Daughter of ‘Chinese Schindler’ protests website using father’s legacy to sell homes

Daughter of ‘Chinese Schindler’ protests website using father’s legacy to sell homes Manli Ho condemns real estate site for invoking her father’s rescue of Jews to promote US$40,000 houses in his Chinese hometown When Manli Ho saw her father’s name being used to advertise US$40,000 houses in his hometown in China, she was outraged. “He Saved 18,000 Jewish Lives in WWII. His Hometown Has Homes for $40,000,” one headline on the now-removed English-language webpage read. Manli Ho, 75, is the daughter of Ho Feng-shan, the Chinese diplomat widely known in the West as the “Chinese Schindler” for issuing thousands of visas to Jews fleeing Nazi persecution while serving as China’s consul-general in Vienna, Austria, from 1938 to 1940. The “Schindler” comparison refers to German businessman Oskar Schindler, who saved about 1,200 Jews by employing them in his factories in occupied Poland during the Holocaust. His story inspired the Academy Award-winning 1993 film Schindler’s List. But now, a real estate website is using Ho Feng-shan’s legacy to sell homes in his hometown, drawing backlash from local authorities in Yiyang and his daughter in the United States. The website, Yiyang Fangchan (yiyangfangchan.com) – “fangchan” means real estate in Chinese – markets property in Yiyang, a city in Hunan province with 4 million residents where Ho Feng-shan was born in 1901.