Evelyn Pike Rubin, Holocaust survivor who lived in Shanghai Ghetto, dies at 91

Evelyn Pike Rubin, who lived for more than 50 years in Jericho, estimated 81 members of her extended family died in the German death camps, victims of the Holocaust.

But in a little-known tale of survival, Pike Rubin spent the duration of World War II in Japanese-controlled Shanghai, China, living among as many as 23,000 Jewish refugees in a one-square-mile enclave known as the Shanghai Ghetto — a story Pike Rubin told often, both in a book about her experiences and in lectures she continued right up to her death.

"Fundamental things she was robbed of because of the Nazis," said daughter Sheryl Lerner, of Syosset. "But despite extraordinary circumstances my mother held onto her faith through all this and she made it her passion to speak about the experience, to let people know there was another story out there — and, like what she did with everything she did, she always turned it to the good."

Born July 30, 1930, in Breslau, Germany, now Wroclaw, Poland, Pike Rubin died April 15. She was 91.

Escape to Shanghai

In November 1938, Pike Rubin’s father, Benno Popielarz, was arrested and sent off to Buchenwald during Kristellknacht, otherwise known as the Night of Broken Glass, when Nazi paramilitary and their incited mobs set synagogues ablaze, killed Jews in the streets, ransacked Jewish businesses and vandalized Jewish homes, schools, cemeteries and hospitals.

During countless lectures, Pike Rubin recalled how her father was released from prison after three weeks, but the family was given two months to leave Germany. Her mother Ricca, having failed to land them asylum in Cuba, Brazil, France, the U.S. and British-controlled Palestine, used her abilities as a businesswoman to find rail transit to Naples, Italy, where the three booked passage on the cruise ship Hakusaki Maru, bound for Japanese-controlled Shanghai.

Following the 8,000-mile trek, Pike Rubin and her parents first lived in the French quarter, a middle-class area with homes and tree-lined streets.

Her father, who had started a typewriter repair business, died in 1941. And with Japan aligned with the Axis powers, Nazi Germany began to pressure Japanese troops to exterminate Jews in Shanghai.

The Japanese instead rounded up Jewish families and sent them to the "Restricted Sector for Stateless Refugees," an impossibly small area in the Hongkou district around the Ohel Moshe Synagogue later called simply the Shanghai Ghetto. In her book and lectures, Pike Rubin explained it was the definition of slum: disease-ridden, rat-infested, and flooded by sewage. The Japanese sealed off the area with barbed wire, though children were allowed passage to and from school via trolley cars. Cholera was rampant, as was smallpox, typhoid, lice and vermin.

Home was the boiler room in a tenement. There was no bathroom, and a communal kitchen.

There was also intermittent war-time action: bombings, aerial conflicts. Pike Rubin’s granddaughter, Jocelyn Wood of Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, said her grandmother would go to the tenement rooftops with friends "and bet which plane would get shot down first."

All the time, Pike Rubin's mother did what she could to earn money — running a sewing machine repair business, selling nylon stockings on the black market. Food was scarce. Pike Rubin and her friends would often chase trucks and slice open bags of rice, noodles and other grain, picking individual grains and noodles out of the dirt to eat later. She got hepatitis.

After the war, in 1947, Pike Rubin and her mother traveled on a U.S. transport to San Francisco, first staying with a distant relative in New Jersey before settling in Forest Hills.

She learned English, had four children and settled in Jericho. Mostly self-taught, Pike Rubin also spoke French and Hebrew, though not much Chinese. She later visited Shanghai twice, the last time in 2006.

"She could have been bitter," Lerner said. "My grandmother didn't talk about it and vowed never to speak a word of German ever again. But my mother? The little acts of kindness was how my mother conducted herself. She spoke to Jewish groups, she spoke to non-Jewish groups, she spoke at schools, at Chinese organizations, at Japanese organizations, all to share her story, because it was a story she felt was important.”

Pike Rubin’s self-published book, "Ghetto Shanghai," was sold at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and copies can still be found on Amazon.

Pike Rubin played tennis until age 85, briefly took up pickleball, and made her final lecture appearance in March, speaking to eighth-grade girls at Bnos Malka Academy in Flushing, Queens.

Burial was April 19 at Montefiore Cemetery in West Babylon. She is survived by her children, Marilyn Pike of Wantagh, Sheldon Pike of Manhattan, Doreen and husband Steven Guzik of Plainview, and Sheryl and husband Paul Lerner, as well as by 12 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren and two stepchildren from her second marriage.

Family was important to Pike Rubin, who gathered her loved ones together regularly. She hosted all the Jewish holidays, especially her favorite, Passover.

"Her favorite saying when she was surrounded by family was, 'I'm an only (child) and I made all of this,'" Wood said.

By John Valenti

john.valenti@newsday.com

John Valenti, a reporter at Newsday since 1981, has been honored nationally by the Associated Press and Society of the Silurians for investigative, enterprise and breaking news reporting, as well as column writing, and is the author of “Swee'pea,” a book about former New York playground basketball star Lloyd Daniels. Valenti is featured in the Emmy Award-winning ESPN 30-for-30 film “Big Shot.”