Directors Joan Grossman and Paul Rosdy

Bay Area
Premiere


Directors'
Statements

The Port of Last Resort
Austria/USA, 1998, 16mm, color, 79 minutes.
English and German with English subtitles.

Directors Joan Grossman and Paul Rosdy. Photo: Paulo Vescia.

I made this film because I wanted to know what it was like for a person of my home country – or any other country, to be – all of a sudden – declared an enemy of the state that actually exists, among other things, for to protection of this very same citizen.

What was it like for a person to be thrown out of his home country, all their belongings taken away, and finding refuge in a city like Shanghai? What happened there and how did people survive?

For me, to understand the history of my home country it was not enough to just read about it and know the story. Making this film made me much more aware of what these people had to go through, something that today hardly anyone imagines can happen again. Though it just did happen in Kosovo.

Shanghai was for most refugees a lost time. They survived but often lost their youth, lost their chance for an education and after these 10 years they had to start all over again for the 2nd or 3rd time. But time did pass, people became older and so their chance for a happy and successful life. As Sig Simon says in the film: The bad is buried by the good (survival).

For me this is a positive story, a story of survival with all it's hardship, facts and memories that usually are not mentioned in history books: human feelings about their struggle to survive. To know what this is like I made the film. I know how privileged I am in being able to make this film and I am grateful for that. I know from the response of the people who were in Shanghai, that they appreciated that their story was finally told.

-- Paul Rosdy, June 1999

Our film gave me the wonderful opportunity to connect intimately and creatively with history. In this day and age we are constantly swept into the next and newest trends and for younger generations this future-oriented culture rarely looks back.

I feel deeply enriched by the work of making this film. In some ways it was like doing a Ph.D. on the complex and fascinating story of the W.W.II Jewish refugees in Shanghai. It took four years of intensely demanding work. In other ways it was like taking a strange and profound journey into another place and time.

During the project I had dreams in which I entered the film. One time I dreamt that I was in "Little Vienna" in Hongkew, the district where the refugees mostly settled and ultimately became a ghetto under Japanese control. In my dream I walked the streets, went into shops and cafes. It was fantastic!

This film also put us in contact with many older people and I now have many friends who are in their 70s and 80s. I now know - more than ever - that everyone has a story, and these stories are important links to the past.

This project gave me a better perspective on history, but also a better perspective on myself. I know more than before about what is important and more about what it means to really suffer and survive.

I am grateful to have had the chance to make this film. I am gratified to see how well it resonnates with audiences around the world.

-- Joan Grossman, July 1999

Two foreign ladies, probably british, are participating in a Rickshaw race on the famous racecourse in Shanghai. This image captured before 1941, is a still frame from the 8mm films of Charles Bliss, an emigrant from Vienna who spent the war years in Shanghai.

Flight
In the years 1938-41 nearly 20,000 European Jewish refugees fled to Shanghai, China, where most would spend almost a decade in exile. The emigration to Shanghai was, for most refugees, a "last resort" to find a safe haven at a time when borders around the world were closed to the desperate Jews of Europe.

In the late 1930s, as the Nazis unleashed a reign of terror against the Jews of Germany and Austria, Shanghai was a free port, a concession which Britain had won in the Opium Wars of the 1840s. Shanghai's International Settlement and French Concession provided foreign enclaves the right to operate under their own laws, and the city had become a thriving international territory with no restrictions on immigration.

But as the refugees from Europe came streaming into Shanghai, the city was in decline. Japan had waged an aggressive assault on China in 1937 and installed a puppet government. Thousands of destitute Chinese refugees from the Sino-Japanese war flooded into Shanghai, spreading poverty and disease. As tensions were drastically rising in Europe, the Far East was in the midst of another conflict that had left China weak and embattled.

By 1938, some 50,000 foreigners lived in Shanghai among a dense population of 4 million Chinese. Shanghai was a city of contrasts, of foreign tycoons and rickshaw coolies, a cosmopolitan center of business and crime. Poised at the mouth of the Yangtze River, the commerce of China spilled through Shanghai. The streets were teeming with vendors and traffic. For the survivors who found shelter in Shanghai, it was an exiting and precarious world.

As the refugee population grew, the local committees sought support from abroad, much of which came from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in New York. But American support began to wane as the war accelerated. Relief reports describe the struggle to feed, house, and employ refugees as the economy collapses under the strain of war in Europe and China. In time, financial ruin and illness plague many of the refugees. For most, Shanghai held no future.

Mrs. Bliss, a Jewish refugee from Austria, walks through a typical Chinese lane in Hongkew – the Jewish ghetto of Shanghai. European Jewish refugees, as well as Chinese, lived together in overcrowded lanes such as the one in this image, a still frame from the 8mm films of Charles Bliss, taken somtime during the war years.

War
Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, coincided with the Japanese occupation of the international territories of Shanghai. A year later the Japanese forced the Jewish refugees into a ghetto in Hongkew. Those living in the foreign concessions were forced to give up their homes and businesses – similar to what had happened to the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe – and live in Hongkew's overcrowded squalor.

The ghetto was administered by the Japanese, but emigrants were forced to guard their fellow refugees. A Japanese officer named Ghoya, who called himself the "King of the Jews", sadistically controlled passes required to leave the ghetto. Ghoya was known to abuse, humiliate, and beat refugees.

Conditions rapidly declined, and disease and hunger spread in the ghetto. Chinese women would sweep the streets for rice. The Red Cross reports that thousands of Jewish refugees are on the brink of starvation. With no medication available, ghetto residents died of dysentery. Destitute refugees, carved their own shoes from wood after having sold everything they owned. And during the worst time of the ghetto, when the only news was of Japanese victories in the Pacific, that couples married, believing they would not survive the war.

Eventually the Americans advanced in the Pacific. On July 17, 1945, American bombs fell on the ghetto in Hongkew. Allegedly seeking Japanese communications and munitions posts, the bombs killed dozens of refugees and hundreds of Chinese in unprotected Hongkew. The longing for liberation by the Allies had become a deadly trap.

Most survived, but with peace came the news of the death camps in Europe. Lost letters arrived after the war from relatives that perished in death camps. Some never knew the fate of their closest family members left behind in Europe. As the Japanese repatriated, activists looked for Ghoya, King of the Jews, to take revenge. They were faced with a life or death decision that expressed years of despair and frustration.

Exodus
At the end of W.W.II the struggle for power between the Chinese Nationalists and Communists had reignited. As the Communists came closer to Shanghai, refugees and foreigners made efforts to leave. For most refugees, the chance to leave China was a continuation of a journey that had started many years before. The Jewish refugees from Shanghai scattered throughout the world, and with them the remnants of their stories.

Paul Rosdy lives in Vienna. Since 1990 he has been working in film and video. After having graduated from film school in Vancouver, Canada, he has produced several short documentaries and educational programs in Austria, Canada and the United States. In addition he has organized documentary film retrospectives in Vienna. In 1994 Paul Rosdy co-founded Pinball Films located in New York and Vienna.

Joan Grossman lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her short films have won numerous festival awards. Formerly she was an award-winning radio producer and the founder of an underground arts space in the Chicago area. Co-founder of Pinball Films in 1994, New York and Vienna.

Paul Rosdy:
You Don't Look For Street Signs When You're In A Jungle, 1991.
Release Day, 1992.
Matzo Balls, 1994.
The Port of Last Resort - Zuflucht in Shanghai, 1998.

Joan Grossman:
Down & Out New York City, short, 1986.
Creature of Habit, short, 1991.
High Stakes, short, 1991.
Matzo Balls, short, 1994.
The Port of Last Resort - Zuflucht in Shanghai, 1998.

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