by Daniel Kalla
“I give the Nazis and the Japs six months tops,” Simon said, though Franz doubted his friend believed that fantasy any more than he did.
Sunny reached for Franz’s hand and guided him back a few steps, allowing Simon and Esther a moment of privacy.
Even after the other prisoners had fallen into line, Esther and Simon stood with their foreheads touching, exchanging whispered words. A Japanese soldier hurried over and jabbed Simon in the back with the butt of his rifle. After regaining his balance, Simon kissed Esther on the lips, then turned and headed for the end of the line without a look back.
* * *
Sunny, Esther and Franz trudged down Bubbling Well Road in sombre silence. Tall neoclassical and art deco buildings loomed overhead, including the city’s tallest skyscraper, the Park Hotel. Rickshaws and pedicabs rushed down the four-lane road. Until recently, roaring American automobiles and coughing trucks had lined the thoroughfare, but the Japanese, in their need to stockpile fuel, had since prohibited the use of non-military vehicles in the city.
They reached the main road, named Avenue Edward VII on the north side and Avenue Foche on the south. Until Pearl Harbor, it had served as an informal border between two separately administered entities within the city: the International Settlement and the French Concession, known by most as simply Frenchtown. The sovereign distinction was long gone. Still, it was hard to ignore the sudden shift in architectural style from the prim and proper British rigour that dominated the International Settlement to the more laissez-faire approach of Frenchtown.
“Why don’t you come home with us, Essie?” Sunny asked. “We can collect your belongings later.”
“No, thank you,” Esther murmured. “I need a little time to organize my home first.”
Franz suspected that she also needed private time to grieve. His heart ached for Essie. After more than a decade as a widower, he could not stomach the idea of being forcibly separated from Sunny again. Their eight-month marriage had been the bright spot in an otherwise dark and difficult few years. During the week that he had been held captive in Bridge House, the idea that he might never see her again was harder to endure than the physical torture.
Franz had met Sunny on his first visit to the refugee hospital more than four years earlier. She was the only volunteer nurse there who was neither German nor Jewish. After years of unofficial apprenticeship at the side of her father, a prominent local physician, Sunny was as knowledgeable as any doctor. Franz offered to mentor her in surgical technique and, within a few years, she was performing at the level of a junior surgeon or better. He had been struck from their first encounter by her delicate Eurasian features: her teardrop-shaped eyes, sloping cheekbones and glowing alabaster skin. But it was her poise, compassion and empathy—the way she could read his mood in a glance and know exactly when to offer him a reassuring smile—that had stolen his heart.
Franz and Sunny walked Esther home through the damp, littered streets of Frenchtown, passing luckless merchants and skeletal beggars, but like most others in the street, they had nothing to offer them. Eventually, they reached Avenue Joffre in the heart of Little Russia: a neighbourhood populated with White Russians who had fled to Shanghai after the Russian Civil War. Since Japan and the Soviet Union had signed a neutrality pact, the Russians—including a large Jewish contingent—were faring better than most, but even Little Russia had suffered in the face of constant rationing, inflation and shortages. The broken windows, backed-up gutters and stench of stale garbage reaffirmed for Franz that Shanghai was a shell of her former self, little more than a ruin in the making.
A girl rushed down the street toward them. Even before Franz could make out her features, he recognized his daughter by her slightly lopsided gait. He opened his arms to greet her, but Hannah stopped short and thrust a sheet of paper out to him.
“Papa, have you seen this?” she panted.
Franz took the page from her. “No, Liebchen.”
“What is it, Hannah?” Sunny asked.
“A proclamation! The Japanese have posted them all over.”
Sunny and Esther crowded in while Franz read the English words aloud: “Proclamation concerning restriction of residence and business of stateless refugees.” The hairs on his neck stood up. “Due to military necessity, places of residence and business of stateless refugees in the Shanghai area shall hereafter be restricted to the under-mentioned area.”
“They mean the German and Austrian Jews, Papa,” Hannah murmured. “Us.”
Franz locked eyes with his daughter. He considered telling her that everything was going to be fine, but he realized she would see right through the lie. All he could muster was a meek “Yes, Hannah-chen.”
The proclamation went on to declare that all stateless refugees had until the eighteenth of May to sell their homes and businesses and relocate to a narrow area within Hongkew, one of the most crowded boroughs in the city. It concluded with an ominous threat—“Persons who violate the proclamation or obstruct its reinforcement shall be liable to severe punishment”—and was signed by the military governor.
Sunny squeezed Franz’s hand until her nails dug into his skin. Franz knew that she must be thinking about her parents’ house—the only home she had ever known—but all she said was “Three months, Franz.”
Before he could reply, Esther’s gaze darted frantically from Sunny to Franz. “A ghetto! Just like the Nazis created in Poland. Like Warsaw and Łódź.”
All the local Jews had heard horror stories of the ghettos in Eastern Europe. “Essie, you cannot jump to—”
Esther’s anguished expression silenced him. “My baby . . . born in a ghetto. His father gone. Mein Gott, what next?”
Chapter 3
The winter sun finally nudged through the canopy of clouds that had hovered over the city for weeks. But the brightness did little for Sunny’s mood as she tromped along Ward Road beside Franz.
Reminders of Simon’s absence were everywhere. At the end of the block stood the bomb-damaged schoolhouse that he had helped to transform into a functional hospital. Across the street loomed the largest of the heime, the hostels, that the CFA ran to shelter and feed the thousands of Jewish refugees who had no means of supporting themselves. Without Simon, and his magical ability to pull supplies out of thin air, what would become of all those hapless refugees? Would they starve? But Sunny was too worried for her close friend to dwell on the fate of the rest of the community.
Franz reached for Sunny’s hand. “You know Simon. He always manages to land on his feet, as he likes to say.”
Not since her father, who had died four years earlier, had Sunny known anyone who could read her mind as readily as her husband. At times, she found it uncanny. “But with the baby so close.”
Franz shook his head. “To have to miss the birth of his own child.”
Sunny studied Franz, trying to discern his thoughts. She longed for a baby of her own and, while Franz seemed to share in that desire, he already had a twelve-year-old daughter. Did he really need a newborn? Besides, with their existence growing more precarious by the day, was it fair to anyone to consider it now? She had yet to feel certain enough to leave the issue to chance in the bedroom.
Franz scanned the street. “Can you imagine, Sunny? Another ten thousand of us forced to live here in Little Vienna.”
Half the city’s Jewish refugees already lived in the square mile that replicated the Austrian capital right down to cafés and bakeries; according to most, it even smelled like home. The Jews shared the cramped space with a hundred thousand Chinese, who had proven remarkably tolerant of their new neighbours. “It will be tight,” Sunny said. “At least the refugee hospital is already inside the borders.”
Franz shrugged. “Perhaps that will just be one more luxury we have to forego.”
She pulled her hand free of his. “We can’t give up now, of all times! The hospital is going to b
e needed more than ever.”
“Yes, I suppose it will.” His expression fell somewhere between apologetic and resigned.
As they approached the footpath that led to the hospital, Sunny experienced a familiar sinking feeling. Involuntarily, her eyes shifted toward the abandoned building across the street. The weeks of rain had helped cleanse the walls, but she could still make out reddish-brown streaks. The slaughter of the two boys and Irma flashed to her mind so vividly that it felt as though the execution were unfolding in front of her all over again.
She had never learned what the teenagers had allegedly stolen. Summary executions were so commonplace in Shanghai that she had come to expect such violence from the Japanese. Still, her cheeks burned with shame. Never had she felt more helpless or cowardly than in the aftermath of that impromptu firing squad.
Franz gently tugged at her sleeve. “Poor Irma. So brave, but so rash. And for what? Thank God you kept your head, Sunny.”
Sunny understood that his reassurance was meant kindly, but it only exacerbated her self-disgust. She broke free of him and headed down the pathway to the hospital.
From the outside, the single-level structure looked as uninspiring as ever. Inside was a different story. Since opening in 1938, the hospital had weathered a world war and a hostile occupation without ever turning away a patient. The single open ward, with its twenty-one beds, housed anywhere from a handful of patients to a hundred at a time, as during the cholera outbreak of the previous spring. The staff consisted of nine nurses—all, aside from Sunny, middle-aged or older refugees—and seven doctors, whose specialties ranged from dermatology to psychiatry. Sometimes the staff tripped over one another in the small ward, while other times a single nurse managed the entire hospital on her own. Many lives had been saved inside the hospital, not a few of them in the operating room, where Franz and the others had performed surgeries that should have been impossible to successfully conduct in such a rudimentary facility.
In recent months, the Japanese had actually helped to supply the hospital. A year earlier, four critically injured Japanese sailors had been rushed there after the Chinese Underground had allegedly detonated a bomb at the wharf nearby. Three of the four victims survived. Ever since, the Japanese had used the refugee hospital as a backup facility for their injured and ill. Sporadically, and always unannounced, canvas-covered trucks would rumble up to the sidewalk, and soldiers would dump crates, often marked only in Japanese, outside the doors. The supplies, a hodgepodge of bandages, non-perishable food and medications (some long past their expiry dates), rarely corresponded with the hospital’s needs, but Simon and his second-in-command, Joey, managed to trade them on the black market for what was most urgently required.
As Franz and Sunny made their way down the main corridor, they slowed at an open door. Inside the office, Maxwell Feinstein ran a makeshift pathology lab. As expected, they found the sixty-year-old internist hunched over a desktop microscope, wearing his usual spotless lab coat and polka-dot bowtie. Max and his wife, Sarah, had been among the first German refugees to arrive in Shanghai as war loomed in Europe, but their daughter and her husband had refused to leave Hamburg with them. Their son-in-law had been convinced that someone he knew at the American consulate would secure them a visa to the United States. By the time he realized his mistake, the war in Europe had cut off the escape route to Shanghai. Max had not heard a word from his daughter or two grandsons in more than two years. He never spoke of them, but his grief was a persistent underlying presence.
Max wasn’t alone in the office. Li Jun—“Joey” to everyone at the hospital—paced what little space he could find on the other side of Max’s desk. The wiry twenty-one-year-old was dressed in his usual attire: a navy three-piece suit left to him by a patient’s widow.
Though Joey rarely spoke of his past, he had once drunkenly told Sunny how he had ended up in Shanghai, at the age of twelve, after a typhoon and subsequent flood killed his family and wiped out his village. Joey had made the hundred-and-twenty-five-mile trek to Shanghai on foot. In the city, he barely escaped the life of street prostitution that so many rural girls and boys drifted into. Instead, he worked as a coolie—the lowest echelon of Shanghai labourers, who regularly worked themselves to death or died on the street from exposure in the winter and dehydration in the summer. Joey might have fallen victim to the same fate had Sir Victor Sassoon, an Iraqi Jew and the city’s most influential businessman, not taken a shine to him. Impressed by the way the young rickshaw runner bartered over a fare, Sir Victor brought Joey onto his household staff, where he acquired languages as easily as he learned his other tasks. Sir Victor had hand-picked Simon to run the CFA, and the New Yorker had come to rely on Joey—who spoke Mandarin, Shanghainese, English, German, French and even a smattering of Russian. Joey, for his part, idolized Simon, treating him as a cross between a big brother and a mentor.
Joey wheeled toward Sunny. “What have they done with Mr. Simon, the Rìběn guı˘zi?” he demanded, using the common Shanghainese pejorative, meaning “Japanese devils.”
“Simon will be all right, Joey,” Sunny soothed. “He has gone to an internment camp with many other Americans.”
“You can’t trust those Japanese dogs,” Joey spat in Chinese before switching to German. “What about the hospital and the heime? Who will help them now?”
Franz motioned to Joey. “We are counting on you to fill in.”
“I am no good at that stuff.” Joey flexed one of his scrawny arms. “I am only the muscle around here.”
Franz and Sunny shared a chuckle. Joey was a very able negotiator, especially with the local black marketeers.
Max viewed the others impatiently. “How is any of this funny? The hospital cannot survive without Simon.”
“It has to, Max,” Franz said with a glance toward Sunny. “We will make sure of it.”
Max grunted skeptically. “What difference does it make, anyway? You saw the proclamation. The Japanese are herding us together in a ghetto. Probably at Hitler’s request. It will make it that much easier to get rid of us.”
Franz shook his head. “The Japanese had no appetite for it last year when the SS showed up with their poison gas and plans for us.”
“Only because your friend, the colonel, intervened.”
Max had a point. The High Command in Tokyo might have never interceded to stop the Nazis’ plans had Franz not solicited the help of Colonel Tsutomo Kubota, a British-schooled Japanese officer who had always been sympathetic to the refugees’ plight.
“And where is Colonel Kubota now to protect us?” Max continued.
Neither Franz nor Sunny had an answer. No one seemed to know where Kubota had ended up after being dispatched from Shanghai in disgrace for overstepping his professional bounds by helping the Jews.
“Besides, the war is not going so well for the Japanese,” Max said. “Perhaps this time no one will object to Hitler’s plans for us. Never forget how they handled Irma and those boys.”
Sunny fought off a shudder. Franz shook his head repeatedly. “We are already at their whim,” he pointed out. “If the Japanese want to hand us over to the Nazis, they don’t need to go to the trouble of relocating all of us into another section of the city.”
“It’s true,” Sunny agreed. “If they planned to hand the Jews over to the Germans, it would make far more sense to round us up in camps, like they have done with the British and Americans.”
Max arched an eyebrow. “So why move us at all?”
Franz shrugged. “More living space for their own people?”
Joey waved a hand toward the window. “The harbour is so close. And the radio towers are nearby. Even the rail lines crisscross here.”
Franz snorted in laughter. “Ja, of course. Joey is right. There is no more strategic location in all of Shanghai than Hongkew.”
“So why in God’s name cluster us here then?” Max asked.
“As a deterrent,” Franz said.
Max raised an eyebrow. “They are concerned about Jewish saboteurs?”
Joey gestured to the ceiling. “Allied airplanes. The bombers.”
“Are you suggesting that the Japanese plan to use us as human shields for their military installations?” Max chuckled grimly. “The fools!”
“What is so foolish about it?” Sunny asked.
Max gave her a compassionate look that he usually reserved for patients. “You dear, naive girl. When in the history of mankind has the potential loss of Jewish lives ever deterred anyone from doing anything?”
Franz sighed. “You are as cynical as they come, my friend, but you might have a point.”
Joey began pacing again. “Where have they taken Mr. Simon?”
“To Chapei,” Sunny said. “They have converted the Great China University into a prison camp for Americans.”
Joey nodded to himself. “Good. I won’t have to cross the river.”
Franz put his hands on hips. “Joey, you are not thinking . . .”
Joey gaped at him as though Franz were simple-minded. “We can’t leave just leave him to rot at the hands of the Rìběn guı˘zi.”
The image of the two teens crumpled at the foot of the wall flashed again into Sunny’s mind. She reached out and squeezed Joey’s shoulder. He reddened at her touch. She had always found his schoolboy crush endearing, but now she chose to use it strategically. “Joey, promise me you will not do anything rash,” she said softly in Shanghainese. “If something were to happen to you, I would be lost. You know that.”
Joey turned crimson, and he dropped his gaze to his feet. “I only want to go see how he is doing.”
“It’s too dangerous,” Sunny said.
But Joey persisted. “Last week, I crossed the Whangpoo to the Pootung Camp to bring food to the Kaplans. That kind old British couple from the CFA executive.” He shrugged slightly. “There were only a few soldiers outside. No one stopped me from going in.”
