This is a fascinating documentary that takes a fresh look at the holocaust. In the mid to late nineteen thirties, Jews were allowed to leave Germany, provided that they could get a country to take them in. Therein lay the rub. Many Jews were willing to leave Germany at the time but could find no country that would open its doors to them. Then, some of them discovered that China was an option. It seemed that Shanghai would accept Jewish refugees, and eventually about twenty thousand desperate refugees decided that going to Shanghai would be a more viable option to staying in Germany and German occupied lands, where life for the Jewish population was becoming a slow descent into hell.
Traveling by ocean liner, the refugees would disembark in Shanghai, where part of the city was segregated into an international settlement, filled with western foreigners. By the time that the Jewish refugees began arriving, the Japanese occupied that part of Shanghai that included the international settlement, although the Japanese had a hands off policy with respect to the international settlement. So, even though Japan was one of the Axis powers, which included Germany, the Jewish refugees were allowed to settle in Shanghai without incident. Moreover, the Japanese, having criticized the treatment of Asians by Germans, were now constrained to treat the Jewish refugees well in order to be consistent.
In fact, there were already two distinct Jewish groups ensconced and well established in Shanghai, the Baghdadi Jews, who were business people and the wealthier of these two groups, and the Russian Jews. Each had their own communities in the international settlement. As the European Jews began pouring into Shanghai, the Baghdadi, who were Sephardic Jews, helped them, providing financial assistance and support. The Jewish refugees came from Germany, Poland, and Lithuania.
These refugees would band together and form a thriving community with cafes, schools, newspapers, theatres, and sport and social clubs, creating a bustling community with a vibrant cultural life. Still, they were now a poor people living in difficult conditions, as Shanghai was a port city that was teeming with people, many of whom were living in squalid conditions, with poor sanitation and rampant disease. Still, the Jewish refugees felt safe living among the Chinese people with their Japanese captors, never experiencing anti-Semitism from their Asian neighbors. No matter how bad it got in Shanghai, where living conditions were deplorable, it was far worse in Europe for those Jews who remained behind.
Then, after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the Americans entered the war, the Japanese went into the International settlement and interned the Americans and British, who were pronounced to be enemy aliens. This included the Baghdadi Jews, as they carried British passports. This brought great hardship upon the Jewish refugees, who had been dependent upon the largesse of the Baghdadi Jews for their survival. The responsibility of the Jewish refugees now fell upon the Russian Jewish community.
In 1943, the Japanese, succumbing to pressure from their German allies, issued a proclamation that all stateless refugees, who came to Shanghai after 1937, were to be resettled in a segregated area and have curfews. This created, in effect, a ghetto of Jews, as they had previously lived side by side with the Chinese. It was not, however, anything like the European ghettos of Jews that the Germans had constructed, as there were no walls separating them from the community at large.
The filmmakers of this documentary tell the little known story of the Jewish settlements in Shanghai through the moving reminiscences of a number of survivors, archival footage, still photographs, and letters written at the time. The filmmakers also obtained input from historians in order to ground the story in the historical context out of which it arose, creating a historical backdrop for the events and situations described by the survivors. They then traveled to Shanghai with two of the survivors to revisit the city and the ghetto where these survivors had spent so many of their early years and to film the places where they had lived. Remarkably, the buildings still existed, virtually unchanged, very much as they had been so many years ago when Jewish refugees had occupied them.
Winner of the Santa Barbara Film Festival Audience Choice Award, this is a fascinating documentary. It is one that will keep the viewer riveted to the screen. Those who enjoy historical documentaries, as well as those with an interest in the holocaust and World War II, will very much like this well-made documentary, which is narrated by Academy Award winner, Martin Landau.
Lost Story of Painful Escape - A Good Cinematic Experience
A couple of years before World War II, Europe and the United States turned their back on millions Jews in Europe that tried to escape an increasing persecution. Nations closed their borders after a political meeting between several nations with Germany in the center that led nowhere. Hitler used the result of the meeting as an invitation to increase the intensity of the Jewish persecution. Some Jews were fortunate enough to escape to neighboring countries while many were escorted back to the German border and handed to the Gestapo. However, far away on the other side of the world some fortunate Jews that had the financial means to escape found a loophole - Shanghai.
Japan and China had been in war, which led to the occupation of Shanghai. The Japanese forces were not checking passports, as people arrived to Shanghai by ships. The Chinese government had been abandoned, as was the passport control. Thus, Jews could leave Germany, even though their passports had been restricted or revoked, to peacefully enter Shanghai. A pleasurable four-week voyage through the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean led the escaping Jews to their destination, Shanghai.
Arrivals were initially shocked by the environment to which they arrived. This culture crash had its foundation in several new experiences such as the extreme humidity, high temperature, different written and spoken language, and new food among many other things. Yet, the 20,000 Jews that arrived found a way to cope in the new society. This is much thanks to the British Jews that had lived in Shanghai since the beginning of the century who had acquired much wealth. In the years before World War II and in the beginning of the war the newcomers basically founded their own miniature society within Shanghai. Coffee shops, newspapers, sports events, and much more offered an outlet where the Jews could live a life much like in Europe.
As the war increasingly intensified the Germans who were allies with Japan pressured the Japanese to create a ghetto in Shanghai for the Jews. The Japanese slowly established this ghetto, but it was very unlike the ghetto in Warsaw, Poland. Nonetheless, food became scarce while starvation and disease made life much more difficult, which even cost several people their lives. Despite the difficulties in Shanghai, the Jews never learned how lucky they were until the end of the war. When the terribly tragic news of the death camps in Europe reached them in Shanghai this moment brought them a heavy sadness, as they realized how lucky they were while reflecting on their relatives and family members' horrific fate.
Shanghai Ghetto offers an interesting cinematic journey, as a number of people offer first hand accounts of what it was like to live in the Shanghai Ghetto. One man tells how traumatic it was to experience the bombing of Shanghai at the end of the war. A woman also expresses her contempt for Germany and how she now has no surviving relatives, which is very hard to hear, as one cannot even imagine the pain she must feel. These stories that the audience experiences through film provides and reinforces an important notion - let this never happen again.
More than any previous documentary about the Holocaust, Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State reveals the inner workings of the Nazi implementation of Hitler's infamous "final solution." Drawing on the latest academic discoveries, this remarkable BBC series presents a wide-ranging, meticulously researched biography of the titular "killing factory" and its evolution into a highly efficient location for industrialized extermination of well over one million Jews, gypsies, and other so-called "mongrel races" between 1940 and 1945. From "Surprising Beginnings" to "Liberation & Revenge," the six-chapter program chronicles the gradual process that escalated into the Holocaust, focusing its expansive European timeline on the detailed movements of preeminent (and highly corruptible) Holocaust... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Laurence Rees DVD Release Date: Released the 29 March 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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The structure of the movie reminded me of "Eleni", a weaving of the past and present as a child goes back to investigate the horrors that were the parent's past. Starts slowly but settles into a pace that can be truly savored. This is a movie that I will find myself revisiting again and again. More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Katja Riemann - Maria Schrader - Jutta Lampe - Svea Lohde Director(s): Margarethe von Trotta DVD Release Date: Released the 18 January 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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This is really a very well done documentary about an area rarely covered and hardly known to the general pubic.
While America and her Allies deserve great credit for ending the hellish reign of the Nazis and thus playing the crucial role in the suvival of the remnant of the Jews in Europe (roughly some 250,000 people out of 6 plus million), they failed to act and even at times prevented actions that could have saved countless Jewish lives!
This documentary does an excellent job covering the basics: from the treachery of the US State Department, led by Breckenridge Small, who told consulates to obstruct the distribution of visas (some 50,000 were left unused when hundreds of thousands needed them to save their lives) to the Bergson group who ran provocative ads... More Info about this DVD DVD Release Date: Released the 26 April 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Solidly built around a subtle yet commanding performance by Don Cheadle, Hotel Rwanda emerged as one of the most highly-praised dramas of 2004. In a role that demands his quietly riveting presence in nearly every scene, Cheadle plays real-life hero Paul Rusesabagina, a hotel manager in the Rwandan capital of Kigali who in 1994 saved 1,200 Rwandan "guests" from certain death during the genocidal clash between tribal Hutus, who slaughtered a million victims, and the horrified Tutsis, who found safe haven or died. Giving his best performance since his breakthrough role in Devil in a Blue Dress, Cheadle plays Rusesabagina as he really was during the ensuing chaos: "an expert in situational ethics" (as described by critic Roger Ebert), doing what he morally had to do, at... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Don Cheadle - Sophie Okonedo Director(s): Terry George DVD Release Date: Released the 12 April 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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The riveting subject of Downfall is nothing less than the disintegration of Adolf Hitler in mind, body, and soul. A 2005 Academy Award nominee for best foreign language film, this German historical drama stars Bruno Ganz (Wings of Desire) as Hitler, whose psychic meltdown is depicted in sobering detail, suggesting a fallen, pathetic dictator on the verge on insanity, resorting to suicide (along with Eva Braun and Joseph and Magda Goebbels) as his Nazi empire burns amidst chaos in mid-1945. While staging most of the film in the claustrophobic bunker where Hitler spent his final days, director Oliver Hirschbiegel (Das Experiment) dares to show the gentler human side of der Fuehrer, as opposed to the pure embodiment of evil so familiar from many other Nazi-era... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Oliver Hirschbiegel DVD Release Date: Released the 02 August 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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