She avoided the benches with the sign: No dogs or Jews allowed. She couldn’t attend public schools. And the Nazis and their growling German shepherds raided her family’s house, throwing their books into a fire.
As a child, “we were very aware,” said Hershfield, now 84. Jews weren’t welcome in their own home.
Growing increasingly fearful, her parents and her older brother left their hometown of Breslau, Germany, in 1938 and journeyed to an unlikely new home — the Philippines.
About 1,200 European Jews fled to the Philippines from 1937 to 1941, escaping the throes of the Nazis only to face another bloody war under Japanese occupation.
Many of the Jews came from Austria and Germany, as the anti-Semitic policies including the Nuremberg race laws intensified. Unable to immigrate to countries like the United Kingdom and the United States, thousands of Jews escaped to places like Shanghai in China, Sousa in the Dominican Republic and Manila.
Those who arrived in Manila didn’t realize that they had escaped the Holocaust only to be caught in the war in the Eastern front, where the Philippines came under attack.
“We were going from the frying pan to the fire,” Hershfield said. “We went from Nazi persecutors to the Japanese.”
The Philippines capital was liberated after a grueling, month-long campaign in the Battle of Manila, one of the bloodiest battles of World War II, which now marks its 70th anniversary.
From persecution to a welcome
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Despite the trauma of facing both fronts of the war, Hershfield remains grateful.
“We would not be alive today if not for the Philippines. We would’ve been destroyed in the crematorium.”
Refuge remembered
In 2009, a monument honoring the Philippines was erected at the Holocaust Memorial Park in the Israeli city of Rishon Lezion. The monument, shaped like three open doors, thanks the Filipino people and its president for taking in Jewish refugees during the Holocaust.
Many of the descendants of the Jewish refugees who fled to the Philippines have not forgotten their family’s place of refuge.
When Typhoon Haiyan struck the Philippines in November 2013, the disaster brought in relief workers from the American Jewish Distribution Committee.
Danny Pin, who is related to Hershfield and is the son of a Jewish refugee to the Philippines, headed its assessment team.
“For me it was like coming full circle and I couldn’t help but think of what it must have been like when my grandparents and mother arrived 76 years ago,” he said. “My going to the Philippines after Typhoon Haiyan was very special. I was repaying a debt to the country that saved my family.”
