When the rest of the world, including the United States, turned its back on the Jewish refugees in Germany in 1939, Hitler took that as a go-ahead for the Final Solution. As quoted in Shanghai Ghetto, Dana Janklowicz-Mann & Amir Mann’s efficient if stolid documentary, the response from Nazi minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels was, "They want us to do the job for them." Hope came from an unlikely source: Germany’s Axis partner Japan. The Chinese port of Shanghai was brutally occupied by Japanese troops, but because of bureaucratic technicalities, no passports were required for entry, and that allowed some 20,000 fortunate souls to escape there and survive the war.
Using stock archival footage and interviews with survivors — then only children — and historians, and with narration by Martin Landau, Shanghai Ghetto chronicles the fortunes of this enclave, from the desperate beginnings and the lifesaving assistance of the wealthy local Jewish community and American Jewish agencies to the desperate times following Pearl Harbor when the Japanese tightened restrictions and cut off all foreign aid. The story itself is fascinating, and its ironies and examples of perseverance are inspiring, but only occasionally does Shanghai Ghetto rise above the conventional, as when the filmmakers accompany a pair of survivors to their old ghetto dwellings in today’s Shanghai. (95 minutes)