Below is an amazing story about another “Oscar Schindler of the Far East who, with a stroke of the pen rescued thousands of Jews from the death camps.” 

NATIONAL POST 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.

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