The Fugu Plan

by Marvin Tokayer

  Passes were distributed by Kubota's men; but the ghetto gates were guarded by the Jewish branch of the foreign Pao Chia - an international force which the Japanese had organized in 1942 to police the entire city. The Jewish Pao Chia ("protect the home" in Chinese) consisted of men aged twenty to forty-five who, on a rotating basis stood at the gate just beyond signs that read "Stateless Refugees Prohibited Without Permission." They checked every pass for the slightest discrepancy, and many of the Pao Chia were despised for being entirely too scrupulous in their work - reporting people for being just one minute late, catching children trying to sneak out to a nearby park. . . . But under the direct supervision of the Japanese, the Jewish Pao Chia guards, like their counterparts in the ghettos of Europe, were in an untenable position.

  The only refugees exempted from the pass system were the children attending the Kadoorie School. For them, a school id card was sufficient for any time during school hours on school days. With its green open playing fields, its clean classrooms and a teaching staff determined to make even these depressing years as rewarding as possible, the school was a large oasis of pleasure in the otherwise dreary, uncomfortable, anxious lives of its five hundred and fifty pupils.

  As winter came on, the Russian Jewish community, though still free outside the designated area, was rapidly exhausting its resources. Voluntary contributions and loans had long since been replaced by a straight system of taxes levied by SACRA over the signatures of Kubota, his secretary and Kano. But inflation continued to diminish the value of the levy and the Allied blockade of shipping was disastrously effective. The Joint Distribution Committee representative, Laura Margolies, had already been interned and was soon to be repatriated. Before she left, Margolies arranged with Joseph Bitker a SACRA member who had also been one of the city's original Jewish leaders, to take over as director of the internationally disconnected Shanghai JDC. Margolies promised that after her repatriation, as soon as she was successful in lifting the JDC embargo on funds to the refugees in Shanghai, she would let him know by sending a telegram wishing his daughter a happy birthday. In the meantime, everyone would just have to subsist on whatever could be raised locally. Dr. Kaufman's Far Eastern Jewish Council in Harbin sent several generous donations. The wealthy industrialist, Lew Zikman who spent the entire war in Japan, sent money over. But demand always outpaced supply.

  The winter of 1943-4 was the harshest that Shanghai had seen in a generation. Coal virtually disappeared. Electricity was rationed. Refugees who, in the heat of the summer, had set up tiny stalls along the sidewalks and sold their heavy clothing for extra food, now had nothing but thin cotton to shield them from the cold and rain. Burlap sacks were reborn as topcoats; people walked the street wrapped in threadbare blankets and little else. For the first time, Jews could be seen begging for handouts along the sidewalks. To alleviate the unremitting cold and hunger, the unthinkable grew into the possible. Prostitution increased noticeably. Seven women were even licensed by the Japanese and many more plied the trade unofficially. In a few instances, mothers of newborn babies gave them up entirely - to other Jews or even to Chinese families - rather than try to keep them in conditions of such privation. Among the men, idleness was the most devastating factor. Raised in a strongly patriarchal society, it was nearly as hard on them to have to live on charity - or on the income of a wife able to secure domestic work - as not to live at all. Husbands would sit for hours in the tiny ghetto coffee shops, staving off rage and depression only through their mutual support. But a few gave up entirely.

  As the winter progressed, the Japanese further tightened the restrictions on passes. Those of the Mir Yeshiva were withdrawn altogether, forcing that group to relocate first to a very dilapidated building, then to a former hotel on Wayside Road. The former collapsed entirely several days after the Yeshiva moved from it.

  These new pass restrictions hit hardest at more than a thousand of the refugees who had secured from some of the Russian Jewish companies certificates that, falsely for the most part, attested to their employment outside the ghetto. Thus they had secured passes that enabled them to pass the gates every working day. Once free in the open city, they could sometimes get the kind of pick-up work that Getzel Syrkin had done. But now, under the scrutiny of the pass officers, even this intermittent source of income would dry up. A cartoon of the times shows a Chinese peasant squatting by a mound of disintegrating vegetables. The caption reads: "Rotten foods: Japanese no buy . . . Coolie no buy . . . White refugee people, they buy!"

  By the winter of 1943, an increasing number of refugees could no longer manage to get by at all. Very simply, even with rotten vegetables there was not enough food to keep from starving. For these, the only place to turn was the communal heime cafeteria where, once a day, up to five thousand hot meals were served. Portions were carefully weighed, but even the poorest refugee could count on a minimum of one thousand three hundred and fifty calories every day. The sick, elderly, and almost a thousand young children, were also eligible for a second smaller meal in the evening. A ration of one thousand three hundred and fifty calories even under good conditions is only slightly more than enough to prevent outright starvation. Strength and resistance to disease are another matter.

  The SACRA medical committee and the clinics worked constantly innoculating refugees against various kinds of avitaminosis and the epidemics that periodically swept through the crowded houses of the ghetto: pellagra, beri-beri, cholera, typhus, and various parasitic worms were the most common diseases. Amoebic dysentery, at first a curse on all the refugees, was finally successfully dealt with by a ghetto physician, Dr. Theodore Friedricks. After months of experimentation, Friedricks discovered a cheap, effective remedy which he derived from a particular kind of nut and called ku-san-tzu.

  Those refugees who followed most strictly the laws of kashrut suffered nutritionally more than those less observant. At one point a form of beri-beri swept through the yeshiva population leaving many of the students with mouths so painfully swollen they could scarcely speak. Once diagnosed, the problem was cured by a local brewer who contributed a daily ration of yeast to relieve its cause, a vitamin B deficiency. But in spite of the innoculations and the free meal service, disease and malnutrition, combined with psychological depression, took their toll. Before 1943 was over, more than three hundred ghetto inhabitants had succumbed, twice the earlier death rate of the refugee population.

  The world outside was not unaware of what was happening to the Jews of Shanghai. In June of 1943, a Red Cross delegate had reported on the conditions of "the German-Jewish immigrants [sic] of whom at least six thousand are on the point of starvation and about nine thousand more are not far better off." The report detailed the economic and emotional devastation caused by the creation of the ghetto and the lack of resources within the local community to deal with it. American newspapers published articles {"Japs in Shanghai Rob, Banish Jews") based on the Red Cross report and on reports from the few civilians who had managed to be transferred to neutral Portuguese Goa on the ship Gripsholm. As winter began, there was a report of a State Department plan to exchange a group of so-called "disloyal" Japanese-Americans for some fifteen thousand North and South American nationals in Shanghai. The World Jewish Congress pleaded with the State Department that at least some of the starving Jewish refugees be included. Their pleas were rejected. Secretary of State Cordell Hull allowed no refugees among the small number of exchanges ultimately made. The same people, it seemed, who had refused to open the country to the refugees from Poland in 1939, from Lithuania in 1940, and from Kobe in 1941, still refused them refuge from the Shanghai ghetto in 1943.

  But there was more to the government than the State Department. In December, 1943, thanks to the ceaseless importuning of Rabbi Kalmanowitz, the first-hand reports of Laura Margolies who had finally returned, the vigorous efforts of Henry Morgenthau Jr., the secretary of the Treasury, and John Pehle, the director of the Division of Foreign Funds Control, the interpretation of the Tradin
g with the Enemy Act was finally relaxed. Early on one of Shanghai's coldest, rainiest mornings, Joseph Bitker received a cable from New York that warmed him more than the greatest coal fire in the world: Laura Margolies wished his daughter a very happy birthday.

  18

  IN THE TWENTY-EIGHT MONTHS of the Shanghai exile nothing did more to raise the spirits of the refugees than Laura Margolies's telegram. On a practical and immediate level, however, it did little to improve living conditions. The Shanghai JDC did soon receive a cable from the New York JDC - the first in a very long, arduous nineteen months. But the cable wasn't money; it merely gave permission for Bitker to raise money ("up to twenty-five thousand US dollars per month") against a formal guarantee of repayment. New York continued to be fearful of the response to anything that might be perceived as "aiding the enemy." It might now be legal to send relief funds to aid refugees held by the Japanese enemy, but would it be seen by the public and by the United States government, as a moral and ethical thing to do? Might not the Japanese simply confiscate the money? Better, they decided, to start off slowly. But Shanghai had little need of a guarantee. There was no lack of faith that the JDC would honor its debts. The difficulty was simply that money for any purpose was not easy to raise in Shanghai. Inflation had soared into the realm of the ridiculous: by January of 1944, the Shanghai dollar which had been valued at six to the US dollar before the war, was down to a hundred per US dollar and dropping steadily. (By the end of the war, the ratio would be one hundred thousand to one.) Even fortune-sized bank accounts dwindled to nothing in the face of such inflation. And there was little hope for future improvement. From the opening months of the war, such trade as had been possible within the vast Japanese-occupied areas of Asia began to dwindle in the face of the Allied approach. Few people in Shanghai felt that the first quarter of I944 was a good time to be lending large sums of money, even for the worthiest of causes.

  Yet the need had never been so great. Over seven thousand Jewish refugees were now almost entirely dependent on the relief committees for everything; rare was the refugee family not in need of some help. And to this expanding emergency, the committees responded with maximum inefficiency. In mid-winter, 19434, an indigent Jewish refugee had to deal with directions and procedures from the following ten organizations: SACRA (with six subcommittees); the Joint Administrative Committee (an extension of SACRA with five subcommittees of its own); the fuedische Gemeinde (a conglomerate, mostly of German Jews, which had subcommittees for every aspect of a refugee's life); the Shanghai Joint Distribution Committee; Eastjewcom (for Eastern Europeans); Centrojewcom (for Central Europeans); the Kitchen Fund (concerned primarily with housing and food); the European Refugee Union (which, among other activities, kept statistics on many things); the Medical Board; and the Arbitration Board which settled at least some of the disputes that arose from the others' overlapping jurisdictions.

  Not only was there no one centralized source of aid for the distraught and needy refugees but the different committees went so far as to work against each other. The Kitchen Fund, in one instance, flatly refused to accept food supplies purchased by another organization, in this case the JDC. The rivalries never were settled worse, they were exacerbated. In the summer of 1944, SACRA set up two more committees to supervise and investigate all the others. By that time though, the financial corner had been turned: in March, New York finally began to cable money again with a remittance of twenty-five thousand dollars worth of Swiss francs.

  Pawns for so long in the political and military games of the world, most of the refugees could not summon the energy to look beyond their immediate needs. They had and could take no control over their lives and futures, particularly since they could place little credence in the reports they received from TASS and the Japanese as to what was happening in other places. Their world had shrunk to a forty-square block ghetto area, and their aspirations were limited to getting enough food at any one meal to stave off hunger till the next.

  As soon as the immediate food-clothing-shelter problems began to be resolved, however, at least several of the ghetto refugees, along with the Russians still leading normal, if increasingly austere lives began looking toward the end of the war. Already, MacArthur, Halsey and Nimitz were steadily retaking the Japanese outposts of the South Pacific. The Chinese - Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalists and Mao's Communists - were forcing Japan to begin withdrawing from the interior, and to consolidate forces in the major coastal cities of Canton, Tientsin and Shanghai. And in Europe and North Africa, the other two-thirds of the Axis was also in retreat. This much the refugees could see. What they could not predict was Japan's response to losing. Would she choose to go down in flames, taking everything and everyone, with her when she went? Might she try to use captive Westerners as hostages against better peace terms? (And how concerned would the Allies be over the fate of such hostages?) Or might the Japanese even make a final show of loyalty to Hitler by rounding up and executing all the Jews in the Co-Prosperity Sphere?

  These fears were not limited to the Jews of Shanghai, of course, and, in fact, when Hitler toppled, one faction, the kempeitai did draw up a list of all Jews under Japanese control with the intention of shooting them all in his memory. But higher level policymakers had other plans for "their Jews," not only in Shanghai and Manchukuo, but also among the captured populaces of Singapore and Hong Kong. And there were a few Jewish families in Japan itself, from Kobe or Yokohama, who had been relocated inland to small resort towns like Karuizawa in the mountains. One of those who lived out the war in Karuizawa was Dr. Karl Kindermann, the professor who had corresponded briefly in 1940 with Rabbi Stephen Wise about possible settlement of refugees in Japan. From the start, Kindermann had been specially protected by Japanese friends who were high in the ranks of the ultra-rightest Black Dragon Society. But even he was to be surprised at how high his influence went.

  The war had long since turned against the Japanese when one of Prime Minister Tojo's advisers, Colonel Tsugio Sekiguchi, called Dr. Kindermann in for a discussion. After the opening courtesies, Sekiguchi began to speak of the grave situation of the war and the difficulties of settling it. "We are ready for a compromise," he admitted to Kindermann. "We have tried different ways to contact Washington, but they have refused to speak to us. Now we have a new plan."

  Sekiguchi paused, expectantly.

  "Of course, if there is anything I could do to help . . ." Kindermann interjected.

  "Excellent!" Sekiguchi said. "In that case, you will go immediately to Dairen and meet with Admiral Nakamura."

  A few days later Kindermann was in Dairen listening to Admiral Nakamura's presentation of the "new plan." It was in fact, a reincarnation of the Fugu plan.

  The twenty thousand Jews in Shanghai, Nakamura said, are suffering more and more as the war continues, and the Nazis are putting intense pressure on us to deal with them. However, "we Japanese admire the Jewish intelligence," he said. "We hope to cooperate with the Jews after the war in building a better society. But first, we must end this war."

  The key to ending the war would be the Shanghai Jews. The refugees would be moved out of their horrible living situation to a "Jewish state" in Manchukuo. They would be guaranteed everything necessary for a good life there. In turn, the "powerful American Jewish community," realizing the sincerity of the Japanese, would persuade Roosevelt to come to the peace table.

  As in 1940, when he'd heard the first mention of a Manchurian settlement scheme, Kindermann agreed to try to help. Once again he wrote to Stephen Wise, still president of the American Jewish Congress and adviser to FDR, explaining the plan and encouraging interest in it. And once again, as in 1940, Wise was totally opposed. "My heart is bleeding when I see what the Japanese have done in other territories," he wrote Kindermann. "The Jewish Congress in America will not enter any negotiations with Japan without the consent of the State Department."

  The Kindermann peace feeler had failed - but the Japanese would keep trying in other ways to reach
the "powerful" American Jewish community.

  Second to Shanghai, the largest concentration of Jews in China was in the coastal city of Tientsin, about fifty miles from Peking. The community there was a very close-knit group of about two hundred and fifty, almost all originally from Russia, and it was led by a broad, solid Siberian named Zelig Belokamen. From the beginning of the war, the Tientsin community had sought to maintain good relations with the Japanese occupiers and keep its life uneventful. On the whole, it was successful. But in the spring of 1944, several unfamiliar Japanese officers walked into the Tientsin Jewish Club, the Kunst, and began to question its members. "Have you been treated well here by our government? Do you have all the basic necessities for your religious practices? Is all going well with you?" The officers' tone was pleasant. The mystified Jews replied truthfully that all was fine and the Japanese left. Nothing happened for a few months. Then suddenly the Kunst received a cable announcing that a high-ranking Japanese mission from Peking would arrive the following Saturday and was to be met at the railway station by "an officer of the community." A formal visitation of the Japanese military was a frightening event. Belokamen was apprehensive as he met Colonel Tomiaki Hidaka and a full complement of assistants and escorted them from the station to the club.

  The dining room where the Japanese were brought had been arranged for maximum effect. On a center table, to welcome the guests, was a Russian-style buffet - chopped egg, smoked salmon, chilled potato salad, liver pate, eggplant salad . . . and bottle after bottle of ice-cold 120-proof Russian vodka. The purpose of the food was to encourage the drinking. The purpose of the drinking was to help Belokamen and the others learn the purpose of the visit.

  Hidaka and his assistants did their part by drinking a great many tiny glasses of the vodka as toasts were made to the good health of practically everyone. But then, without warning, Hidaka stood up and blurted out the message.