Shanghai, China – A memorial paying homage to the more than 13,000 Jewish refugees who fled to Shanghai for safety during World War II was unveiled in the city Tuesday.
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A list of the 13,732 names was carved into a 34-meter-long copper wall built in the Shanghai Jewish Refugee Museum at the former Ohel Moshe Synagogue site reports Chinese news agency Xinhua.
“The list is particularly meaningful. All of [the refugees] survived harsh days in the war and sheltered in Shanghai,” said 75-year-old German activist Sonja Muehlberger, who was born into a Jewish family in Shanghai in 1939.
Names on the wall came from the appendix of Exile in Shanghai: 1938-1947, a book created by three Jewish girls, which Muehlberger proofread and contributed.
The Japanese authorities who occupied Shanghai at the time hired 14-year-old Sonja Poizner, 15-year-old Eva Zunterstein and 16-year-old Helga Ross to type a list of names for a “census” of Jewish refugees.
Thousands of Jewish refugees converged on Shanghai in the 1930s and 40s through two major channels: a sea route from Europe to Southeast Asia and then to Shanghai, and a train from Eastern Europe across Eurasia, Siberia into northeast China, making its way to Shanghai.
Shanghai’s Hongkou District, the site of the former Jewish refugee ghetto, has recommended making the neighborhood a world heritage site to protect the area and preserve the neighborhood’s history and remnants.
The Shanghai Jewish Refugee Museum and the Jewish Studies Center of Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences collaborated to collect and study information on the city’s refugees.