Prague, May 11 (CTK) – The Jewish Museum in Prague has prepared the third exhibition devoted to refugees and migration, called Castaways in Shanghai, showing the photos of Central European Jews made by U.S. photographer Arthur Rothstein in the town in 1946.
The exhibition in the Robert Guttmann Gallery opens later on Wednesday and will last until September 11.
Rothstein captured the living conditions of Jewish refugees living Shanghai in April 1946.
Although Rothstein’s photographic series, commissioned by the UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration), was only made seven months after the end of the war in the Pacific, it is a unique visual testimony of the rescue of about 20,000 Central European Jewish from the Holocaust.
The exhibition was prepared by curator Michaela Sidenberg and film maker Martin Smok.
The exhibition describes the experiences of Czechoslovak Jews who found a shelter alongside Jews from Austria, Germany, Poland and Hungary at the time most of the world was rejecting the refugees.
In the 1930s, Shanghai was the only place in the world that did not demand entry visas from Jews.
In the 1930s and during World War Two, it provided a save haven to about 18,000 Jews who escaped Nazi-occupied Europe. Despite difficult conditions in the town, almost all Jews from Shanghai survived the war unlike the rest of the world.
