Consul General Feng Shan Ho

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Click Here for Chronology of rescue by Dr. Feng Shan Ho

click here for chronology of honoring Dr. Feng Shan Ho

A Righteous Father

by Claudia Cornwall, Reader’s Digest, September 2001

For nearly six decades, Feng Shan Ho’s
extraordinary courage remained a secret. Then
two people joined forces to uncover the truth.

It was threatening to rain as Manli Ho walked towards Yad Vashem, high on a hill overlooking western Jerusalem. Below her, a forest had been planted to commemorate the lives of men and women who had rescued Jews from the Nazis. The names of Raoul Wallenberg and Oskar Shindler were engraved on plaques as honoured heroes. Her father would soon be part of this distinguished company.

The auditorium at the Yad Vashem memorial was packed when Manli reached the front. The slim, pretty woman, wearing a black cheongsam under her jacket, looked out over a sea of faces. Among the dignitaries was Ambassador Pan Zhanlin from China, as well as Ambassador Wolfgang Paul from Austria and retired Israeli Supreme Court Justice Yaakov Maltz.

Justice Maltz announced that Feng Shan Ho had been awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations, then presented Manli and her older brother Monto with a medal. On one side was the name of her father, and on the other, a Jewish proverb: “Whoever saves one life is as though he has saved an entire world.”

Manli told the audience that her father would have been astonished, never expecting praise for his actions. She quoted Shakespeare: “The evil that men do lives after them/The good is oft interred with their bones.”

And except for a remarkable coincidence, the good Feng Shan Ho did would have been lost to history too.

“It’s time for me to go,” Feng Shan Ho said one day in June 1997. Manli’s eyes filled with tears.

Her father had always been strong; even in his eighties he took long walks, scrambling over the sand dunes on his way to San Francisco’s Ocean Beach to take in a favourite view of the surging Pacific. But now, at the age of 96, he was dying.

Three months later, on September 28, he passed away, peacefully, in his bed.

Manli, who had once been a newspaper reporter, sat down at her father’s desk, surrounded by his books, and finished writing his obituary.

Ho was born in Hunan province in 1901, while the Ching dynasty still ruled China. His father died when Ho was seven, leaving the family destitute. But thanks to Norwegian Lutheran missionaries, the young man (whose name means “Phoenix on the Mountain”) would win a place at the College of Yale-in-China. After graduating with a BA in 1926, he earned a Ph.D. in Political Economics from the University of Munich in Germany. Speaking English, German and Mandarin fluently, he began a diplomatic career in 1935 that spanned almost 40 years, first for China, then Taiwan.

Manli included his many diplomatic postings – Egypt, Mexico, Bolivia, Columbia – and mentioned how he helped to found the Chinese Lutheran Church in San Francisco.

Then she remembered an incident from the distant past. Her father was in Vienna before World War II and witnessed the mounting persecution of Jews. One day, he said, he’d stared down Nazi bullies, saving the lives of Jewish friends whom he had given visas so they could leave the country.

Although Manli didn’t have space for details, she mentioned the confrontation with the Gestapo. Then she sent the obituary to the San Francisco Chronicle and the Boston Globe, where she had once worked.

Events now took a surprising turn. Newspapers across the country picked up the story, including the Sacramento Bee. There it caught the eye of Eric Saul.

Saul, 47, was the owner of a picture-framing shop in San Francisco. But he was also an historian who had worked in several museums. There he’d come upon the story of Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat who had rescued thousands of Polish Jews in 1940.

Inspired by the man’s heroism, Saul had sunk his life’s savings into researching, documenting and telling the stories of other diplomats who had helped Jews during World War II. But he’d never heard of Feng Shan Ho.

Saul called directory assistance—the only “F. Ho” listed was just a few kilometres away in Richmond District. Startled, Saul realised he might have passed the man in the street. He dialled number, and Manli Ho answered.

They met about a week later at David’s, a well-known Jewish delicatessen in the area. Amid the clatter and bustle of waitresses carrying plates of bagels and blintzes, Saul pressed Manli for what she knew about the people her father had helped.

Not much, she admitted, just that one story about the Gestapo…

It took place on November 10, 1938, during Kristallnacht, the infamous “Night of the Broken Glass,” when the synagogues in Germany and Austria were set on fire, the windows of Jewish shops were smashed, and thousands of Jews were arrested.

Ho was China’s Consul General in Vienna, and while the looting was still going on he checked on the Rosenbergs, a Jewish family he had befriended.

Mr. Rosenberg had been dragged away for questioning; Ho was staying with Mrs. Rosenberg when two men wearing trench coats burst in and announced they were going to search the house.

Manli remembered how her father imitated the men as he told her what happened. He would pull an imaginary hat down over his eyes, scowl and pretend to have a gun in his pocket. He said one of the thugs pointed a gun at him and demanded to know who he was.

“Who are you?” Ho responded, not intimidated.

A Gestapo agent ordered Mrs. Rosenberg to say who her visitor was. “The Consul General of China,” she replied.

“God damn it, why didn’t you tell me?” the agent yelled. They left.

Mr. Rosenberg was released from questioning. Manli explained that her father had already given the Rosenbergs visas for China, which they used to leave Austria.

“Why did he do it?” Saul asked.

“If you knew my father, you wouldn’t have to ask,” Manli replied. “After seeing what was happening to the Jews, he felt it was natural for any human to feel compassion and to want to help.”

Saul smiled. He had a hunch that the help did not end with the Rosenbergs.

A month later Saul spoke to Genya Markon, curator at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Did she know of any Viennese families who had received Chinese visas? Markon couldn’t remember any but promised to search her archives.

Soon afterwards, she got back to Saul. She had found someone in her records—an Eric Goldstaub. He was in his mid-seventies, living near Toronto, Canada. She even had a phone number.

Excited, Saul phoned Manli with the news. She rushed over to his shop.

“You see,” he said, “it was b’sherrt,” a Yiddish word for destiny.

Saul dialled Toronto. The man who answered still had a slight accent.

After Saul explained why he was calling, Goldstaub said he had never met the Chinese consul and didn’t know who he was. Saul told him his name was Feng Shan Ho. “I have his daughter with me here. Would you like to talk to her?”

Goldstaub was stunned.

“I never had the chance to talk to your father,” he told Manli. “I’m so grateful to him.”

Goldstaub began telling his story.

He was 17, he said, a happy-go-lucky secondary school student in Vienna whose world came crashing down in 1938. He was forced to scrub the streets with a toothbrush and to give the Heil Hitler salute at school. After all Jewish students were forced to quit school, Goldstaub trudged from consulate to consulate, looking to escape, but no-one would give him a visa.

“Jews weren’t wanted anywhere,” Goldstaub said. Then he passed the Chinese consulate on Beethoven Place. “I had never thought about going to China.”

To his surprise, there would be no problem getting a visa. So he asked for 20—enough for his parents and himself as well as his relatives.

The Goldstaubs booked passage on an Italian ship leaving on December 20, 1938. But on November 10—the very same day that Feng Shan Ho stared down the Gestapo—Goldstaub and his father were arrested.

“But we were lucky,” Goldstaub said. “We had our visas and ship tickets; they let us go. Those visas saved our lives.”

Before they hung up, Saul asked if Goldstaub had one of the visas. Goldstaub promised to send one.

About a month later, a package from Canada arrived in San Francisco. Inside was an Austrian passport issued to Oskar Fiedler, Goldstaub’s uncle and stamped with a large red “J” indicating he was Jewish. The first thing Manli noticed was that Oskar Fiedler was born on September 10, 1901, the same day as her father. Carefully turning the yellowing pages, she found his visa to China. It was dated July 20, 1938—and had a serial number: 1193.

Eric Saul told Manli they would find others, and find them they did—scattered all over the world. In July 1999, they met Hedy Durlester in Santa Rosa, California. She was three when her parents fled Vienna.

From her father’s autobiography, Manli learned that the Chinese ambassador in Berlin, Chen Jie, had ordered her father not to issue visas to Jews. He wanted to preserve friendly relations with Germany.

But Ho ignored the order. The visa her father had issued to Durlester’s father was dated exactly a month before the one received by Eric Goldstaub’s uncle. Comparing the two serial numbers, Manli saw that 900 visas had been issued in one month alone.

Later, her brother Monto found a report, written by her father’s successor, about these visas. Until Ho left Vienna in May 1940, the Chinese Consulates had given out an average of 400 to 500 a month. Her father had saved hundreds, if not thousands, of lives.

One of them, Hans Kraus, waited vainly in the line outside the Chinese embassy for days. Desperate, he saw Ho’s car and thrust his papers into the open window. Kraus received a visa a few days later.

Another, Kalman Singer, had been refused entry to 62 countries until Ho authorised his family’s visas. They would board the last ship sailing to the United States from Europe. All their relatives were killed. Kalman’s son, Israel Singer is now secretary general of the World Jewish Congress in New York. “It shows you,” he says, “just what one man can do—save a life and create a new generation.”

Sitting in the auditorium at Yad Vashem last January, Susie Margalit, 76, thought about the Chinese man who was being honoured. Her father had been imprisoned in Dachau concentration camp. Her mother was told that he would be released on one condition: that he leave the country within 24 hours. There was only one consul in Vienna who would help—Feng Shan Ho.

After the war, Susie Margalit had emigrated to Israel and helped establish a kibbutz where she still lived with two of her three children and eight of her ten grandchildren. She’d invited Manli to visit them after the ceremony.

“Every time I meet another person who he helped, it’s as if he lives on through them,” says Manli. She calls these people her mishpocheh, a Yiddish word meaning “family.”

Near the Sea of Galilee in the foothills of Mount Tabor, Manli’s family was just about to grow even larger.

Biography of Consul General Feng Shan Ho

Updated November 24, 2019