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This week, we will re-evaluate contemporary historical understandings regarding the Holocaust and southeast Asia. As a recent article by Cheuk Him Ryan Sun explains, the British colony of Hong Kong was one of the last ports that Jewish refugees transited through before their arrival in Shanghai. By using recently declassified materials, Sun argues that Hong Kong played a more complicated role than ambiguous refuge for Jews fleeing Nazi persecution: one that provided shelter, but whose colonial administration was responsible for the internment and expulsion of Jewish refugees. Sun’s paper challenges previous conceptions of Hong Kong’s role in the refugee crisis by analysing local and historiographical factors that contributed to Hong Kong being overlooked. Adopting a Global Holocaust framework and following refugees’ paths of escape, he reveals Hong Kong as more than just a transit port, expanding our understandings of the critical role that southeast Asia played in the histories of the Holocaust.

Sun, Cheuk Him Ryan. (2022). “The Holocaust and Hong Kong: an overlooked history”, Holocaust Studies, DOI: 10.1080/17504902.2022.2057118