Jewish Refugees in Shanghai Woodcut

David Ludwig Bloch

1943–1945

During World War II, as most nations barred Jewish refugees, Shanghai became a rare haven due to its divided international administration by British, American, French, and Japanese authorities. Between 1937 and 1941, about twenty thousand Jews found refuge there, including David Ludwig Bloch, a German lithographer and Dachau survivor. After Japan took full control of the Chinese city in 1943, authorities forced stateless Jews into the Hongkew ghetto, where harsh conditions, disease, and abuse claimed many lives. Bloch’s woodcut of presenting his pass to a guard captured the daily struggle for dignity and survival.

Woodcut print with a collage of black images and lettering, largely in English, with two figures at the center and a large pendant on a safety pin with a Chinese character.

Credits

David Ludwig Bloch, “Shanghai Ghetto,” 1943–1945. Woodcut: ink on rice paper, 5.5 x 9.1 in. Courtesy of Leo Baeck Institute.

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Creator Bio

David Ludwig Bloch

1910–2002

David Bloch was a German-born Jewish artist, made deaf as a child by meningitis. He was born in Floss, Bavaria, and later moved to Munich. He studied commercial art at various schools for the deaf and became a porcelain decorator, until he was fired from his job and later expelled from the State Academy of Applied Arts in Munich, in both cases for being Jewish. Arrested during Kristallnacht and detained at Dachau, he escaped Nazi persecution, ultimately finding refuge among fellow European Jews in Shanghai. There, Bloch created evocative watercolors and woodcuts, documenting city life and the refugee experience. He later married Lilly Cheng Disiu, also deaf, before immigrating to the United States in 1949. In Mount Vernon, NY, Bloch worked for decades as a commercial lithographer. After he retired and visited Germany, including Dachau, in 1976, he focused his art on Holocaust themes.