Holocaust Refugees in Tianjin: a Colonial Experience?

• In Event: Holocaust Refugees in Global Perspective

Abstract

In 1938-1941, some 20,000 Jewish refugees escaped Europe for East Asia. The great majority of them spent the war years in the overcrowded city of Shanghai. However, some hundreds of Jewish refugees from Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia found shelter in other cities in China.

This presentation explores the Jewish refugees’ experience in the port city of Tientsin [Tianjin] from 1938 to 1948, focusing on their “British colonial life in China”, as one refugee from Czechoslovakia put it. Due to strict Japanese restrictions for entering the city, only some more than two hundreds European refugees ended up in Tientsin. They resided in the British Foreign Concession, which from 1941 was occupied by the Japanese army, and lived within the context of the very much active and well-organized Tientsin Jewish Community, established at the beginning of the 20th century by Jews of Russian origin.

Drawing primarily on family archival collections (photographs, letters, diaries), refugees’ oral testimonies, and memoirs, this paper shows that differently from Shanghai’s harsh and overcrowded life conditions, many of the refugees in Tientsin integrated in the local colonial standards of life. The Tientsin case exemplifies how the rescue of Jewish refugees in East Asia not only often took place within the boundaries of pre-existing Jewish communities, but also happened in European colonial spaces.

Delving into the little-explored history of Jewish rescue in East Asia beyond Shanghai, this proposal contextualizes it in its contemporary colonial setting, and at the same time sheds some light on the history of the pre-existing Tientsin Jewish community and of its sudden demise in the aftermath of the Chinese Communist takeover of the city.

Author

• Silvia Pin, University of Pavia