The Fugu Plan

by Marvin Tokayer

  Avram stayed with Moishe until he realized the boy neither knew nor cared that he was there. Then, too tired to fight sleep any longer, he moved a few yards away, sat down on a blanket and dozed.

  Close to midnight, he awoke to find Moishe, plain in the moonlight, tying a knot in each corner of a handkerchief to create an acceptable head covering. This time the young man did not have to ask the rebbe's permission: "Yisgadal v'yiskadash sh'meih rabbo." Avram rose, as did the other men, to the words of the mourner's kaddish.

  The bombs that fell on Hongkew had been targeted on a Japanese radio transmitter within the ghetto. In silencing the radio station, however, the Americans killed two hundred and fifty people, thirty-one of them Jewish refugees. Three weeks later, two single bombs destroyed over one hundred and fifty thousand people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On August 15, a strange stillness fell over all Shanghai. Coming through the loudspeakers which hung above the streets at various points in the city, was the high-pitched voice of the Japanese emperor. Soldiers stood stiffly at attention, young civilians bowed their heads, older ones knelt to the ground, their faces within inches of the dust. His words burned a new reality into their hearts: Japan had surrendered.

  For several hours the refugees were not sure exactly that the war was over. There had been false alarms before during the past few days: Chinese Nationalist and Allied flags had been run up amid much cheering - only to be hauled down again on orders of the Japanese. Rumors of peace skittered everywhere. But on August 16, newspapers announced it officially. Then the streets were jammed with people, singing, dancing, celebrating the end of the nightmare. Firecrackers exploded everywhere constantly. Blackout curtains were pulled down and burned. Carefully hoarded bottles of Johnny Walker were brought out and drunk with laughter and tears of joy. The poorest of the refugees joined with the wealthiest of the residents in cheering the Allied victory and congratulating themselves for having come through the war in one piece.

  The Japanese forces, stunned that their homeland which had never been invaded was about to be occupied, withdrew completely at first, but, thanks to the prudence of the military leaders, only briefly. Among the most desperate of the Chinese poor, looting broke out with the coming of darkness on the evening of August 16. The Pao Chia and the other remaining branches of the Shanghai Volunteer Corps were called upon for help. But only the Japanese were armed and trained, and within hours, Japanese soldiers were more in evidence throughout the city than they had been since 1941. The wave of looting scarcely had a chance to get underway before everything was secure again.

  Politically, the surrender created a vacuum in Shanghai. The Japanese there could not lay down their arms until the arrival of someone whom they could surrender to. In the face of their mutual victory, the union of the two Chinese forces - Chiang's Nationalists and Mao's Communists - disintegrated. With every passing day, it became more and more a race between them as to who could occupy the greater number of strategic cities. Finally, the theoretical problem was solved by the arrival of a small landing party of American forces. America was backing the Nationalists; the Japanese commander was informed he would make his formal surrender only to Chiang's forces. However, until those troops arrived, which wouldn't be until August 26, the Japanese were to continue maintaining order.

  With the announcement of the surrender proclamation, the Sephardic Jews immediately left the internment camps and returned with relief to their own comfortable homes. The Russians and the other officially "non-stateless" Jews began planning for a future which, they believed, would be not too different from the prewar past. But for the seventeen thousand refugees, after the singing and dancing were over, life went right back to being what it had been. The Mir Yeshiva went on studying fourteen hours a day. The Kadoorie School opened for a new term. Those few who still had jobs continued to work. And the JDC went right on channeling the support that would keep the refugees alive as long as they needed it. The Jewish refugee area of Hongkew remained intact because no one had the money to move from it, or the knowledge of what the future would hold outside it. Only the pass system was definitely, totally and forever laid to rest.

  It was Saturday, September 13. Pleased to have the day for his own business, Avram Chesno sat on a bench in the public garden at the northernmost end of the Bund. The typhoon that had battered the city the previous day had washed the air clean of dust and brought the temperature down to a reasonable degree. Waiting for the hour to be chimed by the big clock on the Customs House tower, he watched sampans glide cheerfully out of Soochow Creek into the broad muddy Whangpoo River. Aside from the inflation that had brought the exchange rate to one hundred thousand Shanghai dollars, the city now seemed almost a pleasant place - life here might not be bad at all. In time, Shanghai would no doubt again become an exciting, cosmopolitan highly civilized city. For some people, perhaps, but never for Avram. His own feelings about the city were too strong ever to allow him to feel comfortable here.

  From the reports and stories now coming out of Europe, Avram realized he had been extremely fortunate in making it all the way to Shanghai. He wondered how many other Jews besides those skeletal forms that hung half-dead over the barbed wire fences in the pictures from Auschwitz and Treblinka and the rest - had managed to come through alive. They would turn up, of course. Even Hitler couldn't have killed all the Jews in Europe. But there was no question that, in Shanghai, he had been safer than he would have been in Poland. So, he didn't hate the Japanese. And he didn't hate the Chinese. What he hated was what had been done to him: he, Avram Chesno, sound in mind and body, a law abiding, hard-working full-grown adult member of society, had been reduced from a person to a category. He had been controlled, confined, forced to live where, and in ways, he detested, compelled to ask permission - from a madman! - to be allowed to go from here to there. He had been denied his own life, his own individuality because of something he had no control over. Avram didn't want not to be a Jew. If anything, the experiences of the past six years had heightened his sense of identity with his fellow Jews. But he never, never again wanted his Jewishness to be the one factor by which he would be classified.

  The smell of newly cut grass drifted across from the adjoining British Consulate. "Big Ching," as the expatriate Londoners had dubbed the tower clock, began ringing 9 o'clock. Avram rose and just as countless times before, in Warsaw, in Vilna, and in Kobe he set his direction toward an American Consulate.

  EPILOGUE

  "The sun rises and the sun sets". The Talmud interprets this biblical verse to mean that even before the sun has set in the western sky, it has already begun to rise in the east. Sadly, the sun has already set on most of the major figures whose stories are told in The Fugu Plan. But at the same time, a keen interest in the Jewish experience in the Far East has been kindled.

  THE AMSHENOVER REBBE, Shimon Kalisch, came to the United States in 1946, after the end of the war. He organized a synagogue in Brooklyn shortly after his arrival; others of his family founded a yeshiva in his name in Jerusalem. The Amshenover rebbe died in 1954.

  GISUKE AYUKAWA, the industrialist, was imprisoned briefly after the war. He went on to become an influential member of the Diet and a personal advisor to Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, his former junior colleague in Manchuria. Ayukawa died in 1967.

  ZELIG BELOKAMEN left Tientsin for Israel after the war. He soon returned to the Orient, served as Israel's honorary consul to the Republic of Korea, and was engaged in international trade in Japan and Korea. He died in Tokyo in 1984 and is buried in the Jewish cemetery in Yokohama.

  AVRAM CHESNO, MOISHE KATZNELSON, MRS. SYRKIN and DOVID like the rest of the eighteen thousand Jewish refugees in Shanghai who came through the war safely, if not comfortably - did not leave Shanghai immediately after Japan formally surrendered to the Chinese in September 1945. It was, in fact, well over a year before the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency which was in charge of resettling all the refugees of the war could begin to clear the way for their mov
e to the United States, Canada, or to various Latin American countries.

  Some Jews in Shanghai, refugees and prewar residents alike, knowing of the former commercial possibilities of the city, were not anxious to leave. But in 1949, Mao's Communist forces took Shanghai and left no doubt as to the future of the capitalist order there. The subsequent mass emigration had been made easier by the creation, in 1948, of the State of Israel and the enactment of a Law of Return. By the mid-1950s, with the cooperation of the People's Republic of China, almost all of the ten thousand Jews remaining in Shanghai had left for Israel and other countries. None remain in Shanghai today.

  DR. ABRAHAM COHN owned a pharmaceutical business in Shanghai until the Communists took over. At first the new regime denied him permission to leave, but in 1957, Cohn was allowed to emigrate to Hong Kong where he resumed his medical practice. The British, however, continued to be suspicious of his wartime contacts with the Japanese and refused his application for citizenship. He died, stateless, in 1972 in Hong Kong.

  SAM EVANS spent the war years in the small, central Japan mountain town of Karuizawa. Afterwards, he returned to Kobe where he was once again the honorary president of the Jewish Community of Kobe. He died there in 1975.

  CHOYA, the official in charge of passes in the Shanghai ghetto, returned to Hongkew shortly after the surrender, "to be friends again with the Jews." Members of the Zionist youth group, Betar, did not consider him a friend. In one of the few violent encounters that marked the end of the war, they set upon him and left him in the middle of the street - alive, but in a bloody heap. But that was not the last that was seen of him. During the Korean War, a former yeshiva student who had known Ghoya in Hongkew and had later joined the US Army, happened to be in a police station in Moji on the southern island of Kyushu when a short, middle-aged policeman walked through the door. "I know you!" the former yeshiva student cried out. "You are Ghoya!" "Yes," Ghoya acknowledged, bewildered that this American soldier should have identified him. "You were in Hongkew!" the soldier continued. "You called yourself 'the King of the Jews'!" Ghoya blushed scarlet, glanced briefly at his superiors, and ran back out the door as fast as his stumpy legs could carry him.

  NATHAN GUTWIRTH reached Kobe in early 1941 and left soon after for the Dutch East Indies (later Indonesia) where, with the start of the war, he was interned by the Japanese. After the war, he emigrated, first to the United States and then to Antwerp, Belgium. He died in Belgium in 1999.

  LEO HANIN left Kobe and was in Shanghai during the war, after which he emigrated with his family to the United States. He now lives in Los Angeles.

  KORESHIGE INUZUKA was arrested in 1945 as a war criminal and was to stand trial in Manila for crimes allegedly committed during 1943-4, while he was serving as a fleet commander in the Northern Philippines. In his own defense, Inuzuka produced the inscribed cigarette case given to him by Frank Newman. It was proof, he said, that far from harming non-Japanese, he had in fact often gone out of his way to assist them. Freed, he returned to Tokyo and was active in forming the Nippon-Israel Friendship League. He also attended the opening ceremonies of the Tokyo Jewish Community Center. By the mid1950s, Michael Kogan, of the Kogan Papers, had read enough of the secret Foreign Ministry documents to confront Inuzuka publid y sit hei de1r et hat he had never been a friend of the Jews, and had, in fact, written virulent anti-Semitic propaganda. Thereafter, Inuzuka dropped out of the Nippon-Israel Friendship League altogether. Inuzuka lived in Omori with his second wife, Kiyoko, the woman who had been with him in Shanghai, until his death in 1965. In 1981, the inscribed cigarette case was donated by Kiyoko to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem.

  DR. ABRAHAM KAUFMAN was part of the delegation that joyously greeted the Soviets when, having just declared war on Japan, they seized Harbin in August 1945. The joy of Kaufman's delegation was short-lived. He and other Jews were promptly arrested for having "collaborated with the enemy." Like many others, Kaufman was sent to Siberia. He was not released until 1956. Five years later, he finally managed to leave the U.S.S.R. and emigrate to Israel to join his family. He died there in 1969.

  DR. KARL KINDERMANN was imprisoned by the Allies in Tokyo at the close of the war. He was charged with collaborating with both the Nazis and the Japanese, and was deported in shame back to Germany. A journalist, Kindermann spent many years trying to set the record straight as to his activities during the war. His claims to have promoted peace and provided the British with valuable military information were finally verified and his name and reputation cleared. He died in Germany.

  MICHAEL KOGAN lived for many years in Tokyo and was a pioneer in developing the video game industry. In 1984, when he was visiting in Los Angeles, he died of a sudden heart attack.

  SETSUZO KOTSUJI came under heavy kempeitai attack after Pearl Harbor for his pro-Jewish - and general pro-Western - feelings. For his own safety, he moved from Kamakura to Harbin where he was befriended and supported by the Harbin Jewish community until the end of the war. Then, penniless, with his family on the brink of starvation, Kotsuji returned to Tokyo where he was hired by the Jewish owner of a trading company who knew the story of this Japanese who had been so helpful to the Jews in Kobe and Manchuria before the war. In 1959, at the age of sixty, Kotsuji traveled to Israel and formally converted to Judaism, changing his first name to Abraham. Fourteen years later, at his home in Kamakura, he died. Just after the Yom Kippurwarin 1973, Kotsuji was buried in Jerusalem with great honor. Zorach VVarhaftig, then religious affairs minister of the State of Israel, presided at his funeral which was also attended by many members of the faculty and students of the Mir Yeshiva. YOSUKE MATSUOKAwas imprisoned and indicted as a war criminal. He died in prison in 1946 before his trial was completed.

  COLONEL JOSEF MEISINGER was arrested in Japan at the close of the war. After a brief stay in the United States where he attempted unsuccessfully to commit suicide, he was taken to Europe to be tried by the War Crimes Tribunal. In 1946, the "Butcher of Warsaw" was hanged.

  THE MIR YESHIVA was the only European yeshiv a intact. In 1946, its students and teachers came to New York and reestablished the school in Brooklyn. Prior to the war, Europe had been the principal source of rabbis, teachers and scholars for the American Jewish community. Though the Holocaust destroyed an entire generation of teachers, when the hundreds of graduates of the Mir Yeshiva came to America, they filled that vacuum until a new generation of scholars could mature. The Mir Yeshiva, with a branch in Jerusalem, is now one of the major yeshivas in the world, with a student population of over 2,500.

  ANATOLE PONVE was in the United States when the war with Japan broke out. (His wife was trapped in the Philippines where she was interned as an enemy national until the war ended.) Ponve returned to Japan after the war. He was instrumental in organizing the Jewish Community Center in Tokyo and in helping the refugees emigrate from Shanghai in the late 1940s. Ponve later returned to California where he became president of the Hollywood Temple Beth El. He died in Los Angeles in 1969.

  MOSES SHATZKES arrived in the United States in 1941 and joined the staff of the rabbinical school of Yeshiva University in New York. He died in 1958 at the age of seventy-seven.

  MITSUGI SHIBATA, having been expelled from Shanghai, returned to Japan. Believing that he had done the Shanghai Jews a great disservice by mentioning the impending pogrom and causing their imprisonment, Shibata was too ashamed to contact any of the Jews in the Orient after the war. It was not until the research was being done for this book that Shibata was found and informed that, in fact, he had saved the lives of thousands of Jews. Shibata was honored at a Passover seder at the Jewish Community Center in Tokyo in 1976. He died in 1977.

  NOBUTAKA SHIODEN was elected to the Diet in 1942 on a platform of antiSemitism. After the war, he was arrested but was not considered important enough to stand trial. Subsequently, until his death in 1962, Shioden lived alone in a small town in eastern Japan, believing to the end that an "international conspiracy of Jews" had caused the
war and even that the airplane which brought the first atomic bomb to Japan had Hebrew letters on its tail.

  SHANGHAI, as it is today, would be, with on eexcepi on , co rrdet dy unrecognizable to the refugees. Even in the 1940s, it was a huge metropolis, spreading mile after square mile back from the Whangpoo River. But now, the city is also going up and up. Neighborhood by neighborhood, Shanghai is being rebuilt with high-rises and architecturally stunning skyscrapers going up in clusters of five or six at a time. A brand new subway system has been tunneled under the city; elevated highways unroll like ribbons above the crowded streets. And neon lights - even on the staid, pre-war buildings that line the Bund celebrate the 24/7 energy of the place.

  The one exception to the re-building is the one-time home of all the refugees - Hongkew. Former refugees come with their children and grandchildren to revisit the places where they lived out the war - and find them still standing. The unpretentious low-rise cement buildings that crowded the streets and lanes are still there. The Ohel Moishe Synagogue is still there, though now it is The Jewish Museum, displaying photos of the refugee period. Hongkew Park is as it was, though the government has erected a monument in the park, inscribed in English, Hebrew and Chinese with an explanation that China was a refuge for Jews during the war and that thousands lived in Hongkew and survived. The Shanghai Jewish School still stands, though now, appropriately, it houses the offices of the Ministry of Education.

  Beyond Hongkew, individual buildings can also still be found. The former Jewish Hospital is now a public hospital specializing in ear, nose and throat. The Shanghai Jewish Club is now the Conservatory of Music. The Ohel Rachel Synagogue built by Sir Victor Sassoon, is now, after many years of neglect, again open, and the Hebrew words above the Ark are again visible. There is also one more building that none of the refugees would recognize but certainly all would approve - an Academy of Jewish Studies in Shanghai, with a library and archives devoted to every aspect of Jewish history in China from the 18th century to the present.