

In 1938 after Kristallnacht, all of the Jews of Eastern European descent were expelled from Germany.

My grandmother, with her parents went to Poland.

My great grandparents were shot by the Nazis.

My grandmother actually got married in the ghetto to my grandfather in July of 1942.

And they survive as employees of Oscar Schindler.

But the story is about my great uncle and his wife.

My great aunt Hy Mojzesz and Rita Wind.

So my uncle Hy was able to get a visa to go in what, you know, in certain ways would be the most surprising direction.

They rode out the war for upwards of six or seven years in Shanghai.

And that's actually where they married.

They knew each other back in Berlin.

She knew the family and she with her parents and my great uncle by himself were in Shanghai and they got married together in the ghetto.

So when my great aunt passed on, her husband predeceased her by about 20 years, we actually have their Chinese marriage documents that hangs in a prominent place in our dining room.

We kind of have kept that as a Memorial to that part of our family history.

And it's really, it's very important to my wife and to myself that our children have this sense of where they come from.

The idea that both the calamity that befell the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust, but also kind of the remarkable and miraculous story of revival that came from there.

(piano music intensifies) (gentle somber music) - Now I'm 14 years old.

It never occurred to me that my father had a story.

I knew there was a Holocaust and my father's parents were killed, but that's all I knew.

And his brother was killed.

My father was a Holocaust survivor who managed to escape through Shanghai.

My father was 17 years old when the war broke out in Poland.

So my father was born in Poland, grew up in Warsaw, the son of a Hasidic family.

September 1st, 1939, the Germans attack Poland.

According to my father, every able body Polish male from the age of 17 to 50 was drafted into the Polish army.

He was given 24 hours of basic training.

(jet engine revving) Then he was sent to the front.

The painters attacked, their lines broken immediately.

He escaped.

My father went to rejoin his unit.

They decided that they were going to do sort of hit and run stuff against the Germans.

Turned out they had an informer in their midst and they were taken to a prison of war camp.

He started his escape on the second day of Sukkot in 1939.

He had to make his way back to Warsaw 'cause that's where his family was.

Leaving Warsaw with no papers 'cause he just went to any train that was going to any neutral country.

The first one that he could get on was to Riga, Latvia.

And then the next part was going to Kovno, Kaunas in Lithuania.

They weren't going to Shanghai.

They were supposed to go to Macau or to one of the Caribbean islands.

So the way you got there was to go through Japan.

My father got to Japan with 110, 120 other guys in the hold of a Japanese fishing troller.

They got caught in a typhoon.

The Japanese coast guard cutter, they brought them to Yokohama, and let the Jewish community in Kobe know that they were still alive.

So that's where they were.

And so from, I'm gonna say from February, March, something like that, 1940 till May, April, 1941, the Mir Yeshiva was two weeks ahead of them.

The Mir Yeshiva was the preeminent advanced school of Talmud study and rabbinical Academy in Europe at the time.

It was the equivalent in Judaism, it would be the equivalent of Harvard.

Somewhere in February, March, the leaders of the Jewish community were told that they received an order that they were going to that the Jewish community was going to be moved from Kobe to Shanghai.

When he got to Shanghai in 41 they were taken to what was the Jewish quarter.

They were just dumped.

Literally just dumped there.

Fend for yourselves.

My father found a room and they had to make a living.

The Mir Yeshiva.

They needed to have Cholov Yisroel, kosher milk in Judaism.

One is enjoined from having milk from any animal that is not kosher.

The main ones that we have are kosher animals that are domesticated are sheep, goats, and cows.

My father offered to them to start a milk business so that he could make a living.

He had to get a special permit from the Japanese authorities to be able to leave early in the morning.

Through contacts, he found a Chinese farmer who was willing to sell him just cow's milk.

Father said he had a 50 gallon jug on handlebars of a bicycle.

And he used to get up at 3:30 in the morning.

And he had this permit to be able to leave.

When the winter came, it was horrendous because he was one of the few people that actually had a source of income.

People starved to death.

He said the people were in the ghetto.

You were literally walking over frozen bodies in the street, but he managed to stay healthy.

He said the greatest day in Shanghai was VJ day.

When the announcement came over, that the Japanese had been vanquished and surrendered.

There were all still poor as hell and starving.

Many people were starving, but they didn't care.

And then the doors were thrown open.

They could leave.

What he said was I wanna go where my family is.

We know that they were killed in Auschwitz in 1943.

His mother's brother had come to the United States in the 1920s for New York City.

He was 24 when he came to the United States.

Everybody else was dead.

And you know what, I think, took about a month.

And then he found a job.

And through that job he met my mother.

My father started to tell the story.

And the story that I heard the first time was seared into my brain.

It was his refuge because it was a place that he felt semi safe that he could get out of once a week and had the ability to earn a living that benefited him, his friends and the rabbinical academy, the Mir Yeshiva.

Shanghai was his refuge and his torture at the same time.

(gentle piano music) - Lucy Hartwich was my aunt.

During the war, she was one of the lucky ones that managed to get out with her husband.

And to Shanghai.

You remember the Kristallnacht.

(piano music intensifies) On the morning of the ninth or tenth, I don't remember, our phone rang very early in the morning.

And Lucy said "Don't you know "what's going on in the streets?"

They're smashing all the Jewish stores' windows, and they're hauling a Jewish man to, well, we don't know where to actually.

At the end Lucy said I'm going to try and find a place to immigrate to.

And she managed to get passage to Shanghai.

She had had a school for Jewish children in Berlin because at a certain point before Kristallnacht, Jewish children couldn't go to public schools and Jewish teachers couldn't teach on the ship which carried them to the far East, where many of her students from Berlin were with their families.

Lucy realized that the people hardly anybody knew good enough English to find a job when they got to the other end.

So she went to the captain of the ship, and she said will you let me have your dining rooms when you don't need them?

And the captain said, well, what are you gonna do with the dining rooms?

And she said, "I'm going to have "everybody speaking English".

On the ship was a very wealthy man by the name of Horace Kadoorie.

The Kadoorie family is a very famous family of philanthropists and people who helped save many Jews.

And Horace Kadoorie was very interested in this woman what she was doing.

When they were about a week or so out of Shanghai.

He said to Miss Hartwich they're already many hundreds, if not thousands of Jewish refugees in Shanghai and the children needed an education.

And he said, we will need to have a school for those children.

And I'm going to provide the school and you will head the school when we get to the other end.

- Life at the Kadoorie school was for me, one of the most important things of Shanghai.

It gave me the education I had.

And I always say, I most probably would have grown up illiterate if it wouldn't have been for that.

- People were able to communicate.

But here for the first time, they learned a common language, English.

And that's I think was a very important part of the Kadoorie school.

- She was a great educator.

Everybody says that.

You know, she had a calling.

She really had a calling.

I look at it and I think about all the upheaval that they faced.

My mother and her aunts, and her own mother, they all went to ends of the earth, you know, before there was the internet, before you knew what was there, they were just you know, getting on a boat and having no idea what they faced at the other end.

(gentle music)