"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.  The 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 in 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.  Hew as 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.

"Feng-Shan Ho issued visas to hundreds and possibly thousands of Jews who were desperate to flee the Nazis," by Globe Staff writer, Charles M. Sennott

JERUSALEM -- In 1938, as Austria was descending into the deep moral darkness of Nazi rule, a small light of humanity filtered through, and that light was recognized yesterday at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial.

A ceremony honored the late Feng-Shan Ho, the Chinese consul general in Vienna from 1938 to 1940, who was formally bestowed with the title "Righteous Among the Nations" yesterday for deflying orders from his superiors and secretly issuing visas to hundreds and possibly thousands of Jews who were desperate to flee the Nazis.

The story of Ho's quiet heroism six decades ago probably would have been lost to history had it not been for a single sentence written in his obituary, a chance phone phone call, and then a dogged investigation by his daughter.

Ho's daughter, Man-li HO, 50, a former Boston Globe reporter, wrote the obituary for her father, which was published in the Globe and the San Francisco Chronicle after his death at the age of 96 on Sept. 28, 1997. She included in the obituary a passing reference to the fact that Ho had helped save Jews on the eve of World War II.

Man-li said she did not know the specifics of what her father had done. He never talked about it much, other than a few passing references, she said. His work was briefly stated in an autobiography he wrote on his life as a diplomat over 40 years of service for China and, after the revolution, for the Chinese Nationalists who fled to Taiwan. He had never been reunited with any of the survivors he helped escape.

"It didn't surprise me that he never mentioned this," said Man-li, who along with her older brother, Mon-to, accepted the award. "To him, helping human beings in distress was something that any person would do."

A few days after the death of her father, Man-li, who lives in Arrowsic, Maine, and works for the Boston-based executive search firm Isaacson Miller, was in San Francisco. She had stayed on after the funeral service to care for her 90-year-old mother when she received a phone call from Eric Saul, director of the San Francisco-based "Visas for life: The Righteous and Honorable Diplomats."

For years, Saul had searched for information on 100 diplomats who he estimated had saved 250,000 European Jews during the Holocaust. Saul had read the elder Ho's obituary and wanted to know whether Man-li had any more information on her father.

Thus began Man-li's research. As she pored over books and old files, worked the Internet, and consulted with Saul, she began to piece together the story.

Nazi Germany annexed Austria in March 1938. Ho ---- the Chinese consul general in Vienna, where the majority of Austria's 180,000 Jews lived --- watched as Hitler paraded through the streets and received a fanatical welcome.

With the takeover, the Austrians eagerly and efficiently pursued the Nazis' plans, and an office established under Adolf Eichmann to expel Austria's Jews sought to make the country a model for the Nazis' systematic persrcution.

At the time, many Western countries, including the United States, restricted immigration. In Palestine, the British Mandate government was restricting the influx of Jews, largely because of pressure from the Arab world.

As a result, Jews were desperate for any way out. Ho would help Jews who came to him by issuing entry visas to Shanghai. Though Shanghai was then under Japanese occupation, no alliance had been made with Germany, and no visa was needed to enter. But before the Nazis would allow them to leave, Jews needed a valid visa as proof of emigration.

Ho was under orders from his superior, the Chinese ambassador in Berlin, not to issue too many visas, so as not to anger the Germans or the Austrians.

As Man-li would later learn, some of the Jews actually traveled to Shanghai by boat from Italy or over land through the Soviet Union. From there, many went on to Australia and other locations. Others simply used the visas to get out of Austria and then emigrated to Canada, Latin America, and Palestine.

One of the people who was saved by Ho was Frida Rogel, 68, who was on hand for the ceremony honoring him yesterday. She was a 7-year-old girl in 1940, when her parents, Joseph and Paula, received the visa from Ho. They spent the next nine years in Shanghai, until in 1949 they emigrated to Israel, which had just finished the war for its independence. Today she lives on a kibbutz on the Sea of Galilee with her husband. She has two sons and two grandchildren.

"I would like to thank him for saving our lives," Rogel said, as she walked with Man-li through Yad Vashem's forest at the foot of Mount Herzl. There, as warm sunlight filtered through towering pines, a marble monument engraved with the name Feng Shan Ho was unveiled.

(Credit of the above article goes to Globe Staff writer, Charles M. Sennott.)

Gilberto Bosques, the "Mexican Schindler" honored

July, 9, 2007

One of the heros of the Mexican diplomatic corps is being honored with an exhibit at the Museo Histórico Judío y del Holocausto Tuvie Maizel (Acapulco 70, Condesa, D.F.). Arturo Jimenez of Jornada wrote about the "Mexican Schindler"

He is often called "The Mexican Schindler" for his work during the Second World War, when as Mexico's Consul General in France, he aided 40,000 refuges - Spanish Republicans, French Jews, Lebanese and others facing persecution, among them leaders of the European opposition and members of the antifascist resistence.

Described as "a Mexican hero" or a "savior" or simply "brave," he spent a year as a prisoner of war of the Germans, where - together with his family and collaborators - his dignified attitude was the epitome of Mexican diplomacy of the era, gaining even the respect of his jailers.

His name was Gilberto Bosques, born in 1892 in Chiatla, Puebla.  In his 103 year lifetime, he was a revolucionary, a congressman, an educator, a reporter, a writer, a diplomat and, above all else, a humanist and patriot: but somewhat forgotten until now.

For everything he was, the Jewish community in Mexico has decided to mount a photographic exhibit in Bosques' honor, the best way to teach about our tradition of asylum and solidarity.

Embajador Gilberto Bosques: un hombre de todos los tiempos (Ambassador Gilberto Bosques: a man for all times) opened last week at the Museo Histórico Judío y del Holocausto Tuvie Maizel (Acapulco 70, Condesa).

In 88 photos, the exposition covers the life of Gilberto Bosques from his birth to his death in 1995. The images and information sheets are organized in 25 panels, and include photos of the almost unknown French Holocaust.

All the images are copies from the Bosques family archives. The museum has plans to show the exhibit in other locations. The curator, Erick Saúl, of the United States, said he is "historical curator, not a museum specialist," spent two years working on the Tuvie Maizel museum exhibit.

Saving lives, raising spirits

The exposition includes images from throughout  Bosques' long and varied career:  his participation in the 1910 Revolution when he was 17; as a Puebla and later Federal legislator working on labor issues in the 1920s and 30s;  his activities as as an educational and political reformer and his career as editor of the Government paper, El Nacional.

His diplomatic career began at shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, when he was tasked with  carrying out the foreign policy of presidents Lázaro Cárdenas and then Manuel Avila Camacho.

Under the leadership of Mexican Minister to France,   Luis I. Rodríguez,  Bosques embarked on a series of adventures in his quest to obtain visas and safe-conduct passes for those persecuted by the Germans in France, even as he moved the diplomatic mission from Paris to other places, eventually coming to Marseilles.

In the French port, he used his role as Mexican Consul General to rent two chateaux (Reynarde and Montegrande) to house and protect hundreds of refugees marked for deportation to concentration and extermination camps, while he arranged for their exit. In the chateaux, he organized artistic activities to "raise the spirit" of the persecuted.

In Marseilles, the Mexican Ambassador had to confront open hostility from pro-German French "authorities", Gestapo spies, the government of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco as well as the Japanese diplomats who had offices in the same building as the Mexican delegation.

Bosques resisted them all. The French and - above all - the Germans, until on his recommendation, Mexico broke relations with both countries in 1943. The Gestapo violently assaulted the Mexican delegation, robbing money from a strongbox and taking the diplomat, his wife and three children and forty staff members into custody. They were sent to Bad Godesberg and locked in a hotel for the next year, which he spent organizing art programs. He above all upheld his dignity and the dignity of Mexico. He told the German bureaucrats:

"We have read the rules you have laid down for Mexican personnel and will abide by them. However, as Mexico and Germany are at war, we expect to be treated as prisoners of war, and will accept no special consideration due to age or other condition, but only those accorded to such prisoners."

In 1944, the Mexican were liberated and repatriated in a prisoner exchange with the Germans who were held in the concentration center at Perote, Veracruz.

After the war, Bosques was appointed Mexican Minister to Portugal, Finland and Sweden. From 1953 to 1964, he served in Cuba. The photo shows Bosques with the Castro brothers (Raul and Fidel) and Ernesto Che Guevara.

Don Gilberto's daughter, Laura Bosques, recalled her family's experiences in Europe, which organizing tertuilias during their incarceration at Bad Godesburg which included reading from the  poems of Rubén Darío at tertuilias.

"It was an era of intense drama. Along with everyone else, my parents and my brothers and I were aware of the suffering. The War was a tremendous thing that should never have happened, and the violence continues to this day."

Laura Bosques spoke with us in the  offices at the Centro Comunitario Nidjei Israel, where the Tuvie Maizel museum is also located. There, we also met press spokesman Enriqueta Loaeza Tovar and museum coordinator Leyla Malki, who summed up the man:

"Gilberto Bosques was a Mexican hero. With this exhibit the museum and the Jewish community in Mexico renders its homage, to one who did so much for us, and for his country."

If you ever wondered how Ilsa and Victor Lazlo got to Casablanca, now you know... Gilberto Bosques arranged it.

[Excerpt downloaded 2/9/08 from http://mexfiles.wordpress.com/category/ciudad-de-mexico/santa-maria-de-la-ribera/]

"The Courage of a Few Hundred Helped Save Thousands," by Sharon Adarlo, Star-Ledger staff, The Star-Ledger [New Jersey], Monday, March 31, 2008

Ellis Island exhibit honors diplomats who secretly let scores flee the Holocaust

Bruce Teicholz was a survivor by chance, but a hero by choice.

With most of his family decimated in concentration camps, Teicholz, a Polish Jew, risked his life fleeing Nazi soldiers in the woods and valleys of Central Europe until he came to Hungary.

There, Teicholz joined an underground effort issuing fake visas to fellow Jews desperate to escape.  Some 300 people-most of them diplomats-located throughout a ravaged Europe did the same thing and had saved untold thousands by the end of World War II.

"He could have been killed immediately on the spot, but he felt he couldn't stand by," said his daughter, Debbie Teicholz-Guedalia, of Demarest in Bergen County.

She echoed the sentiments of many of the rescuers.  As one of the few Jews involved in the covert effort, Teicholz was honored at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, where "Visas for Life: The Righteous and Honorable Diplomats" opened yesterday.  The exhibit is about the people from 27 countries who helped save Jews from the Holocaust.

Some 10 million people, 6 million of the Jews, were beyond the reach of liberators, and they died in the Holocaust.

Under the arched tile ceiling of Ellis Island's Registry Hall, where long lines of immigrants once gathered, more than 200 family members of survivors and their rescuers greeted each other and exchanged stories of how their loved ones made it to safety or how they helped.

Teicholz-Guedalia received, on behalf of her father who died in 1993, the Raoul Wallenberg Award.  The medal is named after the famous Swedish diplomat who sheltered Hungarian Jewish refugees from the Nazis by creating safe houses and handling out fake passports.

In fact, Teicholz and Wallenberg collaborated on the secret rescue mission, Teicholz-Guedalia said.  In the exhibit, a picture shows the two men together.

"It was his fortitude.  It was his will to live," Teicholz-Guedalia said about her father's survival and determination to save others.

On the third floor of the museum, guests and tourists stopped to look at photographs of diplomats and visas, which will be on display until Sept. 1.  On the first floor, an exhibit about American officials who helped free Jews also was on view.

Eric Saul, founder of "Visas for Life," said he began the project in 1994 when he heard about a Japanese diplomat, Sugihara Chiune, who saved thousands of Jewish refugees in Lithuania by giving out visas and letters for safe passage out of the country.

"He was doing it without permission," said Saul, a professional curator based in Morgantown, W.Va.

After the war, Chiune was fired from his post for issuing the documents and went back to Japan, where he was forgotten, Saul said.

When he first became interested in Chiune, Saul contacted Chiune's wife, Yukio, who told him, "I know the Jewish people are grateful, and someday they will really show it."

Saul, touched by her comment, mounted the first exhibit about Chiune in 1995 in San Francisco.  From there, the project snowballed as family members of other diplomats who helped in the rescue effort reached out to Saul.

The exhibit, displayed in 200 museums around the world, has grown to its current size, Saul said.  As for the number of people the diplomats saved, Saul said he can only guess, but the visas issued numbered in the hundreds of thousands.  The rescuers have died, but Saul did get a chance to interview a few several years ago.

"They said, ‘Wouldn't you have done it under the same circumstances?'" Saul said.

Agnes Hirschi said her father, Carl Lutz, a Swiss diplomat, felt a compulsion to help because of his strong Christian faith.  "He did it out of the conviction that God gave him this task," she said.

Vera Goodkin, a Lawrenceville resident who could not make it to the exhibit yesterday, said Saturday night she was saved by Wallenberg when he had her whisked away from a Hungarian prison and transferred to an orphanage.  She later reunited with her parents.

"Every rescuer has the same thread running through their life and that's the thread of courage and decency," she said in a telephone interview.  "You don't have to save a hundred thousand like Raoul Wallenberg.  If you save one life, it's as if you saved all of humanity."