When people think of the Jewish ghettos of World War II, the names of Polish cities such as Warsaw, Krakow and Lublin likely come to mind.

Not Shanghai.

But during the war, some 17,000 Jews from Eastern and Western Europe formed a community in that Chinese city, which was virtually the only place in the world still accepting Jews fleeing from persecution.

“Not many people know. I think, No. 1, because it’s a little bit like, who would go to Shanghai? You’d have to put Shanghai at that time as the place of last survival. It was the only place in the world that still took Jews,” said Tom Lewinsohn, 72, who lived in the Shanghai Ghetto from 1941 to 1948.

Lewinsohn, who later immigrated to the United States and graduated from Kansas University, will visit KU Sunday to attend a screening of the documentary film “Shanghai Ghetto,” a selection of the East Asian Film Festival 2004.

After the screening, Lewinsohn, a Leawood resident, will talk about his experiences.

“I’m going to basically talk about my odyssey of how I came to this area (the Midwest), and also my impressions of basically spending my youth in Shanghai,” Lewinsohn said.

“It had many positive sides and many negative sides. The negative sides were extreme poverty and disease. It was basically a ghetto, and we were interned.”

Lewinsohn will attend the screening with his wife, Alice. The couple, married almost 47 years, have lived in the Kansas City area since 1964.

“I am so excited that he is coming. I feel that it will give a real extension of reality to the documentary subject matter. It will personalize it,” said Randi Hacker, outreach coordinator for the Center for East Asian Studies.

“Shanghai Ghetto” is a feature-length documentary depicting the dramatic survival stories of Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Germany, and elsewhere in Europe, in the late 1930s. The film is narrated by the actor Martin Landau.

Lewinsohn said he knew many of the people who appeared in the documentary.

“My wife and I went to see it (when it played briefly) in Kansas City. We were extremely impressed. It’s very, very authentic. It’s exactly the way it was,” he said.

The story of Shanghai’s Jewish Ghetto “is probably more well known in cities like New York and San Francisco, where a lot of the Shanghai people came to (later),” he said.

Lewinsohn, his brother, Peter, his parents and his maternal grandparents fled to Shanghai from Berlin in 1941. Lewinsohn lived there until 1948, and his parents stayed until 1950.

He earned a bachelor’s in personnel administration from KU in 1957 and a master’s in political science in 1965. Lewinsohn served for 29 years as director of personnel for the City of Kansas City, Mo., retiring in 1993.

“I think what I’d like for people to know is that those who were able to go to Shanghai, despite the hardships, that we survived for another day. And we have to be extremely thankful for that, because the alternatives were unthinkable,” he said.