Honoring China’s own ‘Schindler’

“The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.” – Marc Anthony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

And so it would have been with my father, whose humanitarian feat during one of the great evils of the 20th Century would have gone with him to the grave when he passed away in San Francisco on Sept 28, 20 years ago. It was mere chance that led me to uncover a history that had been obscured for more than 60 years and to bring his story to light.

My father, Dr Ho Feng Shan, was among the first foreign diplomats to save Jews from the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Europe. Posted to Vienna, he witnessed the persecution and reign of terror against Jews that followed the Anschluss, or union of Germany and Austria, in March 1938. For nearly two years, he helped thousands of Jews escape certain death by issuing visas to Shanghai, China, and in so doing put the Chinese port city on the map as a refuge of last resort for some 18,000 European Jews.

In my father’s 700-page memoir!ྔ ঍ิხ຺ๆ౎DŽForty Years of My Diplomatic Life), published in 1990, there is only the briefest mention of his aid to Jewish refugees: “Since the Anschluss, the persecution of Jews by Hitler’s ‘devils’ became increasingly fierce,” he wrote, “I spared no effort in using every means to help, thus saving who knows how many Jews!”

Two anecdotes Dr Ho Feng Shan

However, during his lifetime, my father rarely spoke of his tenure in Vienna. He told me only two anecdotes: one of seeing Hitler march in triumph into Vienna and how appalled he was by the delirious welcome the Austrians accorded him; the other involved his encounter with the Gestapo while trying to help his Jewish friends the Rosenbergs on Kristallnacht, the infamous rampage against Jews on November 9-10, 1938, in Germany and Austria.

Following my father’s death, I wrote in his obituary that he had issued visas in Vienna and had saved the Rosenbergs. The obituary appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle and in the Boston Globe, where I had been a reporter. Soon afterward, I received a telephone call from an Eric Saul, who introduced himself as the curator of a touring photographic exhibit on diplomat rescuers of Jews. He was eager to know more about my father’s visa issuing activities. I told l him I knew nothing more, but his inquiry piqued my curiosity.

And so, a month after my father’s death, I began my search. It was a complete shot in the dark. No one seemed to have heard of Shanghai visas, much less who had issued them or what they were used for. I soon discovered that no documents whatsoever were required to enter Shanghai, as its harbor was left without passport control or immigration authorities after the Japanese invasion in 1937.

Was it even possible, 60 years later, to find any visa recipients who, if they were still alive, by now must be scattered all over the world?

Visa Recipients

To my surprise, I began to find visa recipients almost immediately. October 1997: I read about Dr Samuel Didner in the book Escape to Shanghai by James R. Ross. Unable to reach Didner, I tracked down his good friend Curt E. Fuchs, a fellow Shanghai refugee. Fuchs told me that both he and Didner believed that one of the most significant uses of the visas my father provided was to free those arrested and deported to Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps. That gave me the first inkling of one of the most important purposes of the Shanghai visas.

November 1997: Eric Goldstaub, found through the US Holocaust Memorial Museum archives. Goldstaub visited 50 consulates in Vienna before obtaining 20 Shanghai visas for himself and his extended family. Goldstaub’s cousin Harry Fiedler still possessed one of those visas – stamped in his father Oskar’s passport. The serial number was 1193, issued on July 20, 1938, four months after the Anschluss. It was the first indication to me of the volume of visas that the Chinese consulate in Vienna was issuing.

January 1998: Dr Bernard Grossfeld, whose father was arrested on Kristallnacht and deported to Dachau. He was released on the strength of a Shanghai visa. This confirmed that a Shanghai visa served this purpose. The family escaped to Shanghai.

April 1998: Lillith Doron, who went to Palestine on the illegal transport Sakaria with a Shanghai visa. Her brother Karl was released from Dachau with a Shanghai visa. This was the first indication that recipients used the Shanghai visa to go elsewhere, not necessarily to Shanghai.

June 1998: Ady Lagstein Bluds, who with her four siblings left Vienna using Shanghai visas for France, where Ady and her husband later made their way to the US. None of the siblings went to Shanghai.

July 1999: Hedy Durlester, who with her parents went to the Philippines using Shanghai visas. Hedy’s father was released from detention with a Shanghai visa obtained on June 20, 1938, exactly a month before the Fiedler visa. The serial numbers indicate that at least 900 visas were issued in that month.

Little by little, a picture began to emerge. Under my father’s watch, the Chinese consulate general in Vienna issued thousands of visas to Shanghai. These visas served as the proof of emigration required by Nazi authorities to leave Austria and as a means to go elsewhere. It confirmed what my father had said: “The visas were to Shanghai ‘in name’ only. In reality, they were a means to help Jews to leave Austria and eventually find a way to the US, Britain or other preferred destinations.”

In October 1999, the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC) sponsored a photo exhibit on my father, alongside an exhibit on Jews in Shanghai comprised of the family documents of the Gottfried sisters which included the Shanghai visas obtained by their husbands. By then, I felt I had enough documentation to write a bilingual monograph on my father’s rescue activities. This monograph, “Diplomat Rescuers and the Story of Feng Shan Ho” in English and Chinese, produced by the VHEC and then posted on the Internet, became the basis for much of the information in subsequent articles about my father.

It was not until the following year, in February 2000, that my father’s story became widely known in China, following a long feature article by People’s Daily reporter Zhang Niansheng, who interviewed me at the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust.

At that time, Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Authority, was in the final stages of investigating my father’s case for Israel’s Righteous Among the Nations award. In July 2000, based on the testimony submitted by survivors that I had found and Yad Vashem’s own investigations, my father was designated a “Righteous Among the Nations” for his “humanitarian courage” in savings Jews. Since then, I have continued to find more survivors and documentation in archives in Vienna, Jerusalem, the US, Nanjing, and Taipei.

I recount some of the early historiography of my search to set the record straight, not only with respect to the historical facts, but as to how those facts became known. Over the past two decades, much has appeared in print, on the Internet, and on film about this history that has been questionable, baseless, and even self-serving.

Claim, misinformation

A sampling of various claims and misinformation: On the number of visas issued: The guesses range wildly, from hundreds to tens of thousands. After more than seven decades, it is impossible to determine the exact number. There was no “Schindler’s List”. In addition to the visas I have found, surviving archival documentation which indicate that the Chinese consulate in Vienna issued an average of 400 to 500 visas a month in 1938 and 1939. All I am willing to say is that “thousands” were issued.

One visa saved one life: The number of lives saved by one visa depended on whether it was stamped into the passport of one person, or of one mother whose children were listed with her, or of one couple, or sometimes of an entire family. The number of lives saved may well exceed the number of visas issued, but whether in the thousands or tens of thousands is impossible to ascertain at this point.

The Chinese Nationalist government had instructed all its diplomats to issue visas to Jews, and my father was just following orders. There is no documented evidence of such a policy. In fact, my father was ordered by his superiors to stop issuing visas to Jews and later punished for his disobedience. His successor reported that when he took over, he adhered strictly to long established instructions and curtailed visas to Jews.

My father issued visas to Jews at a nearby cafe because the Gestapo surrounded his consulate. This is one of the more ridiculous claims. The Nazis routinely scoured the Viennese cafes for Jews, so why put people’s lives at risk in a café, when the consulate building provided diplomatic shelter?

My father was “discovered” in 1995, two years before his death, by Chinese Jewish studies experts. They later submitted the documentation to Israel which resulted in my father’s designation as a Righteous. Regrettably, none of this is true. No one had heard of my father’s deeds before his death. No such documentation exists in my father’s file at Yad Vashem.

Finally, besides several historically inaccurate documentaries, two feature films stand out for their particularly nonsensical content. One is a ludicrous Western production by a European cable channel dubbed “A Kung-fu Holocaust exploitation flick” in the media. This depicts my father using Chinese martial arts to fight the Nazis alongside a nephew named Bruce, who is the romantic lead, and a chase scene on a train through Siberia.

Then there is this year’s heavily promoted Chinese television soap opera, which split my father into two characters. A lurid melodrama with an implausible plotline and cartoonish characters, it demonstrates an obvious ignorance of both the European and Chinese history of that era.

Over the two decades since my father’s death, I have often wrestled with the question of how he would want to be remembered. I believe he would want the unvarnished historical facts to speak for him. Therefore, I have been scrupulous in trying to maintain the historical integrity of his story. On this 20th anniversary of his death, that is the most fitting way to commemorate him and his legacy.

‘I SPARED NO EFFORT IN USING EVERY MEANS TO HELP, THUS SAVING WHO KNOWS HOW MANY JEWS!’