Shanghai Ghetto survivors to gather in Rosemont

For almost nine years Kurt and Gerry Jacoby and their parents lived in one room of a seven-bedroom house.

The house had one bathroom, but no running water. Once a week a woman came down the street to take away the human waste, though the smell never went away with her.

The brothers had to walk several miles — often through sweltering heat and thickets of mosquitoes — just to get a little bit of food.

But for the young Jewish boys during World War II, this was the good life.

The Jacoby brothers, now living in Lincolnshire, were among approximately 20,000 Jewish people who fled Europe in the late 1930s for Shanghai, China. The Japanese had overrun China but permitted a Jewish ghetto in one square mile of the Hongkou District of Shanghai, and allowed life to go on — almost normally.

Kurt, Gerry and 14 other survivors of the Shanghai Ghetto will be honored Thursday at a dinner at the Hyatt Regency O'Hare Hotel in Rosemont. On Friday the group will be at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center for a tour and lectures. Both events are sponsored by the Florence and Laurence Spungen Family Foundation based in Lincolnshire.

“This could be the last time so many Shanghai survivors will be together at one time,” said Danny Spungen, who organized the events. “This is such a fascinating part of history that so many people don't know.”

For the Jacoby family, leaving Germany was about survival.

They left Berlin about a month after Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass) on Nov. 9-10, 1938, and spent a month on a ship, crowded with other families who had been able to gather the money to leave. The ship sailed south from Europe and around the bottom of Africa to get to China, but Shanghai was one of the only places Jewish people could go without a visa or passport.

Gerry was only 4 years old when they made the voyage, and Kurt was 10. The family owned the seven-bedroom building they lived in but had to rent the rest of the rooms out to cover their expenses.

Life was hard, they said, but at least the family was together. The brothers went to school and learned English. The community set up a synagogue where Kurt had his bar mitzvah and a hospital where Gerry's appendix was removed.

“It was like a city to itself,” Gerry said. “We took care of our own.”

Before they left Berlin, Kurt was the only Jewish boy in his school, said his son Kenneth, but once they were in Shanghai there was a whole community.

Toward the end of the war American bombers soared overhead, trying to take out Japanese installations.

“You never knew what was going to happen,” Gerry said. “There were no basements to go down in and feel safe. You just had to keep your fingers crossed that you wouldn't be hit. We lived in fear, but we survived.”

For some children, like Judy Kolb, who was born in Shanghai in 1940, this life of bombs, crowded rooms and little food seemed normal.

Kolb's parents, uncle and maternal grandparents left from Swinemunde, Germany, in 1939 before she was born, so she never knew anything different as a young girl.

“At this point it almost feels like it was somebody else's life,” said Kolb, who now lives in Northbrook.

She went to school, learned English, played with other children and went to synagogue where her father was the cantor.

She was too young to realize at the time that her father was frantically writing letters and saving money trying to get his parents and sister a safe passage out of Europe. He couldn't do it, though, and all three family members eventually died at Auschwitz concentration camp.

She was too young to understand that not all children get sick so often with intestinal worms or whooping cough, or that not having enough food wasn't normal.

“I remember the bombings and the air raids. We had to sit under a desk in the office where we lived for a long time, but to me that was not unusual,” Kolb said. “Now looking back it was very incredible.” One day her grandfather didn't come home. He'd had a run-in with the Japanese and been put in a jail, but no one notified the family. They soon found him, and for a few weeks Kolb and her grandmother walked to the jail every day to bring him food and clean clothing until his release.

“He never talked about what it was like in there,” Kolb said.

She said she was surrounded by optimistic family members who went on as if life was normal.

“(My grandmother) was determined that her life would not be changed that drastically,” Kolb said. “Everyone just carried on.”

The first time she was frightened, she said, was when she was on a cargo ship to America in 1948, seasick and crowded in with people she didn't know.

Without radios or letters, the Jewish families in Shanghai had no idea what was going on back in Europe or what happened to their families.

“It was horrendous,” Kolb said, when she and her family realized what had happened in the camps, including to her aunt and paternal grandparents. “It's still very hard.”

Kolb, 73, went back to Shanghai a few years ago and saw the small rooms she shared with her family.

“I was shocked, I had no idea the conditions and the hardships were so bad,” she said. “I didn't know it would affect me to this degree after so long, but it was just overwhelming.”

She has chosen to never visit Germany.

Gerry Jacoby said the Jews in the Shanghai Ghetto didn't find out until after the war what had gone on. “It was unbelievable,” he said. “People couldn't believe what they heard. It was bad for us, but it could have been so much worse.”

Ghetto: 'We lived in fear,' survivor says