The Other Schindlers (14 page)

Betty wrote regularly to the Guicherds all through this period and in 1951, when she was 16, she visited them whilst she was staying at a Jewish holiday camp. She went to Israel in 1964. She stayed in touch and visited them regularly. Victor died on 12 March 1988 at the age of 90; Josephine had died in 1984.
35

Betty told me that Victor had a long correspondence with Yad Vashem but was not willing to have the medal of the Righteous Among the Nations. Although he was honoured by Israel, he never received it.
36
However, he made Betty a gift of the large metal key to the barn where she and her brother Jacques used to play
and hide. It hangs on the wall of her home in Jerusalem, a tangible memento of a truly remarkable couple.

Since I conducted my research a website, www.hiddenroots.org, has been created for both Betty and David’s family histories. Sadly, David died on 31 March 2006. Betty recently visited the village again with her grandchildren and found that the bread box they used to hide in was still there and offered to buy it. The current owner refused to sell it to her as he was giving it to her. Betty’s problem now is to get it to Jerusalem.
37

Dr Feng Shan Ho (1901–97)
was at the Chinese Embassy in Vienna at the time of the Anschluss in March 1938. He witnessed Hitler’s triumphant parade through Vienna and later, with the diplomatic corps, met him. Dr Ho recalled: ‘He was a short little man. He had a ridiculous moustache. He was an
unspeakable
martinet.’
38
He subsequently told his daughter how appalled he had been by the fanatical welcome he witnessed the Austrians give Hitler.
39
Immediately following the arrival of the Nazis, vicious persecution made many of the 185,000 Austrian Jews desperate to leave their native land, but no country was willing to accept them. In May 1938 the Chinese Embassy became a consulate and Dr Ho was appointed Consul-General at the age of 37.
40
The Evian Conference in July 1938 confirmed the Jews’ appalling situation.

Dr Ho was so perturbed by the Jews’ circumstances that he personally decided to issue visas to Shanghai. These visas were not actually required by the authorities for entry into China, but the Nazi authorities required such proof of emigration to give permission to leave Austria. Additionally, possession of such visas meant that some Jews detained in camps such as Dachau and Buchenwald were released to return safely to their families; and countries such as Italy and Britain were
prepared
to grant transit visas with such proof of a final destination.

Dr Ho was extremely sympathetic to the plight of the Jews. He later wrote in his memoirs:

Dr Ho knew that many people would not wish to go to China, but his visas simply gave them an escape route from Nazi Europe. By September 1938
knowledge
of the availability of the Chinese visas was widespread and queues were
forming at the Chinese Consulate. Many Jews waited for days, like Hans Kraus, whose wife Gerda recalled:

The difficulties of evading the Nazis have been confirmed by two Viennese escapees. Charles Peter Carter was only 17 when he was ‘thrown down the stairs at school a week after the Anschluss, when being a Jew in Vienna meant, among other things, experiencing the transformation of people’s attitudes from
friendliness
to hostility’. He decided to leave and relatives in London acted as guarantors for his visa which was granted. However:

Otto Fleming also corroborated the difficulties. In 1938 he was thrown out of the University of Vienna just before he was due to sit his final medical
examinations
, and thus, having no qualifications, no country wanted to take him. Hearing that the Chinese Consulate was issuing visas to Shanghai, he bought a steamer ticket there and then approached the British Consulate requesting a tourist visa for Palestine, en route for Shanghai.
44
This was granted without difficulties but Otto stayed in Palestine and never reached Shanghai. He never actually obtained the Chinese visa, but knowing it would be easy led Otto to leave. He confirmed the dangers of being seen in the streets of Vienna at this time and told me that women rather than men tended to go out more because they often were less Jewish-looking and less likely to be harassed by the Nazis.
45

Dr Ho personally intervened for his friends the Rosenbergs on the very morning after Kristallnacht, when he called at their home to say goodbye. He had issued them with visas for Shanghai but the Gestapo had called at the house to take Mr Rosenberg to a labour camp. His courageous intervention
46
led to the release of Mr Rosenberg and the family left Vienna safely.
47
Dr Ho’s
behaviour
caused considerable concern amongst the authorities, as the Nationalist
Chinese government continued to maintain good diplomatic relations with Nazi Germany, and Chiang Kai-shek, China’s ruler, admired the Nazis.

Not surprisingly, the Chinese Ambassador in Berlin, Chen Jie, who was Consul-General Ho’s direct superior, was adamantly opposed to the issuing of visas to Jewish refugees. He wanted to maintain good diplomatic relations with Germany and did not want to contravene Hitler’s policy against Jews. Having learned that the Chinese Consulate in Vienna was issuing large numbers of visas to Jews, Ambassador Chen called Ho by telephone and ordered him to desist. Ho tried to deflect him by saying that ‘the Foreign Ministry’s orders’ were to maintain a ‘liberal policy’ in this regard. On hearing this, Chen snapped: ‘If that is so, I will take care of the Foreign Ministry end, you just follow my orders!’
48

But Dr Ho continued with his ‘liberal policy’, issuing visas at a rate of about 500 a month for two years. It is estimated that he saved in excess of 12,000 Jews but it is not possible to know the real number. It is known that on 18 October 1938 he issued visa No 1681 to Mrs Lustig and visa No 1787 to Mr Lustig. They used them to escape to Shanghai in January 1939 and their daughter Lotte, now 76, still has them. She concludes that these numbers prove Dr Ho issued at least 106 visas that day.
49

Aware of the dangers in Vienna, Dr Ho sent his wife and 11-year-old son to America for safety. In the spring of 1938 the Nazis confiscated the Chinese Consulate’s building. Dr Ho’s government refused his request for funds to
relocate
the Consulate. He therefore moved the Consulate to smaller premises, meeting all the costs himself. He was censured by his bosses on 8 April 1939, and in May 1940 he was transferred from Vienna. He alone seemed willing to help the desperate Austrian Jews. When asked why, he replied: ‘I thought it only natural to feel compassion and to want to help. From the standpoint of humanity, that is the way it should be.’
50

After he left Vienna he returned to China, where he was involved in the war effort against the Japanese. In 1947 he became Ambassador to Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries for nine years. His daughter Manli was born in Cairo. After the civil war, he sided with the Chinese Nationalists in Taiwan and was their Ambassador in Mexico, Bolivia and Colombia. He retired in 1973 but the Chinese Nationalist government in Taiwan ‘launched a public vendetta to
publicly
discredit him’ and he was denied his pension after forty years’ service. Manli has written that the reasons for this attack have never been revealed, and thirty years later his name had not been cleared.
51
He lived to be 96 and died on 28 September 1997, having written his autobiography,
Forty Years of My Diplomatic Life
, in Chinese in 1990. On 7 July 2000 he was recognised as a Righteous Among the Nations by Israel but, as Dr Paldiel commented on Dr Ho’s nomination: ‘I find it sad that Mr Ho was nominated only after he passed away in 1997. We could
have put these questions to him, which would have made it easier … But also we could have thanked him in person.’
52

Normally Righteous have to have put themselves at risk and have received no payment. In the case of diplomats, Yad Vashem has to be clear that the
diplomat
was disobeying his government’s instructions before an award can be made. Manli Ho believes it was her father’s poverty-stricken childhood that influenced his behaviour towards the Austrian Jews. She does not regard him as having been a religious man. She considers that it was education that influenced him most – both in the Western liberal arts and traditional Chinese Confucian ethics. Added to this was the influence of growing up during a transitional period in Chinese history, when the ancient East met the new West. She
therefore
believes he tried to live his life according to ‘the best in Confucian and Judeo-Christian values’.
53

Manli also confirms her father’s pride in being Chinese and how he brought her and her brother up to value their Chinese heritage, naming them after Confucian principles. She also feels that he was influenced by the times into which he was born. He was part of ‘a generation of Chinese who felt that China had been humiliated and persecuted by 100 years of foreign imperialism. His
generation
was determined not to allow that humiliation to continue. In that sense my father was very sensitive to persecution and to bullying of any peoples.’
54

Ho was born on 10 September 1901, in a rural part of Hunan Province. At the age of 7 he was not only poor but fatherless as well. The Norwegian Lutheran Mission in China not only helped him and his family, it educated him as well, and for that he was grateful all his life.
55
He wrote in his autobiography:

When his daughter turned 20, the Chinese legal age of majority, Dr Ho wrote to her saying ‘that after having raised and educated me, he hoped that I would live my life as a “useful” human being. I don’t think I could have asked for a better role model.’ Rabbi Moshe Linchner spoke at an event to honour Dr Ho in Jerusalem on 19 February 2004, in the presence of Manli, the Chinese Ambassador and some of the survivors and their children. He said:

He did not believe in telling everyone what he had done and his daughter quotes an ancient Chinese proverb: ‘Good deeds performed to be seen by others are not truly good.’
58
Dr Ho expressed his philosophy of life in a poem he wrote for his wife Shauyun on New Year’s day 1947:

In September 2007 Manli took her father’s ashes back to China, ten years after his death, as he had always wished to be laid to rest in his native land. He was buried in his hometown of Yiyang in Hunan Province in the beautiful Hui-longshan Park. The city of Yiyang scheduled a commemorative event on 28 September 2007 in honor of his ‘homecoming’. Manli wrote on that occasion: