Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
News

THE STREETS OF SHANGHAI, CIRCA 1938-1942

“The Last Refuge: The Story of Jewish Refugees in Shanghai” (2003), directed and written by Xiaohong Cheng and co-produced by Noriko Sawada, tells the story of the roughly 18,000 Jews who between 1938 and 1942 escaped Eastern Europe to Shanghai, which required no documentation upon entry.

Shanghai’s prewar Jewish neighborhood could no longer contain the influx of refugees fleeing the Nazis, and the Jews were relegated to a ghetto, where they lived — free from the genocide their families and friends were encountering in their native lands — from 1943 until China’s liberation from the Japanese in 1945.

Shown publically for the first time, the film — originally a master’s thesis — interweaves original footage with reenactments of survivors’ experiences and interviews with a historian and a Jewish military chaplain who participated in the liberation of Shanghai. A question and answer session with the director follows the screening, as well as a talk by Marcia Reynders Ristaino, author of “Port of Last Resort: The Diaspora Communities of Shanghai.”

“The Last Refuge” adds to the documentary record firmly established by 2002’s “Shanghai Ghetto.”

Library of Congress, 101 Independence Ave., S.E.; July 8, noon-1:30 p.m.; free. (202-707-5422 or www.loc.gov/loc/events/julaugindex.html)

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.