A hero from the Holocaust has emerged after his death because in his humility he didn’t tell his story. After he died at the age of 96, Ho Feng Shan’s daughter included in his obituary the one story he had told her about a time he confronted the Gestapo while he was a diplomat in Vienna for the Chinese Nationalist Government. That story prompted more research and people sharing their own experiences.
From 1938 to 1940 Ho was a consul general serving in Austria at a time when the Nazis were sending Jews off to concentration camps. Many desperate Jews were seeking visas to escape the coming storm. Ho was moved by their plight and while other diplomats refused to get involved he organized a way to get perhaps tens of thousands of Jews out of Europe.
Ho issued a special visa only to the city of Shanghai, which at that time was an open-port city without immigration controls. Jews could use those papers to transit to other destinations including the Philippines, the United States and Palestine. Shanghai was under Japanese occupation at the time. The Japanese ended up creating a Restricted Sector for Stateless Refugees, basically a Jewish ghetto. Conditions were crowded and difficult but livable, but some 25,000 Jews survived the war there. Countless others settled in other countries using the travel documents Ho issued as quickly as he could.
After the Communists seized control of China, Ho followed the Nationalist government to Taiwan. He continued to serve as a diplomat in many countries. After he retired Ho settled in San Francisco. Following his death as the stories came out from around the world of what he had done, Ho was commemorated in the U.S., in Taiwan, and at the Jewish Refugees Museum in Shanghai, as well as in Israel where he is counted as one of the “Righteous Among the Nations.” In his Chinese language memoir he wrote, “Seeing the Jews so doomed, it was only natural to feel deep compassion, and from a humanitarian standpoint, to be impelled to help them.” It sounds so clear and simple, yet he was one of the few who acted in such a way during the time of crisis.
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