There were two conventions at the Marriott O’Hare over Labor Day weekend. The hotel was full of casually dressed young mothers and fathers and their well-nourished babies, who were attending a convention of the Illinois La Leche League. Tucked away in a side room were about 300 Jews who spent World War II exiled in Shanghai; it was their fifth reunion since 1980.
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Jewish culture thrived in Shanghai: there was a Viennese light-opera troupe, a Jewish radio station, and 26 publications, including medical journals in German, English, and Chinese. Heppner, who was 17 when he arrived in 1939, worked in a Chinese bookstore that sold pirated editions of American and British novels. He read Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and the Bronte sisters. “We were teenagers, and we all got our education there,” says his wife, Illo Heppner, whom he met in Shanghai shortly after she arrived in 1940. “There were discussion groups. You could get courses or education on any level. I came out of Shanghai with the equivalent of a college degree.” She says she learned all about music and literature in Shanghai. Her husband received his mechanical-engineering training from a ship’s captain he visited. “Every night he told me something. He would give me his books. German books.”
But he learned English by going to American films with Illo, who translated for him. “You take a girl on a date, and you take her to the movies,” Illo says. “Now which girl would do this? She really has to be committed. Imagine an American movie with Chinese subtitles, and there is my date sitting next to me understanding 5 percent of what’s going on. So he’s saying to me, ‘What is going on here?’ and I am simultaneously translating–always missing the punch lines.”
“We were the young ones,” says Rita. “When we left Shanghai we were all between 18 and 20.”
Though the Germans pressured them, the Japanese never drafted an extermination plan for the Jews. Apparently they clung to the notion that Jews ran the world’s financial institutions, deciding that if they treated the Jews decently they would be in better financial shape after the war. Nevertheless around 3,000 Jews died in Shanghai, some of tropical diseases, some in the Allied bombings of 1945, and some of hunger.
In 1943 the Jews were put under the charge of a power-hungry Japanese bureaucrat called Ghoya, who called himself “the king of the Jews,” ruling the ghetto residents seemingly according to whim. He was the only person who could give Jews work permits to get out of the ghetto. Everyone at the reunion has a story about Ghoya.
