In March nineteen thirty eight, Germany annexed Austria, and overnight about a hundred and eighty five thousand Austrian Jews were living in a country whose laws had changed underneath them.
What followed was, at that stage, not yet what came later. It was expulsion. The policy was to make life impossible until people left, and to take everything they owned on the way out.
Which sounds, at first hearing, almost survivable. Leave, and live.
Except that leaving required a visa to somewhere. Not a ticket, not money, but a stamp in a passport from a country prepared to receive you. And the extraordinary and shameful fact of nineteen thirty eight is that almost nowhere would give one.
In July nineteen thirty eight, delegates from thirty-two countries met at Evian, on the French shore of Lake Geneva, specifically to discuss what to do about Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria.
They met for nine days in a very good hotel.
One after another, the delegations expressed sympathy and explained why their own country could not take more people. There was unemployment. There were quotas. There were concerns about the effect on the labour market.
Australia's delegate said that as his country did not have a racial problem, it was not desirous of importing one. Britain declined to discuss Palestine. The United States kept its existing quota and did not fill it.
One country offered to take a substantial number, and it was the Dominican Republic.
German newspapers reported the conference with open delight, and the point they made was hard to argue with. Everybody condemned the treatment of the Jews, and nobody wanted them.
There was, in nineteen thirty eight, exactly one significant place on earth that a Jewish family could reach without a visa, and almost nobody would have guessed it.
It was Shanghai.
Shanghai's odd status was a leftover of a century of foreign concessions and, by that year, of Japanese occupation. Nobody was fully in charge of immigration, and so nobody was refusing anybody. If you could physically get there, you could land.
But Austria would not let you leave without documentary proof that somewhere would receive you. So the paradox was this: you did not need a visa to enter Shanghai, but you needed a visa to Shanghai in order to be allowed out of Vienna.
After the night of broken glass in November nineteen thirty eight, when synagogues across Germany and Austria were burned and tens of thousands of Jewish men were arrested, the queue outside every consulate in Vienna became a queue of wives and mothers holding the paperwork for a husband or a son who was already in custody.
That paper was the whole difference. It also, crucially, got people out of camps. Men arrested and held could often be released if their families produced evidence of imminent emigration.
The Chinese Consul-General in Vienna was Ho Feng-Shan. He was thirty-seven, from a poor family in Hunan, orphaned young, educated by missionaries, with a doctorate from a German university and excellent German.
He began issuing visas to Shanghai, and he issued them to anybody who asked.
He did not require the applicant to prove they intended to travel to China, or to show a ticket, or to demonstrate means. He understood perfectly well that many of the people in front of him would use his stamp to get an exit permit and then go somewhere else entirely, and he issued them anyway.
The scale is genuinely hard to establish, because the records were largely lost and the visas were serially numbered rather than counted. What is documented is that the numbering had reached about two hundred by the end of June nineteen thirty eight, a few months in, and over nineteen hundred by the end of October.
That is one office, in a few months, at that pace. Estimates of the total run into several thousand, and some go much higher, and honest historians say the true figure is unknowable.
There is a family called Goldstaub whose son spent weeks going from consulate to consulate and was refused everywhere, and who walked into the Chinese consulate and left with twenty visas, for his parents and every relative he could think of.
His superiors told him to stop.
The Chinese ambassador in Berlin, Chen Jie, instructed him to be far more restrictive. The reason was diplomatic. China was in the third year of a catastrophic war with Japan. It had lost Shanghai and Nanjing. It was desperate for weapons and for allies, and Germany had until very recently been supplying and training the Chinese army, and Berlin was not to be annoyed.
Ho declined. He argued that issuing visas was within his authority and continued issuing them.
The Germans applied pressure of their own. The building housing the Chinese consulate was owned by a Jewish family, and the authorities confiscated it. The consulate lost its premises.
So Ho rented a smaller place, and paid for it himself, and carried on.
There is a story, told by his family, of a night when a group of young men came to his home to threaten him. Ho was a small man and not a brave-looking one, and the account has him receiving them politely and then declining to discuss the matter, and the visas continued the following morning.
He was formally reprimanded. An entry went into his file for insubordination. In nineteen forty he was transferred out of Vienna, and years later, after the war, he was disciplined over a trivial matter of expenses and left the diplomatic service without a pension.
He never talked about it.
Ho lived a long life. He served in several posts, retired to San Francisco, and died in nineteen ninety seven at the age of ninety six. In his memoirs, written in Chinese and running to hundreds of pages, the entire episode occupies a few lines. He wrote that seeing the persecution of the Jews, it was only natural to feel compassion, and that from a humanitarian standpoint, helping them was the right thing to do.
That is all. He did not name a number, or a person, and his own children did not know the extent of it.
After his death, his daughter Manli Ho, a journalist, began going through his papers and then through archives in Vienna, Jerusalem and Washington, tracking down surviving visa numbers and the families who held them.
In two thousand, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem named Ho Feng-Shan Righteous Among the Nations, the honour Israel gives to non-Jews who risked themselves to save Jewish lives. He was the first Chinese person to receive it. The citation calls him the Chinese Schindler, which he would probably have found embarrassing.
It is worth holding two facts side by side. In nineteen thirty eight, China was being invaded, its capital had fallen, and its cities were being bombed. It was in no position to help anybody. And its consulate in Vienna was handing out more visas than the consulates of countries that were safe, rich and at peace.
The next episode is about a Japanese diplomat in Lithuania who did something very similar, at almost the same moment, also against orders, also without ever making much of it afterwards. The two men never met and neither knew of the other.
There is a question that always comes up about this kind of story, and it deserves a straight answer. Was Ho in serious danger? Probably not of his life, because he was a diplomat of a foreign power. He was in certain danger of his career, and he lost it, and he knew he would. That is a smaller risk than some people took in these years and it is not nothing, and the number of officials in Vienna in nineteen thirty eight who were willing to take even that much can be counted quickly.
Here is something to think about tonight. Thirty-two countries met at a lake in Switzerland and agreed that the problem was terrible and that nothing could be done. One man at a desk decided that something could. What is the difference between those two rooms?