Settling on the shore of the Sungari. A Hungarian Jewish clockmaker in Sino-Russian Harbin

Ferenc Schön was a clockmaker and run a jewelry store on the Kitaiskaia Street (Китайская улица) – the pumping artery of Harbin’s commerce and business. Between the 1920s and 1940s he lived just next door to the New Synagogue on Jingwei jie (经纬街), where he visited the weekly service. His wife, Elisabeta and their daughter, Rahil were both native Harbiners/Harbintsi (Харбинцы)*, while Schön himself was born far away, the Russian Empire stretching in between his hometown and his residence for most of his life in Manchuria. Probably none of them imagined that one day they will move from the frigid Chinese Northeast to the sun-scorched land of Israel. In this post, I will sketch up the life of an ex-Austro-Hungarian prisoner of war of Hungarian nationality and of Jewish confession living in the Russo-Chinese town of Harbin, that for the most part of the period was occupied by Japanese forces. The aim here is to give an idea of the kind of people my research is dealing with.

Ferenc Schön’s letterhead advertising his Kitaiskaia store in Harbin, China, written in German and Hungarian languages (MNL)

Born in Déva (today Deva, Romania), a Transylvanian town in the Kingdom of Hungary at the end of the 19^th century, Schön was later enlisted and sent to the Eastern Front to fight the Tsar’s soldiers for his emperor-king Francis Joseph. At some point during the bloody conflicts of the Great War, he was captured and transported to Siberia to a Russian prisoner of war camp. When the World War ended for Russia and a new one broke out following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Schön and many of his comrades sitting in their barracks found themselves in the chaos of a civil war and foreign intervention. He didn’t follow the hundreds of captive soldiers who took the treacherous trek to escape from the camps and venture to the other side of the Amur river. Schön instead crossed the Heilongjiang (黑龙江, as the same body of water is called on the Chinese side) when the camps were liberated by the forces of the Allied Intervention. Although the international alliance eventually failed in its purpose to defeat the Bolshevik forces but Schön managed to reach the capital city of ex-Russian Manchuria, and decided to settle in the international hub of the Chinese Eastern Railway (CER).

1) Northeast China (red); 2) the line and area of the CER; 3) map of Harbin in 1933: orange – Pristan; yellow – Fujiadian/Daowai districts 1)-2) Wikipedia, 3) special thanks to Jerzy Czajewski)

When anti-foreign sentiments rose following the successful, if temporary unification of Manchurian lands and China proper under the leadership of Nanjing in the late 1920s, Schön’s store on the “China Street” suffered from occasional burglaries and stones were thrown to break its windows. Later, when the Guomindang government applied stricter policies regarding foreigners with identification documents regarded to be insufficient or improper, he and his ex-Austro-Hungarian prisoner of war fellows and their families were treated little different than the stateless Russian refugees of the revolution. New taxes were introduced by the municipality that burdened the young enterprise. Trying everything to protect his business and his family, Schön was regularly writing to the Dutch minister in Beijing, who was in charge of the interest of Hungarian citizens in China, reporting on his situation and asking for advice what to do. At some point he even asked for permission to put the flag of The Netherlands on his storefront next to the Hungarian tricolor, in order to fend off the harassing local authorities. It is unclear whether his request was approved but the Legation made it clear: they restrict their responsibilities to passport issues and cannot interfere with issues regarding taxes.

Streetview of Kitaiskaia on old postcard from 1930s (Flickr of Michael Rank)

During the Japanese occupation and the establishment of the puppet-state Manchukuo in 1932 it became vital for every foreigner to be able to find protection of their rights if they didn’t want to end up like those Russians émigrés left without citizenship unwanted by any state. It was the time of the Great Harbin Flood in the same year that saw the devastation of many ex-POWs’ properties and savings painstakingly built and accumulated in the past decade. The Sungari River (松花江) destroyed the lower areas of the city, Fujiadian (傅家甸) aka Daowai (道外), inhabited primarily by poor Chinese and foreigners was hit the worst. Pristan (Пристан) district (道里区) where the Schön family and Ferenc’s store was located were spared. The natural disaster however, had one good effect: it brought communities together. In 1933 Schön was among the founding members of the Harbin Hungarian Association (Harbini Magyar Egyesület) that aimed to organize a city’s Hungarian nationals for a more efficient fundraising and distribution of relief for the needy.

What Schön was doing in the 1940s is yet to be discovered, but there are leads that point to some smart business ideas he was engaged in, possibly taking advantage of Hungary’s alignment with the Axis powers and seeing trading opportunities to cash in on being a Hungarian entrepreneur in Manchukuo. After 1945 and the Soviet “Liberation” of Manchuria and the subsequent handover of it to China, Harbin and the lives of its residents went through significant changes. It is unclear what the exact reasons were for the Schöns’ decision to leave their home behind, but we can speculate the nationalization of private properties and repeatedly rising anti-foreign sentiments. Nevertheless, in 1950 “Эржебет” /Erzhebet/ and “Ференц” /Ferents/ (their names both spelled with the Cyrillic alphabet but using their Hungarian versions, ‘Erzsébet’ and ‘Ferenc’) were bound for the newly established state of Israel, starting an entirely new phase of their lives. Their daughter Rahil wasn’t listed together with them on the register compiled by the Chinese authorities, which might indicate that she got married and left Harbin with her husband.

The Schön Family ca. 1928: Ferenc, Rahil and Elisabeta (Erzsébet) (MNL)

More than thirty years of life must have left more records behind, and the stories of the Schöns and other residents of Harbin with Central European origins should be traced back by using these sources, in most cases for the very first time. The documents are scattered around the world, written in multiple languages and stored in various archives were sometimes the access to them is restricted.  When put together, they show us the forgotten world of expatriates from Habsburg Central Europe in Republican China, a lens through which we can better understand both regions and the refugee experience.

*Elisabeta might have arrived in Harbin at a very young age, the records are unclear at this point.

Sources:

• Harbin Municipal Archives (Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, PRC)
• MNL: Hungarian National Archives, Foreign Ministry Archives (Budapest, Hungary)
• Kovrig, János. “A harbini „Magyarok Hazafias Egyesületé”-ben [In the Harbin ‘Hungarian Patriotic Association’].” Magyarság, March 25, 1933.