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Refuge and Redemption

A new graphic novel tells of the plight of Jewish refugees in Shanghai in the 1940s
by
With illustrations by Portuguese artist Jorge Miguel and text by Frenchman Philippe Thirault, Shanghai Dream portrays, in the form of a graphic novel, the flight of Jews from Nazi Germany to Shanghai, during the time of Japanese occupation, and in particular, the story of Bernhard a Jewish movie director from Berlin.
 
With Hitler’s rise to power, millions of Jews were deprived of their basic rights, locked up in ghettos and soon afterwards deported to concentration camps where so many lost their lives. However, some managed to escape shortly before the worst days of the Holocaust.
 
The geographic destinations of those who fled were various, from the United States to Portugal, passing through Palestine, Argentina or Canada. But less well known is the story of those who found refuge in the Far East, notably in Shanghai, a Chinese city occupied by the Japanese army at the time, but home to citizens of many nations. 
 
In 1938, the Jewish residents of Berlin had begun to suffer the direct consequences of Hitler’s racial delusions. The main character of the story, Bernhard, previously worked at UFA studios but had already been fired for being Jewish.  He is desperately trying to find work when he realizes that it is time to make an escape plan for himself and his family. 
 
Bernhard and his wife, Illo, board a ship in Genoa bound for China, but at the last moment, Illo decides to return to Berlin, to her father, planning to catch up with her husband later. Bernhard only realizes the change of plans when the boat has already lifted its moorings, and so he heads for Shanghai. Alone. 
 
The story is fictional, but based  on several known records. 
 
Jorge Miguel
 
“Philippe and I had collaborated before,” says Jorge Miguel. “This project was born from a script by Edward Ryan and Yang Xie, which was to be a movie. However the film was not made, and French publishing group Les Humanoïdes Associés decided to take the story. At first the story was much more dramatic, some characters died, some were tortured… We changed a lot of things from that initial script, especially to make the story more visual and not to present it too dramatically, but the backbone is still there.”
 
“This is likely to be the only book that addresses the entire journey from Europe to China of a Jewish refugee. It excited me because I had no idea about this story, and I suppose most people don’t either,” Jorge notes.
 
“At the time, Shanghai was open to refugees. It was the only port where they were still allowed to enter without a visa, and it was the last place where the refugees could escape. But life was difficult there, it was no promised land. I did a lot of research for this book and many of the interviews given by people who made this trip, fleeing to Shanghai, said that no matter how difficult their lives as Jews were, it was nothing compared to the Chinese under the Japanese occupation, which is also curious”. 
 
For this book, Jorge Miguel dedicated a lot of time to historical and visual research, gathering images and elements from Shanghai in the early 20th century, that allowed him to build the scenarios, define the characters and visually structure the plot created by Philippe Thirault. 
 
For the immense research work, they had a lot of support and a vast cinematographic inheritance left by Shanghai production companies: “We had an asset for this research, because we have a collaborator at Les Humanoïdes Associés, Edmond Li, who is Chinese, and that allowed us to access books and other materials in Chinese language. He brought us a lot of documentation from the Jewish Museum, from libraries, etc. And there is a lot of filmography about Shanghai from that time, of course, which helped.”
 
In Shanghai, the main character, Bernhard escapes Nazi persecution, but faces a daily life marked by a scarcity of resources, a partially destroyed city, and the constant presence of Japanese authorities. After securing a place to sleep and a poorly paid job, Bernhard devotes all his strength to a seemingly insane project: to turn a script written by his wife Illo – who never made it to Shanghai and was killed by the Nazis – into a film. With the presence of the cinema, the Shanghai Dream narrative summons the golden age of Shanghai film production and crosses it with Bernhard’s quest for some appeasement to his own story. 
 
“For me, graphic novels are like a movie before being filmed. In movie making, little importance is given to the people who make the storyboards, but that is an essential part of a film. Of course, in this story, the cinema has another significance, because there’s a film to be made within the story itself and that was important for its construction”.
 
Jorge Miguel was born in Amadora and published comics in Portugal, but it was in the illustration of school books and in advertising that he developed his professional career. At a certain point, his name began to appear in comic books published in France by the publisher Les Humanoïdes Associés, one of the many publishers that make up the huge French-Belgian market. 
 
“I started working on illustrations for children’s books and school books and I continued here with this work in France. Right now, I have books on sale in the United States and Canada, and translations in English, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish… and finally Portuguese.” 
 
SHANGHAI DREAM 
by Phillippe Thirault & Jorge Miguel
Edição integral
Translation – Jeremy Tiang
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