By David Chesanow, JTNews Correspondent
Manli Ho, daughter of Holocaust rescuer Dr. Feng Shan Ho, addressed an audience of some 60 appreciative listeners on the subject of her father on May 23 at the Wing Luke Asian Museum. The evening program began with a short video about Dr. Ho that had been produced by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, and concluded with a spirited question-and-answer session.
The previous evening, Ms. Ho had been the guest speaker at the 11th annual Raoul Wallenberg Dinner, hosted by the Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle. The dinner is named for the Swedish diplomat in Nazi-controlled Hungary who issued protective passes to Jews, saving as many as 100,000 from deportation to Auschwitz.
Dr. Ho is the subject of the exhibit “Visas for Life: The Story of Dr. Feng Shan Ho,” on view at the Wing Luke until June 9. As Chinese consul general in Vienna on the eve of World War Two, Ho is credited with saving thousands of Austrian Jews from the Holocaust by providing them with destination visas to Shanghai, in contravention of his superior’s orders.
Ms. Ho explained that, prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Chinese Nationalist leader General Chiang Kai-shek was eager for German support as he fought against the Chinese Communists: Germany sent military advisers, and the Nationalists purchased millions of dollars’ worth of weaponry from the German armaments manufacturer Krupp.
“Not only that, Chiang Kai-shek was so enamored of the fascist state that he sent his number-two son to Germany to military school to be trained by the German army,” Manli Ho said. In fact, Chiang’s son was given the rank of second lieutenant in the 98th Jaeger Regiment and participated in the invasion of Austria in 1938.
Ms. Ho stated that after Austria’s annexation, the persecution of the Jewish population was “more public” than it had been in Germany in the five years since Hitler had come to power. Then, on the night of Nov. 9-10, 1938, in what would be called Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” Nazi gangs in Germany and Austria attacked Jews, destroyed synagogues and looted Jewish businesses: 30,000 heads of Jewish households were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Dr. Ho supplied the visas necessary to free Jewish prisoners in Dachau and Buchenwald and enable them and their families to leave Austria. While Ho knew that most Jews did not intend to go to Shanghai, he thought the city would offer refuge to those with nowhere else to turn. And since Shanghai was under Japanese occupation and therefore outside the jurisdiction of the Chinese Nationalists, Jewish emigration would be unobstructed by Ho’s own government.
Manli Ho recounted how her father provided visas for Shanghai to Jewish friends of his named Rosenberg. In fact, he had planned to see the Rosenbergs off at the station on Nov. 10, 1938, but received a cryptic telephone call from Mrs. Rosenberg asking him not to come to their house. Ho went anyway, to find that members of the Gestapo had arrived and arrested Mr. Rosenberg. Ho demanded that Rosenberg be released. “It was a faceoff,” Manli Ho said. “My father prevailed and Mr. Rosenberg was brought back.”
Dr. Ho’s immediate superior, the Chinese ambassador to Berlin, Chen Jie, was furious that Ho was helping Jews flee Austria, “so he called up my father and ordered him to stop, because he knew that Hitler wanted to get rid of the Jews and he didn’t want to mess up the diplomatic relations that China had with Nazi Germany,” Manli Ho said. Dr. Ho persisted. When the Nazis confiscated the building in which the Vienna consulate was located — “on the pretext that it was Jewish-owned,” Manli Ho pointed out — Dr. Ho wired his home government for funds in order to relocate; his request was denied. He then reopened the consulate in smaller offices at his own expense; there he worked until he was transferred from Vienna in May 1940.
Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Nationalists allied themselves with the United States, severed ties with Germany and closed down the consulate. Dr. Ho was called back to the Nationalist capital of Chungking, where he joined in the Chinese struggle against the Japanese.
After the war, Ho served as Chinese ambassador to Egypt and other countries in the Middle East as well as Mexico, Bolivia and Colombia: Manli Ho notes that “basically, the Nationalists could not afford to lose somebody like my father, so he was kept on” in spite of being “a bit of a maverick.” Still, he was denied his rightful recognition, Ms. Ho maintains: “Given his talent…he should have become foreign minister: That never happened. He should have had plum assignments in the U.S. and England: That never happened.” On the contrary, after retiring to San Francisco in 1973, Dr. Ho read in a Nationalist newspaper that he was being blamed for the equivalent of three hundred U.S. dollars being unaccounted for at his last posting — a signal, Manli Ho says, that her father was being punished. After four decades of diplomatic service, Dr. Ho’s pension was withheld. He died in 1997, at age 96.
In the summer of 2000, Feng Shan Ho was awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations by Israel’s Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem. When the Israeli government asked Manli Ho whether the government of Taiwan or that of the People’s Republic of China should be invited to send an official to the awards ceremony, she requested that a Taiwanese representative not be present.
Many listeners expressed the hope that she will write a book describing her father’s efforts to help Jews escape Nazi persecution. She is considering it, but indicated that it is a daunting task, inasmuch as Dr. Ho said little on the subject while he was alive. “We’re really piecing it together: It’s really a puzzle, because all he really said was that he used every means possible to help the Jews,” she recalled.
Asked later how she thinks her father should be remembered, she replied: “When I turned 20, which is the age of adulthood for the Chinese, my father wrote me a letter in which he said that after having done his best to raise and educate me, he hoped that I would be ‘a useful person.’ By useful he meant someone who would contribute to society in some way. That is how I would like my father to be remembered: that he was a useful person who, out of a sense of compassion and righteousness, did his best to contribute to his fellow man.”
Miriam Greenbaum, executive director of the Seattle-based Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center (a sponsor of the “Visas for Life” exhibit and a beneficiary of the Raoul Wallenberg Dinner), said of Manli Ho’s presentation, “It’s a wonderful story, not only in that Dr. Ho rescued people, but it shows that you can step out of your own background and reach out.”
“Visas for Life: The Story of Dr. Feng Shan Ho” runs until June 9. The Wing Luke Asian Museum is located at 407 7th Avenue S., Seattle; call 206-623-5124 or visit www.wingluke.org for information.