For German Jews trapped in a land that didn't want them and was about to kill millions of them, Shanghai offered a window of escape, but one that would surely close -- and soon. "Jewish men were being picked up and put into concentration camps," Janklowicz-Mann explained. "They were told you have 'X' amount of time to leave -- two weeks, a month -- if you can find a country that will take you. Outside, their wives and friends were struggling to get a passport, a visa, anything to help them get them out. But embassies were closing their doors all over, and countries, including the United States, were closing their borders."
And then suddenly a sliver of hope appeared.
"It started as a rumor in Vienna," Mann said. "'There's a place you can go where you don't need a visa. They have free entry.' It just spread like fire and whoever could went for it."
It wasn't that the Chinese deliberately set out to help the Jews of Europe, it was simply that among the warring colonial factions who ran Shanghai -- the French, the British, the Japanese -- no one wanted to control the passport department because no one wanted to take ultimate responsibility for the chaotic province. And in chaos lay an escape route for the Jews.