Gradowski was not poetic; he was prophetic. He did not gaze into this inferno and ask why. He knew. Aware of both the long recurring arc of destruction in Jewish history, and of the universal fact of cruelty’s origins in feelings of worthlessness, he writes: “This fire was ignited long ago by the barbarians and murderers of the world, who had hoped to drive darkness from their brutal lives with its light.”

  One can only hope that we have the courage to hear this truth without hiding, to face the fire and to begin again.

  Chapter 2

  FROZEN JEWS

  ONE OF MY STRANGE AND VIVID MEMORIES FROM MY first trip to Israel, when I was nine years old, is of a brief cartoon I watched at the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv. The cartoon described the travels of Benjamin of Tudela, a twelfth-century Spanish Jewish merchant who documented his six-year journey traversing the known world, across the Mediterranean to Turkey, Israel, Egypt, Babylonia, and Persia, and reporting on India and China, staying with Jewish communities in each place and sharing crowded boats and wagons in between. The Diaspora Museum has since been revamped and rebranded as the Museum of the Jewish People, but in 1986 it was a dark and openly depressing place, its dour displays about Jewish communities around the world all leading to a “Scrolls of Fire” atrium describing how the hapless Jews in these communities were either expelled or burned alive.

  But the cartoon was bright and curious. Benjamin was a ridiculous bowling-pin figure with googly eyes, bobbing across the screen and cheerfully reporting on thriving Jewish communities around the world—the Jews in France who inexplicably lived in a castle, the Jews in Babylonia who had their own googly-eyed king, the Jews in Yemen who joined local Arab armies and stampeded with them in a cloud of dust, the Jews in Syria who pacified wiggly-eyebrowed assassins by offering free silk scarves. For reasons I could not articulate at the age of nine, I was utterly enchanted.

  I feel that same enchantment now when I am seduced by the travel industry’s branding of the world as an amazing place full of welcoming people who, beneath it all, are actually the same. In reality, the more time I have spent in any of the fifty-plus countries I have visited as a tourist, the more I notice the differences between myself and the inhabitants, and the more alienated, uncomfortable, and anxious I become. Yet colorful photos of exotic places on TripAdvisor lure me every time.

  So I was eager to make my way to a city called Harbin in a remote province of northeastern China, south of Siberia and north of North Korea, where the temperature hovers around minus 35 Celsius for much of the year, and where every winter, over ten thousand workers construct an entire massive city out of blocks of ice. The Harbin Ice Festival dwarfs similar displays in Canada and Japan by orders of magnitude, its enormous ice buildings laced through with LED lighting and sometimes replicating famous monuments at or near life-size. It attracts over 2 million visitors a year; it needs to be seen to be believed. As I considered a trip to Harbin, my mindless travel-industry scrolling took me to a list of other local tourist attractions, including synagogues.

  Yes, synagogues. Plural. And then I discovered something deeply strange: the city of Harbin was built by Jews.

  Jews have lived in China for more than a thousand years, which is as long as they have lived in Poland. But the story of the Jews of Harbin, and of Harbin itself, begins with the railroad—because before the railroad, Harbin did not exist.

  Like most Chinese cities you’ve never heard of, Harbin today is larger than New York, with a population around 16 million. But as late as 1896, there was only a cluster of small fishing villages around a bend in a river. That year Russia received a concession from China to build part of the Trans-Siberian Railroad through Manchuria—the traditional name for the vast, frigid, and, at that time, barely populated region of northeastern China. Building this route would shave precious time off the trip from Moscow to Vladivostok. The route would also include a branch line deeper into China, requiring a large administrative center at the junction—essentially, a town. Mikhail Gruliov, a Jew who had converted to Russian Orthodoxy in order to become a general in the Russian Army, selected the site that became Harbin.

  With an enormous investment to protect, railroad officials quickly realized that they could not depend on local warlords or Siberian peasants to create this not-yet-existent town. They needed experienced Russian-speaking entrepreneurs. But who would ever want to move to Manchuria? The Russian minister of finance, Sergei Yulyevich Witte, hit on a genius idea: the Jews.

  Russia’s crippling antisemitic laws and violent pogroms were already driving hundreds of thousands of Jews to America, including my own ancestors. Witte argued to the regime in St. Petersburg that to get capital and talent to Manchuria, one only had to tell the Jews that they could live free of antisemitic restrictions—without learning a new language or becoming bottom-feeders in New York’s sweatshops—if they moved there.

  The regime reluctantly agreed. So did hundreds, and then thousands, of Russian Jews.

  The first Jews arrived in 1898 and incorporated an official community in 1903; in only five years, the plan was working splendidly. A 1904 National Geographic article written by a U.S. consul to Manchuria reported, wide-eyed, that “one of the greatest achievements in city construction that the world has ever witnessed is now going on in the heart of Manchuria,” and that “the capital for most of the private enterprises is furnished by Siberian Jews.” These Jewish entrepreneurs created Harbin’s first hotels, banks, pharmacies, insurance companies, department stores, publishing houses, and more. By 1909, twelve of the forty members of Harbin’s city council were Jewish. These initial entrepreneurs were later joined by new Jewish veterans of the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War, then by Jewish refugees fleeing the 1905 Russian pogroms, then by even more refugees fleeing World War I and the Russian Civil War.

  At its peak, Harbin’s Jewish community numbered around twenty thousand. The “Old” Synagogue was built in 1909, and by 1921 there was enough demand for a “New” Synagogue a few blocks away, as well as a kosher slaughterer, ritual bath, and matzah bakery, not to mention a Jewish elementary and secondary school, a hospital, a charity kitchen, a free loan association, an old-age home, multiple magazines and newspapers, performances of Jewish music and theater, and Zionist clubs that were the center of many young people’s lives—featuring not only competitive athletics (these clubs owned their own sports facilities and even yachts) but also rigorous study of Hebrew language and Zionist ideas. Harbin hosted major international Zionist conferences that drew Jews from all over Asia. Zionist parades were held in the streets.

  You already know this story has to end badly. Like almost every place Jews have ever lived, Harbin was great for the Jews until it wasn’t—but in Harbin, the usual centuries-long rise-and-fall was condensed into approximately thirty years. The flood of refugees from the 1917 Russian Revolution included many non-Jewish “White” Russians (anti-Communist royalists), whose virulent antisemitism was soon institutionalized in a Fascist party within Harbin’s government, and who burned the Old Synagogue in 1931. That was also the year the Japanese occupied Manchuria, noticed rich Jews there, and decided they wanted their money. Conveniently, White Russian thugs were ready to help.

  The Japanese gendarmerie embarked on a partnership with White Russian criminals, targeting Jewish business owners and their families for extortion, confiscation, kidnapping, and murder. Later they manipulated the Jewish community for political purposes, sending Abraham Kaufman, a respected physician and the community’s elected leader, off to two separate audiences with the Japanese emperor, and forcing him to publish official statements from Harbin’s Jewish community announcing their love for Nazi-allied Japan. When the Soviets took over in 1945, they rounded up the city’s remaining Jewish leaders, including Dr. Kaufman, and sent them to gulags. Dr. Kaufman endured eleven years in a gulag and then five years in exile in Kazakhstan before he was allowed to join his family in Israel. He was the luckiest; no one else survived. Then again, dying in a gulag was less dramatic than the fate of some Jews under the Japanese. While retreating from the Manchurian town of Hailar, the Japanese military beheaded its Jewish residents.

  By 1949, Chinese Maoists controlled Harbin. The thousand-plus Jews still in town were gradually stripped of their businesses and livelihoods, while Israel’s government made secret contact with Harbin’s remaining Jews and began arranging for them to leave—a process that mostly involved submitting to extortion. As Walter Citrin, an Israeli official responsible for facilitating Jewish emigration from Communist China, explained, “It is obvious that the Communist government is keen to clear the country of the foreign element. However . . . the authorities make things very difficult as long as the person who wants to leave is still in funds, and let the person go only after making quite sure that his personal funds are exhausted.” The last Jewish family left town in 1962. After that, only one Jew remained in the city, a woman named Hannah Agre, who refused to leave. Leaning into the crazy-old-lady motif, she moved into a tiny room in the Old Synagogue (by then the building, its interior subdivided, was being used as government office space) and died there in 1985, the official Last Jew of Harbin.

  She wasn’t quite the last, though. Today there is one Jew in Harbin, an Israeli in his seventies named Dan Ben-Canaan. Ben-Canaan was covering the Far East for Israeli news media when he was invited to teach at a local university, and he settled permanently in Harbin in 2002. Ben-Canaan is a busy man, not only because of his university responsibilities and his work editing local English-language news programs, but because his enormous research into Harbin’s Jewish past has made him indispensable to the local government as they restore Jewish sites—so he is also basically employed as the semiofficial One Jew of Harbin.

  Ben-Canaan spends enough of his time being the One Jew of Harbin that when I first spoke with him over Skype, he had his one-liner ready: “I’m the president of the community here, which consists of me and me alone. It’s great because I don’t have anyone to argue with.” Ben-Canaan’s interest in Harbin’s Jewish history, stemming from his days as a journalist, intensified when he learned that Harbin’s government owned the Jewish community’s official archives—and kept them under lock and key. “I tried to get them to reopen the archives, and they refused,” he told me. “I’ve been given two reasons for it. One is that it contains politically sensitive material, and the other is that they’re afraid of being sued for property restitution. There were some wealthy Jews here whose property was worth millions.” The lack of access motivated Ben-Canaan to re-create the archives himself by collecting photographs, memorabilia, and testimony from more than eight hundred former Harbin Jews and their descendants around the world. As a result, as he put it, “I’ve become an address” for Harbin’s Jewish history. When the provincial government decided—for reasons that only gradually became clear to me—to spend $30 million to restore, renovate, or reconstruct its synagogues and other Jewish buildings, they hired him.

  The One Jew of Harbin spoke with me for nearly two hours, because that was how long it took him to describe the Jewish sites whose refurbishment he had supervised. There was apparently a lot to see. When I asked if I might meet him in Harbin in January, he laughed, explaining that he spends his winters in southern China. “Winter here is not like winter in other places,” he warned me. “You can’t just walk around outside. Come in the spring or summer instead.” But I’d been lured by the city of ice. So he connected me with one of his former students who now worked as a tour guide, and I was on my way.

  There is a tourist-industry concept, popular in places largely devoid of Jews, called “Jewish Heritage Sites.” The term is a truly ingenious piece of marketing. “Jewish Heritage” is a phrase that sounds utterly benign, or to Jews, perhaps ever so slightly dutiful, suggesting a place that you surely ought to visit—after all, you came all this way, so how could you not? It is a much better name than “Property Seized from Dead or Expelled Jews.” By calling these places “Jewish Heritage Sites,” all those pesky moral concerns—about, say, why these “sites” exist to begin with—evaporate in a mist of goodwill. And not just goodwill, but goodwill aimed directly at you, the Jewish tourist. These non-Jewish citizens and their benevolent government have chosen to maintain this cemetery or renovate this synagogue or create this museum purely out of their profound respect for the Jews who once lived here (and who, for unstated reasons, no longer do)—and out of their sincere hope that you, the Jewish tourist, might someday arrive. But still, you cannot help but feel uncomfortable, and finally helpless, as you engage in the exact inverse of what Benjamin of Tudela once did: instead of traveling the world and visiting Jews, you are visiting their graves.

  Harbin was enjoying a heat wave when I arrived, a balmy ten below with a wind chill of minus eighteen. I only needed to wear a pair of thermals, a shirt, a sweater, a fleece, a parka, a balaclava, a neck warmer, a hat, gloves, three pairs of socks, and three pairs of pants to go outdoors.

  My first stop was the city’s Jewish cemetery, billed by tour companies as the largest Jewish cemetery in the Far East—except that it’s not a cemetery, since cemeteries contain dead bodies, and this one doesn’t have any. In 1958, Harbin’s local government was redesigning the city and decided that the Jewish cemetery, home to around 3,200 dead Jews, had to go. The city offered families the option of moving their dead relatives’ graves to the site of a large Chinese cemetery called Huangshan, an hour’s drive outside the city, for the price of about $50 per grave. Many Jewish families were long gone by then, so only 812 graves were moved—and, as it turned out, only the gravestones, since city authorities saw no reason to move the bodies too. The human remains from the old cemetery are now in what the Chinese call “deep burial”—that is, the space containing them has been paved over and turned into an amusement park. “It is nice for them to be there,” my tour guide—whom I’ll call Derek to keep him out of trouble—said of the dead Jews under the rides. “They are always with happy people now.”

  The drive to Huangshan took about an hour through industrial wastelands and frozen fields, culminating in a grandiose toll plaza with enormous Russian-style onion domes and then several miles more of abandoned warehouses, with a few bundled people by the roadside selling stacks of fake money to burn as offerings—because Huangshan is really a vast Chinese cemetery, filled with endless rows of identical shiny white tombstones on mini plots containing cremated remains. After driving past tens of thousands of dead Chinese people, we found the entrance to the cemetery’s Jewish section, paid our fee, and entered the gates.

  The Jewish section was compact and stately, with roughly seven hundred gravestones elaborately carved in Hebrew and Russian, along with many modern metal plaques sponsored by former Harbin Jews whose relatives’ original stones hadn’t been moved. Many of the original grave markers had ceramic inserts with photographic portraits of the deceased, which would have been intriguing if every single one hadn’t been shattered or removed. The damage was clearly deliberate, which might explain why a cemetery employee kept following us around. The idea that Jewish cemetery desecration was currently in vogue in Harbin was a tad depressing, but to my surprise, this snowy Jewish Heritage Site didn’t feel at all lonely or bereft. In fact, it was rather glam.

  Inside the gate was a plaza with a massive granite Star of David sculpture, next to a two-story-high domed synagogue building festooned with more Stars of David. The synagogue’s doors were locked, but through its windows I could see that the building was a shell, with nothing inside but some scattered tools and junk. When I asked what the building was for, Derek laughed. “They built it for Olmert’s visit,” he explained. “Now it’s just used by the cemetery workers to stay warm.” Ehud Olmert, a former Israeli prime minister who served prison time for corruption, had roots in Harbin. His father was born there, and his grandfather, or at least his grandfather’s gravestone, was in Huangshan—a gravestone that had now been outdone by a twelve-foot-high black marble obelisk. The obelisk, crowned with yet another Jewish star, was carved with greetings written in English in Olmert’s handwriting and painted in gold: “Thank you for protecting the memory of our family, and restoring dignity into [sic] the memory of those who were part of this community and [illegible] a reminder of a great Jewish life which a long time ago was part of Harbin.” The words were a dashed-off scribble, suggesting that Olmert didn’t quite expect them to be set in stone. His grandfather’s gravestone had been replaced with a black-and-gold marble one to match the obelisk, outshining the plebeians with their smashed ceramic photos. Near his grave stood a trash can designed to look like a soccer ball.

  Olmert’s visit to Harbin in 2004 as Israel’s deputy prime minister had been a big deal, but the (fake) synagogue built in his honor at the (also fake) cemetery was just one part of an enormous and expensive project on the part of the local provincial government to restore Jewish Heritage Sites. The government’s explicit goal is to attract Jewish money, in the form of both tourism and investment by foreign Jews.

  In our conversation, the One Jew of Harbin had only praise for these efforts, in which he has been deeply involved. “The restoration cost $30 million—it’s unheard-of here. Everything was of the highest quality,” Ben-Canaan told me, adding that Harbin’s Jewish Heritage Sites have the same official designation as Chinese landmarks like the Forbidden City. But one of the many sources on Harbin he shared with me was a long 2007 news article from a Chinese magazine by a journalist named Su Ling, whom he described as one of China’s rare investigative reporters. The article, titled “Harbin Jews: The Truth,” traced a very particular history: not Harbin’s Jewish Heritage, but the Heilongjiang provincial government’s attempts to capitalize on that heritage.