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Welcome home - return of a Shanghai Jew
By Adam Minter (LA Times)
Updated: 2006-01-17 10:43
Near the waterfront, Moses stops outside a whitewashed two-story building
that houses a massage parlor. Two days earlier he had found it, relying only on
instinct. "I think this is where my father lived when he arrived in 1939," he
says. "And then we lived here with him when we arrived in 1941." He sits on a
concrete embankment across the street and folds his arms. "I remember there was
a doctor on the first floor who kept a human fetus in a jar in the window. We
lived in one of two apartments up there." He pauses. "If this is really it. I
don't know." Displeasure tightens his lips. "I'm a little shocked it's a massage
parlor."
He crosses the street, strides down a narrow brick alley and emerges into a
neighborhood of squat concrete homes. Sitting alone on a wooden stool, a tiny
old woman with silky gray hair looks up curiously at the foreigners. "Ala
Shanghai YouTaNin," says Moses as he approaches her. She nods with a knowing
smile and takes his hand. Moses opens his wallet and pulls out a black-and-white
visa photo snapped in 1947. "Ala!" he declares, pointing at the delicate
12-year-old with the protruding ears, the dark circles under his eyes and the
thin smile. Then he stretches that world-weary half-smile and places the photo
next to his striking blue eyes. "Ala!"
The woman takes the photo and smiles gently. Her name is Jiaodi. She has
lived here for 60 of her 92 years, but she has no memory of any Jews. Moses pats
her hand. "Something about this woman," he says softly. "She reminds me of our
amma [maid]. She cooked and cleaned for us when we lived in this building.
Later, when we had to go to the heime [a refugee group home], she came and
brought us candy." His brow rises. "It's not her, but she is so close to
her."
He fixates on Jiaodi for several minutes, holding her hand, until a woman
interrupts, attracted by the conversation. Soon a crowd has gathered. They pass
around the photo and repeat the words Shanghai YouTaNin. "I remember the Jews
who lived there," says a large old woman in a purple coat. "There were two
little kids always running around in back, playing. And then there was one who
was still a baby," she adds before slipping away. Moses' eyes widen. "That would
have been me and my sister. My brother was young," he whispers. "We were here."
He embraces each of the older people surrounding him.
In early 1941, Frida Moses and her children still were in Germany, waiting to
join Max in Shanghai. The Nazis were about to make extermination—and not
emigration—the solution to their so-called Jewish problem. Exit permits were
almost impossible to obtain, and the widening war had closed the sea routes to
Shanghai used by most European refugees. "My mother is the hero," says Moses.
"Without her, we'd all be dead." Frida took the direct approach: She went to
Breslau's Gestapo headquarters and demanded an exit stamp or death. According to
her son, who often heard the story recounted, the commanding officer replied:
"You're brave for a Jew."
If not for a nonaggression pact between Russia and Germany, the family would
never have boarded a train bound for Vladivostok, in Siberia. "Can you imagine?"
asks Moses. "This skinny little German woman, who had never left the country,
traveling to China with three kids?" At a Siberian port they transferred to a
Japanese ship that took them to Shanghai.
"We definitely came off the boat over there," Moses says, nodding toward the
Huangpu River. He still is behind the massage parlor and encircled by curious
Shanghainese. He approaches two windows that face the back alley and rakes his
hands across the steel security bars. "My first memory of Shanghai is beggars
sticking their hands through there," he says. "We didn't know what they wanted.
We didn't understand at all."
People were starving to death by the tens of thousands in the wake of the
Japanese conquest of the Chinese sections of the city. "You'd see bodies in the
streets, on the sidewalks," Moses recalls. "But you know, if we were thirsty,
they [the Chinese] gave us water. If we were hungry, they gave us rice cakes."
He purses his lips before continuing. "As bad as we had it, they had it worse.
And they felt bad for us."
He walks around to the front of the massage parlor and yanks on the glass
door. Inside, two teenage girls in tight pants and low-cut blouses smile
nervously at the two white men and the Japanese woman with the very large
camera. Behind them, a red curtain snaps open to reveal an emaciated 6-foot-tall
man with tobacco-stained teeth and a dead cigarette between bony fingers. "Ala
Shanghai YouTaNin," Moses says.
The man's head cocks left, curious. "Shanghai YouTaNin?"
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