When his boss, the Chinese ambassador to Berlin, Chen Jie, learned of this, he telephoned Ho and ordered him to stop so as not to damage the relation between China and Nazi Germany.\u00a0 Keep in mind that the then Chinese President, Chiang Kai-shek, had a close relationship with the German government.\u00a0 He used German military advisers and weapons, and had also sent his younger son, Chiang Wei-guo, to Germany to be trained by the Nazis.\u00a0 However, Ho did not follow the order and continued to issue visas to any Jew who applied.\u00a0 The ambassador even sent an officer to Vienna to investigate whether Ho was profiting from the visas.\u00a0 But no evidence of bribery was found.<\/p>\n
In early 1939, the Nazis confiscated Ho’s consulate on the pretense that it belonged to a Jew.\u00a0 Ho asked his government for relocation funds, but was refused, the reason being that China did not have the funds because it was at war with Japan.\u00a0 Ho rented smaller facilities at his own expense, and continued to issue visas to Austrian Jews until he left Vienna in May 1940.\u00a0 On November 10, 1939, he went to the home of one Jewish family to see them off after he had issued them visas.\u00a0 The Gestapo had arrested the father.\u00a0 Ho confronted the Nazi officers, who pulled a gun on him, resulting in a tense face-off. \u00a0 Finally the Gestapo backed down because they realized that Ho was a diplomat who issued valid visas.\u00a0 The family was then allowed to leave for Shanghai.<\/p>\n
It is not clear how many visas Ho had issued by the time he left Vienna in May 1940.\u00a0 We do know that by October 1938, or five months after he became the Chinese consul-general in Vienna, he had already issued 1,900 visas.\u00a0 Then came Kristallnacht in early November 1938 and persecution of Jews intensified, so more Jews wanted to emigrate.\u00a0 By September 1939 when war broke out in Europe, almost 70% of the approximately 185,000 Jews registered in Austria (about 90% lived in Vienna) had already emigrated, but of course to many countries, and not just to China.\u00a0 We also know that by that time (September 1939), more than 18,000 European (not just Austrian) Jewish refugees had arrived in Shanghai.\u00a0 Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that the number of visas issued by Ho to Austrian Jews from May 1938 to May 1940 was easily over 10,000.\u00a0 This does not necessarily mean that all these Austrian Jews settled in Shanghai, because they could use the Chinese visa to leave Austria and then go to other countries to settle.<\/p>\n
After Japan conquered Shanghai in November 1937, Shanghai was occupied by the army of Japan, and Shanghai allowed foreigners to enter Shanghai without visa or passport.\u00a0 So Austrian Jews did not require the Chinese visa to enter Shanghai, but they needed a visa to leave Austria.\u00a0 At that time, there were two main Jewish communities in Shanghai:\u00a0 The more wealthy Baghdadi Jewish community (coming mostly from Iraq) and the less wealthy Russian Jewish community. In February 1943, Japan issued the “Proclamation Concerning Restriction of Residence and Business of Stateless Refugees” that required Stateless Refugees to relocate to the “Restricted Sector for Stateless Refugees,” also known as the “Shanghai ghetto.”\u00a0 Stateless Refugees are those refugees who “arrived in Shanghai since 1937 from Germany (including former Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, former Poland, Latvia, and Estonia, etc) and have no nationality at present.\u201d\u00a0 The Shanghai ghetto was an area of approximately one square mile in the Hongkou District of Japanese-occupied Shanghai.\u00a0 About 20,000 Jewish refugees were relocated there, together with the Chinese who were already living there.\u00a0 The Ohel Moishe Synagogue, located in the Hongkou District, was established in 1907 to serve the Russian Jewish community.\u00a0 It was renovated and re-opened to the public in 2008 as the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum.<\/p>\n
After he left Vienna in May 1940, Ho transferred to New York and did political analysis, and then he returned to Chongqing, China’s wartime capital, to help in the war effort against Japan.\u00a0 In 1947, he was appointed as the Chinese ambassador to Egypt and several other middle Eastern countries.\u00a0\u00a0 After serving in the Middle East, he then served as the (Nationalist) Chinese’s ambassador to Mexico, Bolivia, and Colombia.\u00a0 He retired in 1973.\u00a0\u00a0 Although he served as a diplomat for his country for almost 40 years, he was denied a pension by the Chinese Nationalists with the reason being that he could not account for about US$300 of embassy expenses.\u00a0 His daughter Ho Manli believed that the snub with the pension was not a retaliation against what he did in Vienna, but because later on he offended Chiang Kai-shek’s oldest son, Chiang Ching-kuo.\u00a0 After retirement, he lived in California, until he died on September 28, 1997, at age 96.\u00a0 Taipei was not represented at his funeral, but Beijing’s consulate in San Francisco sent a wreath.<\/p>\n
Ho was a humble man.\u00a0 His daughter said “He was generous in nature.\u00a0 To help other people was very natural.\u00a0 From a humanitarian point of view, it was what you should do.\u00a0 There was nothing much to say.”\u00a0 Perhaps this attitude originated from his deep religious beliefs, which were instilled by Norwegian Lutherans who raised him after his father died and left his family destitute.\u00a0 Even though his 1990 memoir was 290 pages long, it contained only 10 pages on his tenure in Vienna.\u00a0 As a matter of fact, his heroic deeds in Vienna almost went unrecognized.\u00a0 It was after his death in 1997 that his daughter Ho Manli posted an obituary in a newspaper, with one line about her father’s work in Vienna.\u00a0 This was read by Dr. Eric Saul, an American professor of Jewish history and a Holocaust historian, who then embarked on the painstaking work of collecting evidence from those (and their descendants) who had received visas from Ho.\u00a0 Only after that, did Ho, who may have been responsible for saving the lives of more European Jews than any other single individual, received the recognition that he so deserved.\u00a0 In 2001 he was awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations,” which is Israel’s highest civil award, bestowed by Jerusalem on non-Jews who helped Jews at the risk of their own lives.\u00a0 The awardees are remembered in the Yad Vashem, the Holocaust History Museum in Jerusalem. Ho is now also known as “The Schindler of China.”<\/p>\n
Below are four photos I took in 2009 when I accompanied the “New Jersey Alliance for Learning and Preserving the History of WWII in Asia” (NJ-ALPHA) on the China Study Tour organized for American high school\/college teachers\/educators.\u00a0 The photos were taken at the “Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum” which used to be the Ohel Moishe Synagogue in the Hongkou District.\u00a0 This synagogue was established in 1907 to serve the Russian Jewish community that flourished in Shanghai. It was recently renovated and re-opened to the public in 2008 as the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum.\u00a0 You can see a bigger-size photo by clicking on the thumbnail photo.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>Entrance Plaque of Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum in Hongkou District of Shanghai<\/p><\/div>\n