Celebrating a Chinese hero

For San Francisco resident Hedy Durlester, the story of how her Jewish family escaped from Nazi-occupied Europe to Asia had been kept quiet for years. Her parents never wanted their daughter - 3 years old at the time - to remember the fear they lived through.

But she has learned about a Chinese man who played a major role in her family's safety - Ho Feng-shan, a diplomat who, while serving as the Chinese consul general in Vienna from 1938 to 1940, helped thousands of Jews like Durlester and her family obtain visas and escape the Holocaust.

"He is a very special person. How do you describe somebody like that? I don't know if I could do what he did," she told China Daily on Sunday. "My three children living in the Bay Area all know the story, and we have a movie about him at home."