Chinese diplomat who saved thousands during Holocaust honored

0 Comments | AFP, May, 2008

WASHINGTON (AFP) — The heroic actions of a Chinese diplomat who saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust by issuing visas for them to flee Austria are being honoured in an exhibition at the US Congress.

Against the orders of his superiors, Feng Shan Ho, the Chinese consul-general in Vienna from 1937 to 1940, facilitated the safe departure of the Jews in the years immediately preceding the Second World War, including those sent to Nazi concentration camps.

Ho's extraordinary rescue efforts were not known until after his death in 1997 -- thanks to his reporter daughter's nose for news.

Ho had lived after retirement in 1973 for almost a quarter of a century in San Francisco, California, not far from some of the people he had saved but they never knew it....