ABSTRACT
Half a century ago, more than 25,000 Jewish refugees from Central Europe, endeavouring to escape from Nazi persecution, travelled all the way to Shanghai seeking a safe haven. They suffered many tribulations, but almost all of them miraculously survived the holocaust and the war. Why did Shanghai – the largest metropolis of the Far East – the only big city available to them at that time, become an ideal haven for Central-European Jewish refugees? How did these refugees flee the Nazi-controlled areas and reach Shanghai? How did they settle down in the city and spend the long and hard days of the Pacific War? Why could they survive under the Japanese occupation authorities, theoretically Hitler’s allies? These questions still arouse strong interest in international academic circles even more than fifty years later.
