It is one of the more obscure tales of valor in Jewish history: China's role in protecting over 13,732 Jews who fled Europe to escape Nazi persecution and certain death during World War II.

This week, officials at the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum 37-meter-long, 2.5-meter-high copper wall embossed with the life-sized figures of six Jewish refugees and engraved with all the people known to have taken shelter in the city.

Like Us on Facebook

Each figure represents one of the six million Jews who died during the Holocaust, said He Ning, the American-Chinese designer of the memorial.

When Nazi persecution of Jews officially began in 1933, China was one of the few nations in the world where a visa was not necessary to enter, and Jews left for the Middle Kingdom by the score once the news got out. When Shanghai came under Japanese domination in 1937, controls were loosened further, requiring neither visa nor passport. However distant, Shanghai became an attractive haven. More over, as China's most international city, there was already a Jewish community living there.

Although allies, Japan often reacted with puzzlement over Nazi Germany's genocidal regard for Jews; Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul in Lithuania, arranged for over 2000 Jews to escape across Russia to safe harbor in Japan. Although they herded Jews into a ghetto, Japanese officials in Shanghai did not restrict their movements, and refused to hand over them over to Hitler, despite German demands.

China, too, actively funneled European Jews out of harms way. Austrian consul-general Ho Feng Shan, acting on orders from the Chinese ambassador in Berlin, Chen Jie, granted transit visas to thousands more Jews to fell the continent.

At the monument's unveils, Ning said he got the idea for a name wall in 2002, when he and Chen Jian, who is now the curator of the museum, heard that a planned meeting of Shanghai Jewish refugees in San Francisco had to be canceled as most of them had died.

"I was very sad," he said. "It seemed wrong that history was dying out with the people."

Most Chinese had forgotten the story as well until the museum opened in 2007 on the site of Shanghai's old Ohel Moshe Synagogue, now in the Tilanqiao area of the city. Many refer to the list of refugees on the memorial as "Shanghai's List," a nod to the famous list of Jews to be saved drawn up by German industrialist Oskar Schindler.

The names were collected by the museum with help from surviving refugees and the Israeli consulate in Shanghai. Most of the refugees hailed from Germany, Austria, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Lithuania, and almost all left Shanghai for Israel after its incorporation in 1948.

TagsShanghai Ghetto, Jews, Jewish, holocaust, Chinese Jews