By David Chesanow, JTNews Correspondent
Dr. Feng Shan Ho, Chinese consul general in Vienna on the eve of the Second World War, is credited with providing Austrian Jews with visas to Shanghai, enabling them to escape Nazi persecution and survive the Holocaust. Ho is honored at the Wing Luke Asian Museum in Seattle, in an exhibition titled “Visas for Life: The Story of Dr. Feng Shan Ho,” which opens Friday, Feb. 8.
“To our knowledge, 55 consulates were in the capital city of Vienna, and not one of them helped the Jews emigrate out of the country. But Dr. Ho, on his own authority, just like [Japanese diplomat Chiune] Sugihara — in contravention of Chinese orders and the directives of his superiors — he issued visas to any and all Jews. We don’t even know how many thousands, but they were certainly in the thousands range,” explained Eric Saul, curator of the exhibition and project director of Visas for Life, a San Francisco—based organization that researches and recognizes diplomats who helped Jews and other refugees flee the Nazis.
After Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass” of Nov. 9—10, 1938, when Nazi gangs terrorized Jews, Ho used his influence to secure the release of a Jewish family detained by the Gestapo, Saul said. He supplied the necessary documentation to free Jews imprisoned in concentration camps and allow them to emigrate within a specified number of weeks, after which they would have been subject to rearrest. Saul said that almost 30,000 heads of Jewish households were arrested in Austria and Germany: “Jewish families in Vienna and Austria were desperate to get any kind of a destination to get out of the country. On the strength of Dr. Ho issuing visas to the wives of people in Dachau and Buchenwald, they were able to emigrate.”
According to Saul, although Shanghai was already under Japanese control, Ho’s visas satisfied the requirements of countries that would not otherwise have provided transit visas. Furthermore, while Ho knew that most Jews did not intend to go to Shanghai, he thought that the city would offer refuge to those with nowhere else to turn. The fact that it lay outside the jurisdiction of the Chinese Nationalists — who were on good terms with the Nazis, and who officially refused to help escaping Jews — also meant that any Jewish emigration to Shanghai would be unobstructed by Ho’s own government.
“They reprimanded him several times; in fact, they sold his consulate — they closed the consulate: He had to reopen it at his own expense and pay the rent on the consulate in order to keep it open” and continue to issue visas, Saul said.
Feng Shan Ho was born in rural Hunan Province in 1901. When he was seven his father died; the family was left destitute but was aided by Norwegian Lutheran missionaries. In gratitude, Ho converted to Christianity. He attended the College of Yale in China and the University of Munich, where he received a doctorate in political economics in 1932.
According to his daughter, Manli Ho, Dr. Ho joined the foreign service of the Chinese Nationalist government in 1935, and became one of the first diplomats to issue visas to escaping Jews when a Chinese consulate was established in Vienna following the German annexation of Austria in March 1938. He served there until March 1940, then joined in the war against Japan. After World War Two, he was assigned to diplomatic posts in the Middle East, sided with the Chinese Nationalists after the Communist takeover of the mainland and served as their ambassador to Mexico, Bolivia and Colombia.
However, when Ho retired in 1973 and moved to San Francisco, the Taiwanese government “launched a political vendetta to publicly discredit him,” Manli Ho wrote last year. “The real reasons behind this political vendetta were never revealed. [He] was censured and denied a pension for his 40 years of service to China.” He died in 1997.
It was on seeing the line “Saved Jews during World War II” in Ho’s obituary in The San Francisco Chronicle that Eric Saul, who had organized the Visas for Life traveling exhibition on Chiune Sugihara, first learned of Feng Shan Ho. After contacting Manli Ho, Saul learned that her father had written his memoirs in the 1990s.
“He wrote 70 words about how he helped Jews,” Saul said. “He mentioned [that] he issued “˜innumerable’ visas to Jews in Austria. Well, that’s fantastic!” The next step was “to figure out who those people were and how many was “˜innumerable.’” A friend working at the Holocaust Memorial in Washington, D.C., checked the archives and found photos of people who had received visas from Ho. Austrian refugee organizations provided further information on people whom Ho had saved.
Ho indicated that his sense of compassion, based on his understanding of Christian teachings, fueled his determination to help the Jewish people, Saul said. In the summer of 2000, Ho was awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations by Israel’s Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem: The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority.
Asked why the Wing Luke Asian Museum elected to host the exhibit, media relations spokesperson Van Diep replied: ” “˜Visas for Life’ was put on the exhibition schedule last spring, originally to acknowledge the 60th anniversary of the Japanese American internment of World War II and to honor an individual who made personal sacrifices to aid a minority group that was being targeted only on ethnic and religious differences.
“Little did the Museum staff and community know how immediate the relevance of the exhibit would become after Sept. 11. In light of the backlash against Arab Americans, those who look like Arab Americans, and Muslims, the Museum is more resolved to connect the lessons of the past to the present,” Diep explained.
“Visas for Life: The Story of Dr. Feng Shan Ho” runs from Feb. 8 to June 9, 2002. The Wing Luke Asian Museum is located at 407 7th Avenue S., Seattle; call 206-623-5124 or visit www.wingluke.org for information.