Editor's Note: During the World War II, more than 30,000 Jews, under attack by the Nazis in Europe, fled to Shanghai, China and 16,000 of them took refugee in this city. Meanwhile, the local Shanghai people were also in an abyss of pain inflicted by the Japanese invasion.  Though the time was difficult, gratitude and mutual friendship lived on in the heart of the Jewish and Chinese people. The Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum and Shanghai International Studies University (SISU) launched a initiative early this year to present those touching stories in Chinese, English, German and Hebrew. This is one of the selected stories in the project to commemorate the history of Jews in Shanghai.

During WWII, Dr. Feng-Shan Ho, the Chinese Consul General in Vienna, issued Chinese visas to Jews in Vienna in spite of orders from his superior to the contrary and even risking his own life. He is compared to Oskar Schindler, the hero saving the lives of over a thousand Jews during the Holocaust, and was named Righteous Among the Nations by the Israeli government.

he American film Schindler's List is well known throughout the world, and the hero, Oskar Schindler, an industrialist and a spy, is now widely acclaimed for saving 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust. Dr. Ho, however, was much less known although he is now known as “Chinese Schindler”.

Dr. Ho was born to a peasant family in Hunan Province in 1901. After graduation from Yale-in-China College in Hunan Province, Dr. Ho went to Germany in 1926 and studied at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich where he graduated in 1932 with distinction and a Ph. D degree in political economics. Between 1938 and 1940, Dr. Ho served as the Chinese Consul General in Vienna. During those years, Dr. Ho issued visas to Shanghai to over 4,000 threatened Jews.

In 1938, Austria which had the third largest Jewish community in Europe was annexed by Nazi Germany (the Anschluss), and less than a month after the Anschluss, a number of Austrian Jews were deported to Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps. They were told that if they emigrated immediately, they would be released. That means a visa to a foreign country was a hope of survival.

The problem was such a visa was very hard to obtain. The Jews realized that, as the whole world was struck by economic crisis and the threat of war was felt palpably everywhere, not any country offered to accept Jewish refugees. All countries took sympathy with the Jews, but none of them would open their door to them. Every day, thousands of Jews desperately hurried from one consulate general to another, but practically in vain. On July 20, 1938, Eric Goldstaub, a 17-year-old Viennese Jew, obtained 20 Chinese visas for himself and his extended family. The news spread very fast, and lines of desperate refugees soon formed at the Chinese consulate seeking the lifesaving visas. They got the visas for life and the chance to flee to Shanghai or other western countries like the USA and Australia. The news, however, infuriated the Nazi occupiers who dispossessed the house of the Chinese consulate on the allegation that the house was a Jewish property. Undeterred, Dr. Ho rented a smaller house at his own expense and continued his mission as a consul and issuer of visas for life there.

China was not consistent in its position on the issuing of visas to Jews. Chen Jie, the Chinese ambassador in Berlin and Dr. Ho's direct superior, was adamantly opposed to giving Jews visas as he hoped to cement closer ties between China and Germany. He thought Hitler hated the Jews, and didn’t want to risk offending Hitler and damaging the China-Germany “friendship”. Dr. Ho, however, continued to issue visas out of his compassionate heart. Reports of his insubordinate behavior soon got to the Chinese government, alleging that Dr. Ho was “selling” the visas and pocketing the money. This gave Chen Jie the excuse to investigate Dr. Ho, and soon Dr. Ho was transferred away from Vienna.

The exact number of visas given by Dr. Ho to Jewish refugees is unknown, but visas still kept by survivors may tell a good story. A visa obtained in June 1938 shows the number is just above 200th, a visa dated July 20 was numbered well over 1,200th, while by October 17, the number reached 1906th. It is logical that the demand for visas had soared after the Crystal Night. By September 1939, 70% of Austrian Jews had fled and Shanghai had received over 18,000 Jewish refugees. According to a survey in 1943, there were over 4,000 Jewish refugees from Austria the Restricted Sector. That means Dr. Ho had issued more than 4,000 visas in Vienna.

After his retirement in 1973, Dr. Ho spent a carefree life in San Francisco, mainly engaged in writing his memoirs. My Forty Years as a Diplomat published in 1990 mentions the history of the Jewish refugees and explained why Dr. Ho signed the visas: "I thought it only natural to feel compassion and to want to help. From the standpoint of humanity, that is the way it should be." In 1998, scholars from the Center for Jewish Studies Shanghai (CJSS) and the Visas for Life Organization in the USA published the special history for the first time. When Dr. Ho died on September 28, 1997 at the ripe old age of 96, his daughter, Ms. Manli Ho, mentioned this part of his experience only briefly in his obituary, as she was not very well informed, either. The obituary published on the Boston Globe, however, caught the eyes of Eric Saul who was deep into researching "righteous gentiles" for the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. Eric Saul called Ms. Ho and very soon both began to work diligently on uncovering as much of Dr. Ho's story as possible.

The collection of evidence, including visas still kept by survivors, were displayed at an exhibition of the life stories of 71 emissaries called "Visas for Life: The Righteous Diplomats," which opened at the United Nations in New York on April 3, 2000. On January 23, 2001, Dr. Ho was given the title of "Righteous Among the Nations" posthumously by the Israeli Government "for his humanitarian courage" in the rescue of Austrian Jews. His name is inscribed on the Wall of Honor in the Garden of the Righteous. According to some European historians, Dr. Ho had saved the largest number of Jews of all the “righteous diplomats”.