In 1937, when Japan invaded China, the German consul in Shanghai evacuated German citizens to the Philippine capital of Manila. Curiously, among the evacuees aboard the ship sailing under the swastika flag were around 30 Jewish families. To support their arrival, the small yet influential local Jewish community established the Jewish Refugee Committee. A year later, the community convinced President Manuel Quezon and US High Commissioner Paul McNutt to establish a visa programme to help rescue more persecuted Jews from Europe. Until the Japanese invasion in late 1941, around 1,300 Jewish Holocaust refugees arrived in Manila, creating a culturally and religiously diverse, flourishing diaspora. 

While the exile experience was just as varied, several defining factors shaped the refugees’ lives: cultural and climatic shocks, colonial hierarchies, and the upheaval of the Japanese occupation and Pacific War. Drawing on written and oral testimonies, artistic expressions, and community sources, this paper explores the refugees’ adaptation processes, the construction and negotiation of whiteness in a semi-colonial space, and their experience of terror and trauma under occupation and war. By focusing on refugees' emotional lives and narratives, Lena Christoph foregrounds their resilience, transformation, and their creation of meaning within an ever-changing environment and set of circumstances.

Lena Christoph is a doctoral researcher at the Department of Contemporary History, University of Vienna, working within the project “GLORE: Global Resettlement Regimes,” funded by the European Research Council (ERC). Lena was a 2024 fellow at the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C., and a 2025 research fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In 2025, she was an affiliated researcher at the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation, Monash University, and she is currently a guest researcher at the University of Melbourne’s McMullin Centre on Statelessness.

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