Ho Feng-shan honored in California

Hedy Durlester stands before her family picture at the symposium held at consulate general of China in San Francisco for Ho Feng-shan. Chen Jia / China Daily

For San Francisco resident Hedy Durlester, the story of how her Jewish family escaped from Nazi-occupied Europe to Asia had been kept quiet for years. Her parents never wanted their daughter - 3 years old at the time - to remember the fear they lived through.

But she has learned about a Chinese man who played a major role in her family's safety - Ho Feng-shan, a diplomat who, while serving as the Chinese consul general in Vienna from 1938 to 1940, helped thousands of Jews like Durlester and her family obtain visas and escape the Holocaust.

"He is a very special person. How do you describe somebody like that? I don't know if I could do what he did," she told China Daily on Sunday. "My three children living in the Bay Area all know the story, and we have a movie about him at home."

She and her husband, Mervyn Durlester, were among hundreds of members of the San Francisco Jewish community who participated in a Sunday symposium held at the consulate general of China in San Francisco honoring Ho Feng-shan.

In 2000, Israel bestowed one of its highest honors - the title of "Righteous Among the Nations" - on Ho posthumously "for his humanitarian courage" in the rescue of Austrian Jews.

"When my father died in 1997, the story of his humanitarian efforts was completely unknown," says Ho Manli, Ho Feng-shan's daughter.

"Perhaps it was grief - not wanting to let go just yet of my father, perhaps it stirred my journalist's instinct for a good story, which propelled me, a month after my father's death, to embark on an unplanned odyssey into uncharted waters to bring to light a history buried for so many years," she says.

With the Nazi takeover of Austria in March 1938, anti-Semitism and the persecution of Jews erupted in full force. Using a policy of coerced expulsion, Nazi authorities told Jews that if they showed proof of emigration, they, along with relatives deported to Nazi concentration camps, would be allowed to leave.