Odd snippets of history: the Shanghai ghetto

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_ghetto

If you're like me, oftentimes you'll find yourself just meandering around sites like Wikipedia for hours -- one article links you to another, which in turn links you to still another, and so on. Well, one of the articles in today's Did you know... section talks about the ghetto in Shanghai where some 20,000 German and Austrian jews escaped the holocaust, and lived until the founding of the state of Israel. It's just one of those odd things -- despite atrocities committed by the Japanese military (and to a lesser extent scientific and political bodies, probably largely as a byproduct of the military's all-encompassing influence) upon the Chinese, Koreans, and others, the port of Shanghai remained the only destination open to jews fleeing Europe (even America had locked down its avenues of entry) and Japan actively denied Nazi demands for the return of the refugees. How many of you have read about the "Japanese Schindler"?

Interesting stuff.