Tag Archives: shanghai

A murder in my family

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In 1949, a year after my father, Basil Yamey married my mother, one of his cousins arrived in South Africa from Europe. Hendrik (aka: ‘Henry’, ‘Hendrik’ and ‘Heinrich’) Jami set foot on South African soil after an arduous trip. Tragically, his life ended suddenly and by foul means in South Africa.

Hendrik was a son of Moses and Dora (née Peisel) Jami. The Peisel family owned a brewery in Budapest. Moses was a brother of Basil Yamey’s father Solomon Yamey. Hendrik was born in Plunge in Lithuania in 1895, soon after his uncle Solomon had migrated from Plunge to South Africa. His brother Kurt (1901-1984) migrated to Rhode Island in the USA, and another two brothers, Isidore (1903-1946) and Max (1905-1990), followed their uncle Solomon to South Africa between the two World Wars. Records in the National Archives of South Africa suggest that Hendrik was planning to go to South Africa to join his brothers there in 1939. However, it took him 10 years to reach the country.

Hendrik, who had been living in Budapest for several years, must have perceived, as did many other Jewish people, that the Nazis in Germany were beginning to make life very uncomfortable for Jews. Even after the Second World War broke out in 1939, Hungary – an ally of Germany – was not occupied by the German troops; this only happened in 1944.

From late 1938 onwards, Hungary invaded territory beyond its eastern and south-eastern borders. This increased the length of its frontier with the Soviet Union.  Hungary declared war on the Soviet Union in June 1941. I assume that it must have been sometime before that date when Hendrik began his journey eastwards towards Shanghai. This city in China was just about the only place where there was no administrative difficulty for Jews to gain entry. According to Sally Ogle Davis writing in an article[i] published by the on-line Jewish Journal in 2002:

“It wasn’t that the Chinese deliberately set out to help the Jews of Europe, it was simply that among the warring colonial factions who ran Shanghai — the French, the British, the Japanese — no one wanted to control the passport department because no one wanted to take ultimate responsibility for the chaotic province. And in chaos lay an escape route for the Jews.”

Many of the Jews who fled to Shanghai travelled by boat via the Suez Canal. Others, including Hendrik, travelled by train across Stalin’s Soviet Union to China. Shanghai, their destination, had an established Jewish community. This was founded by wealthy Baghdadi Jews, including members of the Sassoon and Kadoorie families, in the 1870s.

Shanghai was occupied by the Japanese in 1937[ii]. It was then that the port allowed entry without passport or visa, making it a place that Jewish refugees could gain access freely if they could travel so far from Europe. By the time that Hendrik reached the city, there were already many Jewish refugees there, and conditions were becoming crowded. By 1943 there were at least 18,000 Jews sheltering in Shanghai. It was then that the Japanese forced them all to live in a small ghetto, a three-quarter square mile area of Shanghai’s Hongkou district. Conditions were cramped and difficult to say the least, but the Jews, most of whom might have already perished had they remained in Europe, were safe for the time being.

The Shanghai Ghetto was liberated in September 1945, and by 1949 most of its Jewish inhabitants had moved away from China. Hendrik Jami was amongst these. When he arrived in Cape Town in 1949, he was met by one of his brothers, Max Jami (who was to change his surname to that of his uncle Solomon: i.e. ‘Yamey’). Max took him to his home in Wolsely, which is just under 90 miles north-west of Cape Town and 10 miles south of Tulbagh where Solomon Yamey used to live. Hendrik lived with Max and his family for a few weeks while he acclimatised to his new surroundings and a new way of life.

Eventually, Hendrik moved to the town of Worcester, which is about 26 miles south-east of Wolsely. In time, he bought the Afrikaanse Koffiehuis in the centre of this small town in the High Street near where it is intersected by Porter Street; the establishment still exists. The Koffiehuis was both a café and a general store. Hendrik’s nephew, Max’s son Mervyn, remembers visiting his uncle once a week on Sundays. He recalls that Hendrik was a very friendly man who got along well with everyone. He was very generous, always plying his nephews with gifts of confectionery. Mervyn told me that his uncle’s generosity extended well beyond his family. Once, for example, he donated a huge sum of money, £1000, to the Dutch Reformed Church in Worcester. Mervyn also remembers that Hendrik did not believe or trust in banks, and kept much money in his living quarters which were situated behind the shop and separated from it by an almost enclosed yard. Another source of information, the Cape Argus newspaper, said that Hendrik was often seen around the town with his bulging wallet stuffed full of banknotes.

In early 1956, Hendrik sold his business to a Mr Athanassiou. He continued to work in the shop as its manager, and lived as before in his quarters behind the shop. Shortly before midnight on the warm summer night of the 10th of January 1957, Hendrik Jami, the manager of the Afrikaanse Koffiehuis, was seen taking a leisurely stroll along Porter Street in the small town of Worcester in the Western Cape Province of South Africa. Next morning, Mrs Rena Erasmus, who worked as an assistant at the Koffiehuis, arrived at half-past seven to find that her workplace was still closed. Usually, it was open by then. She knew that Mr Jami always opened the shop promptly at five thirty in the morning. He was always telling her so.

Alarmed, she telephoned the café’s owner, Mr Athanassiou, from a public ‘phone box, and told him about the unusual state of affairs. He told her to look at Mr Jami’s rooms behind the café. What she found there was very unpleasant. Mr Jami was lying fully dressed on the floor of his kitchen. His hands were tied behind his back with a handkerchief, and there were bruises on his throat. A cloud of flies hovered above him, buzzing. He was dead. His murdered body was described in gory detail in the Cape Argus. It made front page news on several consecutive days. After some days, two different rewards were publicly offered for any information that lead to the arrest and conviction of Hendrik’s murderer(s). Both Mr Athanassiou and Hendrik’s brother Max offered rewards of £100 (worth well over £1000 today).

The crime was not resolved immediately. Eventually, the murderer and his accomplice were discovered and arrested. Hendrik’s nephew Nat Yamey told me that they were both sentenced to death in the Circuit Supreme Court in Worcester.  In those days the death penalty was by hanging, and he remembers that his father told him that they were both hanged in Pretoria Central Prison.  

[i] http://www.jewishjournal.com/arts/article/europes_harms_to_chinas_arms_20021004, accessed March 2015.

[ii] A friend of mine, the late Sir Henry Norman Brain (1907–2002), was a British diplomat in Shanghai when it fell to the Japanese. He remembered that the seemingly unending fighting stopped suddenly. Soon after this, he asked a Japanese general what had made the Chinese surrender so suddenly. He was told the Chinese soldiers, who were all mercenaries, had accepted a bribe from the Japanese to do so.

Confined in Japanese occupied Manchuria

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PARTICLES OF SNOW, whisked by the breeze, were whizzing about in the air in random directions and eventually reaching the ground this early February afternoon in London. I had just finished my midday meal with some nutritious fermented cabbage and was wondering what to write. Maybe, it was the kimchi that helped me remember an old friend who spent some of his working life in Manchuria, which is close to Korea, the home of this weirdly delicious fermented food substance, or was it something else that has brought him to mind?

Sir Norman had already retired from Britain’s diplomatic service when I first met him in the mid-1970s. An accomplished musician, a string player, he used to perform in concerts given by a fine amateur orchestra based west of London, whose treasurer was both a player in it and a friend of mine. Usually, after concerts, my friend and her husband hosted a coffee party at their home for the conductor and selected patrons of the orchestra. Sir Norman was a patron, and it was at these parties that I first got to know him. The few tales that he related about his years as a diplomat fascinated me.

On graduating from university, Sir Norman had a good command of several modern European languages as well as Latin and Greek. He told me that it was typical of the diplomatic service that they decided that his first posting was to Japan, where he was to have a role in the interpreting of a language he did not know: Japanese. Being a good linguist, he was able to learn it.

During the late 1930s, he was sent to Shanghai in China for a year (1937-38). When he arrived, a war between China and Japan was in progress. He told me that every afternoon, he would sit taking tea on the roof of a building in the European cantonment of the Chinese city. As he sat there, he could see shells shooting overhead. They were being fired at the Chinese on one side of the Yangtse River by the Japanese artillery on the other side. This went on day after day for several months. Then one day, the shelling stopped suddenly and for good. Sir Norman wondered why.

Soon after the shelling ceased, he met some senior officers of the victorious Japanese forces. He asked them why the fighting that had been dragging on for so long had ended so abruptly. The officers explained that the Chinese soldiers were mostly mercenaries. Once the Japanese had ascertained how much to pay them to stop fighting, they stopped.

Later, Sir Norman was transferred to Manchuria, where he was the Acting Consul General in Dairen (now ‘Dalian’).  He was serving there when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour. After that incident, the Japanese authorities in the city of Dairen ordered him not to leave the consulate building, in which he lived. They cut off his telephone and forbade him to use his wireless to listen to radio broadcasts. Frequently, Japanese officers used to visit his premises to check that the radio was inactivated. Sir Norman, who told me that he had never been much of a technological wizard, told me more about the radio. He said that he had unscrewed a wire in the radio, which rendered it inoperable, and left it disconnected whenever he did not want to use the apparatus. With a smile on his kindly face, he explained to me that whenever he wanted to listen to a news broadcast, it was a simple matter to reattach the wire. During the time that he was being held under house-arrest, none of the Japanese officials who had visited to check on him had ever bothered to examine the radio properly.

In about 1942, the Japanese transported Sir Norman to Tokyo and eventually he was transferred into Allied hands. He said that at no time was he treated badly by the Japanese. In fact, he was looked after by them very well.

The last time I saw Sir Norman was not long before he died. We went to visit him at his home, whose lovely garden ran down to the bank of the River Thames.  He was in good spirits, recovering from a hip replacement. He told my wife and me that both of his hips had prosthetic joints and that every few years they required replacing.

“It’s like changing a car’s tyres, you know,” he explained cheerfully, “except that it lays you up for a few weeks each time.”

Although I did not meet Sir Norman as nearly as often as I would have liked, I feel privileged to have been able to hear about historical events from someone who experienced them first-hand.

Sir Norman died in 2002. Sitting at home today in early February 2021, watching whisps of snow swirling in the air, whipped up by a strong cold wind, had brought him to mind. I am not sure that it was because of the kimchi I had just eaten that made me think of him. I wondered if I had recalled him because just as he was confined in Manchuria, we are also being confined, or at least being restricted in our freedom to move around. Unlike him, we have plenty of access to communications from the outside world, much of which arrives in ways that Sir Norman did not live long enough to experience. However, like him, we are currently limited in our movements. We can leave home, which Sir Norman could not, but we cannot travel as far from it as we had become accustomed to doing before the onset of the covid19 pandemic. Sir Norman used to sit out the several weeks of recovery from his hip surgeries patiently. I suppose that we must also wait patiently, but for far, far longer.