RCCHC "China and the World: Historical Interactions" Talk Series #10 - Where but into the sea? : Stories of Jewish refugees in wartime Japan and Shanghai

Short Summary

The program aims to highlight under-reported facts about the asylum process for Jewish people in wartime Japan and Shanghai, through the history of two former refugees of Polish Jewish origin, resettled in Australia after World War II. It consists of screening of the documentary film work: ‘Where but into the sea?’ (72 min. with English subtitles), presentation of Marylka Project, Q&A and discussion with the participants.

Detailed Description

Melbourne and Sydney, Australia, 2016: the lecturer Kenji Kanno’s encounter with two former Jewish refugees of Polish origin, Maria Kamm (née Weyland, 1920-2019) and Marcel Weyland (born in 1927), sparked the beginning of Marylka Project.

In September 1939, Maria, Marcel and their family (parents, elder sister and her husband) left their home town Łódź due to the Nazi invasion of Poland. After fifteen months of precarious refugee life in Vilnius, Lithuania, they jumped on the Trans-Siberian Railway.

In March 1941, the Japanese steamship took two nights to take them from Vladivostok to Tsuruga, Fukui Prefecture, Japan. From Tsuruga port, they were transferred to Kobe, where they spent six months. And in September 1941, with an order from the Japanese authorities, which could no longer retain foreign residents in the pre-Pearl Harbor context, they were transferred to Shanghai, which had been under the Japanese military rule for four years.

The family had struggled in the search of visas and tickets abroad, to find only one berth to Australia. Maria’s father then talked to her: ‘It’ll be you who go to Australia first and arrange to bring us over later.’ It was just ten days after her arrival to Sydney that the Pacific War broke out (December 7/8, 1941). Maria, alone in Australia; and her dear family confined in Shanghai under Japanese military rule. No one knew that this separation was to be as long as five years.

Still for Marcel, Shanghai ended up becoming the city of his youth. ‘Were I asked by a youngster’, writes he in his memoir, ‘where I would recommend him to spend his teenage years there would be only one answer: in World War II Shanghai.’ He is thus, today, one of the last eyewitnesses to Japan’s takeover of Shanghai, proud Japanese battalions marching through the streets on the day of Pearl Harbor, establishment of the ‘Designated Area for Stateless Refugees’, harshness of treatment by Japanese officials, Japan’s surrender and landing of American marines...

On the basis of professor Kanno’s reseach, the film director Mirai Osawa produced a film work on Maria and Marcel’s odyssey, with the participation of the German composer and pianist Henning Schmiedt, the New York-based artist Keiko Miyamori and the Australian anime artist Rachel Walls. The used languages are: English, Japanese, Polish, Yiddish, Chinese and Shanghainese, but subtitled in English all through the work.