refugees fleeing German-occupied Europe were given an area of approximately one square mile in the Hongkou District of Shanghai by the Japanese Empire, designated the Restricted Sector for Stateless Refugees, one of the poorest and most overcrowded areas of the city. Shanghai had previously had a small population of Baghdadi Jews and Russian Jews, the latter mostly having fled the Russian Empire as a result of anti-Jewish pogroms. The new Ashkenazi Jews that immigrated to Shanghai began arriving from 1933, firstly German Jews following the Nazi Party's rise to power. Despite the cultural differences they faced, and restrictions imposed by the Japanese under Nazi pressure, the Jews of Shanghai survived the war unharmed, as the Japanese refused to hand them over to the Germans. Following the end of the Second World War, many Jews who had sought refuge in Shanghai returned to Europe or decided to settle in countries with much larger Jewish populations, such as the United States and Palestine. Most of the Jews that chose to stay in Shanghai left shortly afterwards as a result of the resumption of the Chinese Civil War, and by the late 1950s very few Jews remained in Shanghai. As a result of Chinese economic growth in recent years, however, the city's Jewish population has grown to around 1,500 in 2010. This compares to a Jewish population of fewer than 100 around 20 years before. Production Wu, a former history teacher, first became interested in the history of Shanghai's Jews, obscure to both Jews and Chinese alike, in 2005. To mark the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, many newspapers and magazines in Shanghai published the stories of Jewish refugees, seeing parallels between the Jewish and Chinese peoples' oppression by the Germans and Japanese respectively. Wu had previously lived in Los Angeles, and he based the character of Mishalli on Jerry Moses, a Jewish American friend, originally from Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland). Jerry Moses obtained a safe haven in Shanghai. Moses and other Jewish friends helped Wu to learn about Jewish religious practices. Wu has stated that his main reason for making the film was to let children know about what really happened, and to promote the story and the history so that people all over the world can learn from it. The story was originally conceived for adults, but Wu decided to aim the film at children in