‘Never Again’

By Abby Wolf
MONROE — In an evening by turns solemn, somber, touching and uplifting, the Joint Yom HaShoah Committee of Eitz Chaim and Monroe Temple Beth-El last Thursday, May 5, presented its annual commemoration of Yom HaShoah, the day that memorializes the destruction of European Jewry, with recollections from surviving eyewitnesses and their children, musical interludes and candle lighting to remember the victims and culminating in the Jewish evening prayer and singing of Hatikva (“The Hope”), Israel’s national anthem.
The Holocaust, or Shoah, entailed the systematic mass murder during the Second World War by the Nazis of some six million European Jews – and many millions of Roma (the people formerly known as Gypsies), Poles, Slavs, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Communists, and the mentally and physically disabled – and all those whom the Nazis and their collaborators deemed “undesirable,” or “inferior.”
The term “Holocaust” has often been used to describe the genocidal catastrophe; its meaning, from the Greek, refers to an animal sacrifice used as a burnt offering to a deity; the term more commonly used in the Jewish community is “Shoah,” from the Hebrew, meaning calamity.
Those exceptional few who were able to escape this catastrophe often found themselves in far-flung places, in the few locations in the world where they could find sanctuary – in the case of Reni Schustermann, this sanctuary would take her family to the other side of the globe: Occupied Shanghai, China.
Schustermann described her childhood as a refugee in Shanghai to a hushed crowd of about 150 souls at the service, held at Congregation Eitz Chaim Monroe. She was introduced by her daughter and Eitz Chaim member Karen Pomerantz , who noted that she learned about her mother’s experience “when the world gets turned upside-down,” and about the “horrors” of that dark period in the not-too-distant past.
Pomerantz, considered part of the Second Generation (children of Holocaust survivors), added that she also learned of those righteous individuals who “risked all” to save others, “for which we are grateful.”’

On November 9 and 10, 1938, agents of the Nazi government, with the help of some regular German citizens, ransacked and destroyed Jewish shops, buildings and synagogues, smashing the windows in the process. This act is recognized as the beginning of the Shoah.
Schustermann pointed out, however, that the Holocaust “did not appear suddenly, but began in 1933,” with the rise of Hitler and the advent of discriminatory laws against Germany’s Jewish citizens (these laws would later spread throughout the countries under the control of the Third Reich).
On November 9, 1938, Reni Schustermann’s father was “picked up,” along with other Jewish men, by the Nazi authorities; he was then sent to Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp. He left the camp in April 1939.
At that point, Schustermann said, people could still leave the camp, if they had a ticket to another country.
She added that you had to collect large sums of money to bribe the authorities.
“It sounds so easy now … but it wasn’t.”
Schustermann’s father made his way to Shanghai; it would be another year and a half before he’d be able to bring her, her mother and sister out.
She said that the typical passage out of Germany would be to get to Italy, then to make one’s way to Egypt, then down the Suez Canal, and then, finally, travel across Asia until you reached Shanghai.
Once Italy joined the Axis that was no longer an option.
One now had to escape through Siberia to get to Shanghai.
Shanghai was divided into two sections at that time: the more affluent French Concession, where wealthy Europeans lived, and the International Settlement, which had a few wealthy British and American business people, but mainly consisted of desperately poor Chinese – and the European Jewish refugees who were fortunate enough to join them.
Schustermann’s family initially stayed in the French Concession when they arrived, but eventually moved to the International Settlement in Hongkew with the rest of the refugees. She went to a Jewish refugee school, taught by English and Russian teachers.
The Jews fleeing the Nazis found an established community of Russian Jews, as well as the Iraqi Jewish community – the latter had been in Shanghai since the 19th century, arriving as traders. The Sassoon family, led by Sir Victor Sassoon saw to it that “Jews were helped.”
When war broke out in the Pacific, “things changed,” Schustermann said. The Americans and English were interned, so her teachers were all Russian. These were Russian Jews who came with the Russian Revolution, and had settled in Shanghai, Manchuria and Harbin.
“When we were in Germany, we were declared stateless,” she added. All Jewish males’ middle name became Israel; all Jewish females’ middle name became Sarah.
“We were living on the wrong side” of the designated area, and had to move.”
“We were not segregated among the Chinese, like (in) the Warsaw Ghetto,” but we had to find a place to live.”
With a war on, jobs were hard to come by, so there was no money coming in, and no way to buy necessities. The refugees often used a room for a makeshift “store,” with used goods – especially old shoes – where they could trade with one another.
One of the Japanese officers that oversaw the refugee area had, Schustermann is convinced, “an inferiority complex” because of his height: if you crossed him, you were sent to jail – a terrifying prospect, due to the presence of rats.
The warm, moist, sub-tropical climate was also challenging for the refugees, as well as the frequent threat of typhoons (Asia’s answer to the hurricane).
A fond memory: Schustermann had a favorite pair of rubber boots, her “pride and joy,” that she wore until her feet got too big for them.
Shoe repairs were done by a Chinese shoemaker; while her shoes still fit, her leather backpack was sacrificed to make replacement soles.
When Schustermann outgrew her shoes, she did what everyone else did: she went to the “used shoe store,” to pick out a “new” pair from the pile of castoffs traded in by the other refugees.
Although she and her family arrived with two trunks of belongings, the clothes didn’t last long: the tropical summer climate made things moldy, and the winter cold “would go through you.”
She recalled that there was just enough electricity to warm something up once a week. Also: there was just one light bulb in their room (all refugee families lived in just 1 or 2 rooms), and cooking was done on the floor, using briquettes made of coal dust mixed with sand – they were “more sand than coal,” so she and her family only had one warm meal a day.
When the large influx of Jewish refugees arrived in Shanghai as the war unfolded, local authorities didn’t know where to put them – people were crowded into buildings: “Everyone had only one room.”
In 1942, Schustermann’s father died, making a difficult situation for the family that much harder.
Shanghai had previously been a trade city, but those jobs disappeared when the war came.
The Jewish refugees didn’t perform most of the remaining available work, which was “hard physical labor,” done by Coolies (Chinese laborers).
Schustermann’s mother found work as a “measurer,” measuring the square footage of rooms for the tax collector. She was also a knitter, but that didn’t bring in much additional money.
“We were so poor, but (our situation) didn’t compare to the Chinese street beggars – they lived and died on the street. In the winter, more died. And if you saw a body on the street, you made a big circle” around the body, since you couldn’t be sure how they died.
“Since it was a sub-tropical place, you drank a lot (of water).” Her mother would admonish her to make sure the water was boiled first, for sanitation’s sake. Schustermann added that a great deal of chlorine was added to the water, just to be on the safe side, and it tasted so awful that they would drink tea to try and mask the chlorine taste – to little avail.
Due to the large numbers of people living in close quarters, and a minimum of sanitation, vaccines were an absolute must.
“They were given on schedule and mandatory.” Shots were typically given for smallpox, typhus, typhoid and cholera – if you weren’t vaccinated, Schustermann pointed out, you presented a danger to those around you. The government set up checkpoints around the city, to make sure people complied: “There was no such thing as a conscientious objector, or religious objector.”
“I got vaccinated for smallpox at least seven times when I was there.”
She generally received her shots at school, with a “nice, clean Health Department,” not at the ones set up on the street: they (often) used one syringe for four people!”
Schustermann acknowledged the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee – popularly known as “the Joint” – for that agency’s work in getting the refugees three meals a day – although by 1940, when the Schustermanns came, it was reduced to one meal a day: a meager subsistence diet consisting of white rice, sugar and some cinnamon.
Still, “Without the ‘Joint,’ I probably wouldn’t be standing here.”
Schustermann urged the audience to support organizations like the ‘Joint,’ HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, originally set up to help Jewish immigrants, now helps immigrants of all backgrounds), and similar organizations because of the good work they do.
She added how grateful she is to be here in the US, how she has three children and seven grandchildren, and that those who came through one of the darkest periods in recent history can view themselves as winners ultimately: “Am Yisrael Chai!” (The People of Israel Live!)