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Memories of kindness and rickshaw rides
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JOSEF Rossbach, a retired doctor who now lives in Hamburg, Germany, spent the first three years of his life in Shanghai’s Hongkou District.
Now 70, he said his Jewish parents found refuge in Shanghai after fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939.
In 2010, on a visit to the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum with his wife and son, Rossbach donated a toy rickshaw he remembered playing with as a small boy in his adoptive home.
“Whenever I held it in my hand, my heart beat faster,” he said.
Rossbach’s neighbor in Shanghai was a rickshaw puller who sometimes gave him and his mother rides. His mother bought him the toy as a reminder of the journeys they took together.
“The Chinese people were great to us. Without them, we would have probably died,” he said.
More than 20,000 German and Austrian Jews fled to Shanghai to escape Nazi persecution.
Among them were Rossbach’s parents and grandparents, who traveled to the city by ship via the Suez Canal.
“Except for two suitcases, they had to leave everything behind,” he said.
Shanghai had about 6.5 million inhabitants at the time. Though it was a commercial center of the Far East, the swelling population of refugees and the Japanese occupation plunged parts of the city into poverty.
Rossbach said his father operated a small business outside the ghetto set up by the Japanese for Jewish refugees near the current Zhoujiazui and Huiming roads.
“There was very little space. Each family had only one room,” he said.
The family had to use a bucket as a toilet, he said, and the summer heat created a breeding ground for pathogens.
Rossbach said he also remembers the noisy clamor of the ghetto, which went on day and night.
Although living conditions were poor, cultural life flourished. The members of the Jewish community built their own theaters, schools and sports facilities, Rossbach said.
“Just outside the gates of the ghetto, there was a park and we often made trips in the rickshaw there,” he said.
But it wasn’t all fun, he said.
When American planes bombed the area, 40 Jewish people were killed and 500 were wounded. During the raids, Rossbach said his mother made him wear an iron pot on his head as protection.
At just three-and-a-half years old, the boy was diagnosed with polio. He spent a year in a Swedish-run hospital outside the ghetto and has been confined to a wheelchair ever since.
In 1949 after the war, the family left by boat to Italy and traveled to Israel.
“I remember my parents waking me up in the dead of night and telling me we were leaving Shanghai,” he said.
“For a boy that age, it was exciting.”
Years later, Rossbach earned a bachelor’s degree in Israel, before returning to Hamburg with his parents.
He studied medicine, became a gynecologist and worked at the Elim Hospital in the city. He met his wife, a psychologist, at university, and the couple had a son, who is now 35.
Rossbach said his extraordinary childhood made him the man he is today.
“Material things mean nothing to me. I learned the importance of family and human relationships,” he said.
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