Zuflucht in Shanghai

The Port of Last Resort is a documentary film about Jewish emigration to Shanghai (1938 to 1949). The little-known story of the World War II Jewish emigration to Shanghai is presented through the recollections of four former refugees and through a collage of evocative archive materials: personal and published writings by refugees, relief reports and secret documents, illustrated with rare home movies, photographs, newsreels and propaganda films. Siegmar Siemon’s family left Germany in 1939 in great haste. He and his family lived like thousands of other Jews without means in crowded refugee homes run by the refugee comittees. At age 14 he began looking for work, competing for low-paid jobs with Chinese natives. The money he earned usually paid for no more than a meagre dinner. Fred Fields was eighteen years old when he left Berlin in 1938 by himself. He worked at the ‘Yellow Post’ and later at the ‘Shanghai Jewish Chronicle’ and got to know the intellectual aspects of emigration. Ernest Heppner talked about how his mother bribed the employee of a travel agency with an impressionist painting, soon hearing that due to the double suicide of a Jewish couple, two cabin places had become free on the steam ship Potsdam. So, in 1939, Heppner and his mother arrived at the site of yet another war. Japan had occupied large parts of China. Illo Heppner travelled to Shanghai in 1940 together with her mother on the Transsiberian railway. They were able to live according to a European standard in the International Settlement of Shanghai. Illo met Ernest Heppner with whom she spent Sunday afternoons in Chinese dance halls.