National Post Nov 1, 2011
TORONTO — Eric Goldstaub curses, spits out a stream of naughty words and then abruptly apologizes for having uttered them. He can’t help himself, he says. It was a long time ago, a lifetime, but when he thinks back to the Vienna he once knew and all the doors that he knocked on — and all the doors that were shut in his face — his temper sparks.
“I went to every goddamn consulate there ever was in Vienna. Vienna, as the Austrian capital, had all the consulates,” the 89-year-old growls. “I wanted to get visas for my parents and for my relatives. I had 20 relatives. My family, we were 20. And I was going from one bloody consulate to the other. ”
He was a Viennese Jew, and this was his beloved Vienna in 1938, after the Austrians had welcomed Hitler and his Nazi thugs with straight-armed salutes and a campaign of Jewish persecution that would escalate into the Holocaust.
Mr. Goldstaub was a teenager from an influential Jewish family, with a trench coat, a fedora, kind-looking eyes and a talent for dancing.
His fruitless waltz around the city district housing international embassies ended when he visited the Chinese consulate and was met there by Dr. Feng Shan Ho, the Consul General.
“It was a warm reception, and he said bring your passports tomorrow and we will give you all visas,” Mr. Goldstaub says.
“I didn’t believe my eyes, my ears. It was like a miracle that he would say that and, sure enough, I went back the following day and brought all the family’s passports and he sent me away with visas for Shanghai, China.
“And I didn’t even know where the hell China was.”
Much was lost in the Holocaust including, in large part, the story of a Chinese diplomat, an Oscar Schindler of the Far East who, with a stroke of the pen rescued thousands of Jews from the death camps.
“Very few people did the right thing during the Holocaust,” says Bernie Farber, former CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress, who is lecturing in Toronto on Wednesday about the unsung heroes of the Holocaust, for which Mr. Goldstaub will be in the audience. “If more people acted as did Feng Shan Ho, and others, it would be a different world today.”
The world in 1938 was a dangerous place, especially for Jews. Shanghai, an open port city without any diplomatic controls and with a Japanese occupying army watching over it, became a safe harbour for thousands fleeing the coming horrors in Europe.
“People usually ask me two questions about my father,” says Manli Ho, the diplomat’s daughter, from San Francisco.
“Why would some Chinese guy be saving Jews in Vienna when so many Europeans were turning their backs, and why didn’t he talk about it?”
The answer, she believes, is that helping people was the most natural thing for her father to do. And since it was, he never spoke about it after the fact.
Dr. Ho devoted one sentence of a 700-page Chinese language memoir he published in 1990 to the Viennese visa scheme. What he omitted is a Hollywood blockbuster that has never been made.
For two years, he issued visas. Five hundred a month on average, despite being ordered to stop by his superiors and being evicted from the building housing his office by the Germans. Dr. Ho opened a new office, and paid for it out of his own pocket when his Chinese boss in Berlin shut off the money tap. He kept issuing visas until he was transferred out of Austria in 1940. He died in California in 1997, having never met the people he helped save, beyond a fleeting, life-giving encounter in Vienna.
..Mr. Goldstaub was among the lucky ones. He got out with his family and, after 12 years in Shanghai, a time he remembers as a “great adventure” of youth, he moved to Canada and began importing classic clocks and barometers.
“My company is called Ergo Industries — Ergo — for Eric Goldstaub,” says the proprietor, plunking a business card in my palm.
Mr. Goldstaub is honorary president. It is a title he takes seriously, spending most mornings at an office in suburban Toronto reading newspapers, drinking tea and kibitzing with the employees, including his son, Danny, who runs the place.
The old man is turning 90 in a few weeks. On a rare morning at home, in a spacious apartment, surrounded by ticking clocks and trinkets from China and photos of his grandchildren, Mr. Goldstaub smiles. He says that he has lived a good life, one full of richness and luck.
“If I never knocked on that door in Vienna I would have been in a concentration camp,” he says. “And I would have died, I am almost sure of that. Our whole family would have died.
“We needed Feng Shan Ho. He saved us. It was a miracle.”
National Post
