The Fugu Plan

by Marvin Tokayer

  "Where are you going?" Moishe called out when Sophie's shoe moved away from his.

  "Just to see Dovid. He's right over there, Moishe, see? It's all right."

  He watched her curly black head bob in and out among the adults and finally come to rest by the Syrkins. The father was not there - which didn't surprise him but Mrs. Syrkin was standing next to Dovid and would, now he knew be keeping an eye on his sister. Moishe was depressed as the crowded two-story outskirts of Shanghai slid by. Japan had been clean and fresh, even in the summer heat. By comparison, this place was a pigpen. And even from a distance he could see that the Chinese people didn't move calmly and carefully like the Japanese.

  Facing this strange environment, Moishe was apprehensive, but he wasn't really frightened. Somehow, he and Sophie would be taken care of, just as they had been in Vilna and Moscow and Vladivostok and Kobe. By now, they were part of a group. He and Sophie would not be allowed to get lost. But even if he wasn't afraid, he was still lonely. It was a foregone conclusion that he wouldn't see his parents or his two sisters after all until the war was finished and he could go back and find them. Refugee committees in Vilna and again in Kobe had sent inquiries almost everywhere trying to see if somehow the rest of the family had already escaped to some other point. Moishe had to resign himself to the realization that he and his sister were cut off perhaps forever from the other Katznelsons.

  Sophie still hoped, and he was glad she did. And Sophie had found a friend in little Dovid Syrkin. But Moishe had no friends. All the boys even near his age, it seemed, were scholars; they spent all day, every day in the yeshivas. He himself had neither the background nor the interest for that. But he wasn't really old enough to feel comfortable with the men, and not big enough to pass among them anyway. Even the peculiarly unstructured refugee community in Kobe held no place for him. And Shanghai, no doubt, would be just a continuation of that. Or maybe worse. Many people, he knew, had made some sort of contact in Shanghai. Many had somebody who would be meeting the ship, somebody who would at least know who they were and what they were. But outside the group, he and Sophie had no one. Just the strange-sounding name, Eastjewcom.

  The ship came to a complete halt in the middle of the river and was instantly surrounded by a dozen motor launches that would ferry the passengers ashore. As the refugees scattered to collect their baggage, Sophie came running back, excited in spite of the heat.

  "Moishe, do you see all the Chinamen! Look how crowded it is much more than Kobe. And it's all so big. Dovid says it's the biggest city in the world!"

  "Yes? Well, maybe. Come on, let's get our suitcases. We'll probably have to spend the whole of the rest of the day filling out forms. Oy, is it hot here!"

  But this was Shanghai: there were no forms. A quick clearance through a stifling customs shed, and the refugees were in. In the blazing hot midday sun, they milled around in a large and noisy group, many looking for faces that seemed to fit the names of the strangers they hoped would meet them. A few simply did what seemed the most expeditious thing: standing in one place and calling out "I am Katzenback; who is Mr. Wilensky?" or something of the sort.

  Moishe watched, as the Amshenover rebbe and his wife and son were welcomed by a short middle-aged rabbi, and he saw them all climb into a small car and drive away. Ever since that hopeless, helpless day in Vilna, Moishe had felt a kind of bond between himself and the rebbe. And the old man gradually got to know him a little - at least he remembered Moishe's name and sometimes he even gave him an apple or at least a pat on the head when they happened to meet in Kobe. But the rebbe had his own life and his own son who followed him everywhere, quiet and obedient, like a miniature reproduction.

  Moishe sighed and looked for the Syrkins. He knew they also had no contacts in Shanghai. In fact, Mr. Syrkin seemed unable to make real contact with anyone. You could talk to him, but only about the immediate present: "Nice weather, isn't it Mr. Syrkin. . . . Did you see the cherry blossoms, Mr. Syrkin?" But the minute you referred to anything in the past, anything before Kobe, or if you began speaking of the future, he stopped responding entirely. His face took a confused expression and he looked as if he didn't recognize you anymore. Moishe and Sophie had stayed close to the Syrkins in Kobe. While Sophie played with Dovid, Mrs. Syrkin looked after them, and she would do motherly things like sewing up tears and remembering that Sophie needed new shoes even if she didn't complain about the old ones. But Moishe wasn't so sure the relationship would continue in this new place.

  In locating the Syrkins on the pier, Moishe also found the Eastjewcom representative, a Mr. Spechman, and another man also wearing a label on his jacket, CFA it read. Gradually, the other refugees who also had no one to meet them collected around the two committee men. Mr. Spechman spoke first, briefly welcoming them to Shanghai, explaining that before anything else they would have to be "processed" for the purpose of record keeping and that afterward, they would be helped to find housing and jobs. He would be going with them now to the Pingliang Road heim, which was the processing center, Spechman said, but the CFA was in charge of procedures, so please listen to its representative.

  Feeling like a package being passed from hand to hand, Moishe shifted from foot to foot while the CFA man explained that the three open-sided trucks awaiting the refugees with no other place to go were insufficient to carry the entire group of eighty. "You can't all go at once, so some will have to wait."

  The refugees groaned quietly at the prospect of waiting in the heat, to say nothing of being driven in what appeared to be open cattle trucks through the streets of Shanghai. But the CFA man paid no attention, merely separated off a chunk of about half the refugees and began hurrying them away. Moishe, the Syrkins, and the rest of the second half away retreated into whatever patches of shade they could find and sat down on their baggage to return the stares of the Chinese stevedores and take stock of their arrival in Shanghai.

  If Shanghai was not, as Dovid believed, the biggest city in the world, the particular section of it facing the customs shed was impressive enough. Massive stone-faced buildings, the highest in Shanghai, rose up in a solid wall of five or six stories, with towers and cupolas reaching above that. Parallel stripes of tall arched windows and bas-relief pillars ran far off to both left and right, and blinding sunlight reflected off the broad dome of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. The street in between, the Bund, was filled with a constant flow of traffic, as busy as Moscow but more varied. Trolleys, cars and trucks veered from lane to lane, maneuvering for dockside space. And rickshaws - dozens and dozens of the little two-wheeled carts being jerked along by Chinese dripping with sweat. Everybody was in a hurry. Only the wealthiest, white-suited European gentlemen, apparently, could afford to walk leisurely. The slowest Chinese gait was a trot.

  The slat-sided trucks finally returned. Moishe and the Syrkins made their way gingerly up the ramp to the back of one and hung onto its sides as the trucks jerked to a start and swung out into the chaos of the Bund. It was breezy in the truck, but it was a short trip. After a few blocks, they passed beyond the magnificent edifices of the Bund, crossed the Garden Bridge over the narrow, filthy Soochow Creek and came into the northern sector of the International Settlement, a district called Hongkew. Beginning with a crescent of consulates - the Russian, the German, the American and the all-important Japanese - then curving off to the right, the road, now called Broadway, passed through the area rebuilt by the German and Austrian Jews in 1938 and 1939. This was a pleasant enough section, so European that it was referred to as "Little Vienna." But right after it, the real Hongkew began. In 1937, the Chinese, retreating before the Japanese, had torched everything that would burn. In the intervening years, a good deal of rebuilding had been accomplished; but the construction was of the most basic nature. Now blocks of houses, some looking like little more than firm piles of broken brick and timbers, stood forlornly overlooking the remaining, as yet uncleared, lots of charred rubble.

  The truck pulled into the yard of the Ping
liang Road heim, originally built to house one large family. Now in the rooms not occupied by the processing center, lived nearly sixty, mostly German, refugees. Climbing down, the newcomers joined a line of forty or so others waiting in the hot sun. It threaded inside slowly; it was going to be a painfully long day.

  The members of the Shanghai Jewish communities who had volunteered to help with the processing kept order and organization as best they could. Shouting to hold the attention of the despondent refugees, they directed people this way and that - come here, go there, and always have all papers ready. The procedure was particularly hard on Getzel Syrkin. He jumped uncertainly at each crack of command, and by the time he reached the interviewers inside, he was incapable of doing more than standing very still and shaking his head back and forth, back and forth. Cheya did her best to answer all the questions and cover up for him: she was terrified they would take him away.

  One by one, the refugees passed through the doors into the heim to respond to a barrage of questions: What is your name? Where were you born? How much money do you have? In what currencies? Who do you know in Shanghai? What is your occupation? And throughout it all, the heat enveloped questioner and respondent alike, shortening tempers, turning requests into orders.

  By 4:30, only a few refugees still waited to be assigned housing. Two representatives of the CFA Housing and Disbursement Committee sat at battered desks near the side door of the heim. With the assistance of the Eastjewcom representative, the Syrkins, who had preceded Moishe and Sophie throughout the bureaucratic maze, had just received one medium-sized room of an apartment in the back of the fourth floor of a rebuilt house some blocks east of Pingliang Road.

  Moishe and Sophie - unfed since breakfast, exhausted by being ordered "now here, now there" for six hours - collapsed into two rickety wooden chairs by the second committee desk.

  "You have no family," the committee woman said aloud, looking over an impressive sheaf of forms on the Katznelsons. Moishe shook his head in answer - he had been asked the same question fifty times today. But the lady wasn't looking.

  "And you are fifteen and you are . . . nine? Yes, you are nine years old." Sophie, beyond response, stared at the floor.

  "Well," the lady went on, looking at the papers rather than the children, "I think the best place for you to be is right here in the dormitories - you with the men, of course, and you with the women. I'll make sure you are introduced to someone. . . ."

  As the meaning of her words dawned on Sophie, she looked up, distraught. "I don't want to be with women," she said in a voice rising with emotion. "I want to be with Moishe. He is my brother.''

  The CFA woman looked at Sophie and Moishe. What were they doing here, such innocents as these? What kind of a world was it that sent children like these off on their own to a place like Shanghai? And what was she supposed to do with them? Sophie, in the face of the heat, the exhaustion, the hunger, having heard no retraction of her banishment to the dormitories, fell sobbing onto her brother's lap. "Moishie, where is Mommy? Where is Daddy? Moishie, I want Mommy to come. Why doesn't she come and take care of us? I don't want to be with women, Moishie; don't let them. . . ."

  God, what was he supposed to do! Mommy and Daddy weren't going to come. He was all Sophie had and he didn't know how to help her. With half a mind, he wanted to jump up, run away from all this - from this lady, this horrid hot place. He couldn't do that, and he wouldn't, but he didn't know what he could do. Lowering his head and shoulders over Sophie like a shelter, he put his arms around her shoulders and just held her. She was all he had too.

  "They will stay with us." This was Cheya Syrkin's statement, and for once it was not a request - nor was it prefaced with "my husband says." Cheya had heard enough. She had been on her way out, grateful for a place to go, no matter how miserable it sounded, grateful that they had not taken her husband away, grateful to be finished with this "processing" at last, still she had turned back at the sound of Sophie crying. As she had kept half an eye on the girl ever since they had met in Kobe, she also kept half an ear out for how she and her brother were doing during the past few hours. The Katznelsons were not her problem. But a person's heart is not a stone.

  "They will stay with us," she said again to the surprised CFA woman.

  "That is impossible," the committee woman said, shaking her head. "It is very kind of you; but really, I have seen the room you will be living in. It is simply not large enough. . . ."

  Moishe didn't look up. Sophie continued to sob as if her heart were breaking.

  "The children will be fine here," the CFA woman began explaining to her.

  If Cheya had not taken the opportunity, while seeking out the bathroom, to look around the Pingliang Road heim and been horrified by its immense dormitories she would probably have allowed herself to be overruled. If the committee representative had been a man, she certainly would never have let herself speak out so boldly. As it was, she put her suitcase down firmly on the floor and moved closer to the desk.

  "I have seen 'here,'" she said directly to the woman. "'Here' is no place for children. 'Here' is nothing but a bed, not a table to put a book on, not a nail to hang up a jacket. 'Here' is no place for children. These have no parents - at least, no parents with them," she added, mindful of Sophie's presence. "They need a home and they will stay with us."

  The CFA woman stared at this homely, underfed O stjuden villager with her patched, sweaty dress and her dirty hair in disarray. Five people in a space already much too small for three was unthinkable for any who considered themselves human beings!

  It was Spechman the Eastjewcom representative, who, hearing the dispute, came over to break the impasse: "It's after all the Syrkins' apartment and therefore their choice, I would say. In a day or so, perhaps, we can find another solution to the problem."

  The committee representative threw up her hands in resignation. With these people, what could you expect? Marking the appropriate information on Moishe's papers she pushed them back into his hands and managed a small smile. "Good luck to all of you," she said evenly. "Next!"

  Dovid, hot and tired but pleased that his friend was moving in, went over to Sophie and put his hand on her shoulder in brotherly fashion. "Stop crying, Sophie. Stop it now."

  As best she could, she did. Half-lifted by the two boys, Sophie managed to stand up. Then, with Cheya in the lead and Getzel, who had watched the entire proceding like a man at a play, bringing up the rear, the five newcomers trudged out into the hot sun and headed for the tiny apartment at 14B Tongshan Road.

  14

  BY THE CONCLUSION of the High Holy Days in September of I94I, all eleven hundred of the Kobe refugees who had been unsuccessful in obtaining destination visas had relocated to Shanghai. Kobe Jewcom reverted to being simply the Kobe Jewish community, and its activities as Leo Hanin described them once again became "ninety percent gin-rummy and ten percent social gathering." But as Japan approached Pearl Harbor it increasingly restricted the kind of international trade from which the Jews of Kobe made their living. From one week to the next, the size of the community decreased, as whoever could manage it left permanently for the security of America or Canada or Australia. For them, Kobe became only a memory - as it did for the eleven hundred refugees now in Shanghai. But for the latter, in retrospect, their months in Kobe would seem like a dream-memory, an idyll when compared to the unending harshness of the reality of their new home.

  Nothing was the same about the two cities, and everything about Shanghai was worse. Where Kobe had been temperate, Shanghai was miserably tropical. Where Kobe as a city had been well built and maintained, other than the few blocks of handsome European edifices, Shanghai still suffered visibly from the bombing and burning of the battle of I937. And even in the neighborhoods that had come through unscathed, the cityscape was nothing but a flat jumble of dark, overcrowded, closely built two- and three-story brick boxes. The mass of Japanese in which the refugees had found themselves had been alien, but well-mannered and genero
us. The Shanghai mass was made up of four million people whose tradition did not so strenuously dictate politeness and whose total being was consumed in a relentless struggle simply to stay alive. Existing hand-to-mouth in a heartless, unforgiving world, most Shanghai Chinese had neither the energy nor the money for luxuries like cleanliness or generosity. Moreover, the refugees had been a rarity in Kobe and their plight a cause for sympathy, while in Shanghai, Caucasians were commonplace, and for valid historical reasons, not well liked. With all the chaos that had been sweeping across their land for the past hundred years, the Chinese themselves had been refugees often enough - and how often had the whitemen ever felt sorry for them? Shanghai had consistently attracted refugees. There was nothing so special about these. Why shouldn't they, too, have to make it on their own? Anyway, the Jews had their own kinsmen to look after them, didn't they?

  They did. By the fall of 1941, there was a major relief undertaking going on in Shanghai. But for the incoming refugees, the organization of relief efforts represented one more point of comparison - again negative - with their experience in Kobe. The comparison was not fair. Kobe Jewcom had, at the most, two thousand refugees to care for at any one time; the average refugee contingent in Japan over the twelve-month period was less than eight hundred (many of whom were "just passing through"). Shanghai, on the other hand, had a constant refugee population of seventeen thousand. And for many thousands this was the end of the line.