A visa to Shanghai. The Chinese consulate in Vienna issued an average of 500 visas a month to Jews in the nearly two years after the Anschluss.[Photo provided to China Daily]

Document hunt

One question I am often asked is how many visas were issued and how many lives were saved under my father's watch.

After more than seven decades, there is no way of finding exact figures. The best that can be determined now is that the visas numbered in the thousands. Based on the highest serial numbers of visas that I have found, close to 4,000 were issued about a year after the Anschluss. How many more were issued in the remaining months before the outbreak of World War II on Sept 1, 1939, when routes of escape began to shut down, is difficult to determine now.

The only surviving Chinese documentation I have found indicates that the Chinese consulate in Vienna issued an average of 500 visas a month to Jews in the nearly two years after the Anschluss. I have also uncovered evidence that in addition to visas, my father issued affidavits and other documents to help Jews escape.

As to how many lives were saved, even my father himself never knew. One visa sometimes served an entire family. My father was never reunited with any of those he had helped. The majority of them never even knew his name.

Another question that I am often asked is: Why would a man from China save Jews in Europe when others would not?

My immediate answer is that if you knew my father, you would not need to ask, but of course that is no longer possible. What he did was totally in character. He was a man of conscience and courage with a compassionate heart.

My father's own explanation for what he did was simply this: "On seeing the Jews so doomed, it was only natural to feel deep compassion, and from a humanitarian standpoint, to be impelled to help them."

Another reason that would have propelled my father to extend his hand to Jews is that he came from a generation of Chinese who felt that China had been humiliated and persecuted by 100 years of foreign imperialism. In fighting Japanese aggression, this generation was determined not to allow that humiliation to continue. In that sense my father was very sensitive to persecution and to bullying of any peoples.

Uncovering history

My father was born into poverty in rural China. Academically brilliant, he obtained a doctorate in 1932 from the University of Munich, where he witnessed the rise of Adolf Hitler. In 1935, he joined the Chinese Foreign Service and served for nearly 40 years before retiring to San Francisco, California. Ten years after his death in 1997, in accordance with his wishes, I took his and my mother's ashes back to China to be buried in his beloved hometown of Yiyang.

When I began this search nearly 18 years ago, I never imagined that it would keep unfolding as it has. As I waded deeper into these uncharted waters, the story became panoramic and grew to encompass the hitherto unchronicled history of escape from a genocide in Europe, and revealed how one person's actions led to the creation of a refuge on the other side of the world - in China.

Uncovering this history has been my greatest feat as a journalist. I had to master the very complex and turbulent history and politics of both China and Europe during that era, because I feel a responsibility not just to my father, but to the survivors and to history to record it accurately.

What my father did in those two short years in Vienna has to be placed in a much larger context, which is the interplay of Chinese and Western history in the 20th century. And this commemorative plaque, which took five years of effort to bring to fruition, is a first step toward that end.