The first German Jewish refugees — twenty-six families , among them five well-known physicians — had already arrived in Shanghai by November 1933 . By the spring of 1934 , there were reportedly eighty refugee physicians , surgeons , and dentists in China . On August 15 , 1938 , the first Jewish refugees from Anschluss Austria arrived by Italian ship . Most of the refugees arrived after Kristallnacht . During the refugee flight to Shanghai between November 1938 and June 1941 , the total number of arrivals by sea and land has been estimated at 1,374 in 1938 ; 12,089 in 1939 ; 1,988 in 1940 ; and 4,000 in 1941 . In 1939-1940 , Lloyd Triestino ran a sort of " ferry service " between Italy and Shanghai , bringing in thousands of refugees a month - Germans , Austrians , a few Czechs . Added to this mix were approximately 1,000 Polish Jews in 1941 . Among these , all the faculty of the Mir Yeshiva , some 400 in number , who with the outbreak of World War II in 1939 , fled from Mir to Vilna and then to Keidan , Lithuania . In late 1940 , they obtained visas from Chiune Sugihara , the Japanese consul in Kaunas , to travel from Keidan , then Lithuanian SSR , via Siberia and Vladivostok to Kobe , Japan . By November 1941 the Japanese moved this group and most of others on to the Shanghai Ghetto in order to consolidate the Jews under their control . Finally , a wave of more than 18,000 Ashkenazi Jews from Germany , Austria , and Poland immigrated to Shanghai until the Attack on Pearl Harbor by Japan in December 1941
Kristallnacht
Kristallnacht
Shanghai Ghetto