HIDING IN A CAVE OF
TRUNKS:
A prominent Jewish Family’s
Century in Shanghai and Internment in a WWII POW Camp
Author: Ester Benjamin
Shifren
Non-fiction/memoir/history
ISBN 978 1479165384 and ISBN
1479165387
Available on Amazon.com: http://amzn.com/1479165387
Hiding in a Cave of
Trunks is
the saga of British family's century-long residence in Shanghai. Author Ester
Benjamin Shifren is the descendant of Sephardic Jewish émigrés to the eastern
city. Her ancestors sailed into Shanghai from India in the early 1840s and from
Persia and the Mideast in 1917. For the next century, family members were active
participants in Shanghai's multi-ethnic cultural life and commerce, while
remaining faithful to the rites and rituals of their religion.
In Shanghai, Jews were not
hampered by Christian prejudice, which enabled the immigrants to flourish. But
like other Shanghai émigrés who chose to retain citizenship in their home
countries, the Benjamin clan steadfastly maintained British citizenship during
their hundred-year residency in the International Settlement - the section of
the city where wealthy foreigners built and maintained spacious
homes.
The chapters of Hiding in
a Cave of Trunks are split into four sections: Early Childhood Days in
Shanghai, From Freedom to Captivity, Homecoming, and Hong
Kong. In preparation for the book, Shifren researched family records, copied
photographs, sorted through correspondence, and interviewed old friends and
living relatives to flesh out her own Shanghai memories.
The first section, Early
Childhood Days, introduces the author's grandparents, parents, aunts,
uncles, siblings, and servants. She reviews important incidents and devastating
events in the family history, and outlines how the Benjamin family, generation
by generation, integrated into the highest circles of Shanghai society. Shifren
recalls her chaperoned excursions into exotic street scenes and the émigré
community's social occasions at private clubs, weddings, funerals and the
racetrack. Many members of her family owned racehorses and enjoyed that level of
the city's sporting life.
Much of Shifren’s research
for this book was based on several interviews, done over a period of seventeen
years, with her parents. Their-first person input makes this story a poignant
account of courage and parental fortitude in a time of high stress and
danger.
The From Freedom to
Captivity section recounts the family's traumatic experiences during WWII.
After Pearl Harbor, the Japanese military swiftly invaded Shanghai and took over
all of the city's profitable enterprises. The Allied nationals, who had owned
many of the banks, shipping warehouses and businesses, lost much of their
savings and possessions - even their family cars - to the invaders. Even worse,
families who had retained citizenship in Allied countries were labeled security
risks by the Japanese. All Allied families were soon forced to leave their
luxurious homes and take up residence in a hastily prepared prisoner of war
camp.
The author's family members,
as British citizens, were also considered enemies of the Emperor. This poignant
passage from Hiding in Cave of Trunks relates their last evening in their
spacious ancestral home:
On the first morning
of Pessach (Passover) in
April 1943, we tearfully celebrated the Seder, eating matsoch and
performing all the rituals. This was to be our last wonderful home-cooked
festival meal for a long time.
The next morning Mummy and
Daddy looked around our home for the last time…. Some Chinese men with large
wheelbarrows arrived to collect our things. They grunted and groaned while they
transported all our cases, kitbags, beds, and bare necessities to the Public
Boys and Girls School on Yu Yuen Road, our designated camp, and “home” for the
unforeseeable future.
The incarceration of Allied
civilians in the Far East has been dramatized in several movies and television
shows. The dramas usually emphasize extreme hardships: torture, forced marches,
rapes, and other types of inhumane treatment inflicted by the merciless Japanese
military. And the movies re-create, or a scriptwriter fantasizes, dramatic acts
of resistance by heroic civilians. Extreme cruelty is easy to dramatize. But
everyday tedium, limited bland nutrition, and less onerous deprivations - like
never providing kosher meat to the Jewish families - are considered ho-hum
matters to a movie director.
Shifren provides a vivid
picture of real life in the POW camp. Although Hiding in a Cave of
Trunks chronicles cruel and sadistic acts by the Japanese Commandant, the
author puts the emphasis on the subtle mind games that were played every day
between the military captors and the Allied prisoners.
All through their three-year
captivity, the inmates of the prison camp found ways to work together and make
their imprisonment bearable. For example, they had a secret communication system
that imported outside news of key battles and Allied victories, even though the
Japanese threatened death to anyone who participated in this grapevine. And the
community resisted their captors and demonstrated loyalty to the Allied forces
by staying physically and mentally active. The women of the camp found ways to
nourish and educate the children; the men did heavy work and repaired their
ramshackle housing when the Japanese allowed such activity. This daily effort to
maintain esprit de corps and community well-being was heroism on a less
flashy level.
When the Allies began to win
key battles in the Pacific arena, the news eventually sifted through the camp
news sources. Hope grew weekly. But the closer the battle came to Shanghai, the
more recalcitrant the camp's Japanese commandant became. New rules and
requirements amped up the mind games until the last day of
incarceration.
After the official Japanese
surrender, the truth could no longer be denied. One morning the captors melted
away into the postwar mayhem and confusion in the city, and the Allied families
slowly realized they were free to leave their prison. They eased their way back
into the streets of Shanghai and rejoiced.
And yet, the former captives
soon realized that they couldn't simply take up where they left off before the
war. Their property was now in other hands. The Communists were on the horizon.
Shifren's parents, like many other camp survivors, came to understand that they
had to start over again … but not in Shanghai.
In the last two sections of
this memoir, Homecoming and Hong Kong, Shifren relates how her
family slowly let go of their friends and the Jewish community in Shanghai, and
moved to Hong Kong. But as mainland China steadily morphed into a repressive
Communist society, the family decided to break with their ancestral home. They
boarded a plane to Israel. Émigrés once again.
I asked the author what had
inspired her memoir. She replied:
"I wrote the book because I
felt I had to tell the little-known story of the history of the multi-ethnic
groups living in Shanghai, "The Paris of the East," and the brutal Japanese
occupation of the Far East during WWII. Of great importance was letting the
world know about the internment of all Allied civilians, and the resultant
losses of material wealth, optimum health, and dislocation that we
endured."
With
the completion and publication of this intimate memoir, Ester Benjamin Shifren
has given the reader a valuable eyewitness account of a little-known historical
event. Her story is especially valuable for those who study and seek to preserve
Chinese, Indian, Japanese and Eastern Jewish history.
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