A resolute spirit

By then, Lotte had raised three children, finished college, obtained her master's degree and, in 1985, at the age of 57, earned a PhD in psychology. She had a successful clinical practice and had turned the post-traumatic stress she suffered from her wartime experience into a means to help others.

Our meeting was a revelation to both of us. For Lotte, learning that the visas her father obtained had a face behind them, that it had not been just a random bit of bureaucracy, but an act of kindness, led her to see the past with fresh eyes. For me, Lotte's ability to transcend her childhood traumas and memories, to see past experiences with adult eyes and to place them in a larger context, gave me a fuller understanding of that complex history.

For the next 19 years, Lotte spoke and wrote with unflinching eloquence about the harsh realities faced by the Jewish refugees in Shanghai. She gave credit where credit was due: to the wealthy local Jews and Jewish relief organizations who provided housing, soup kitchens and schooling for the refugee children, and facilitated the creation of an exile community.

She spoke with regret that neither she, nor her fellow refugees, ever learned the culture or language of their host country. The common struggle for survival had precluded any real social interactions with their Chinese neighbors, to whom the refugees were just another added "sliver of nakojin" ("foreigner" in Shanghai dialect), albeit poorer, Lotte recalled.

She decried a recent revisionist trend that embellished and distorted this Shanghai history into a "fictive tale" of hearts-and-flowers. "Nothing could be further from the essence of the actual experience," she wrote.

In her last years, Lotte often said how "lucky" she had been in life. But it was more than luck. It was Lotte herself: her strength of character, her intelligence, her resourcefulness, and her courage. My father would have been proud to have saved someone like her.

Ho Manli, the daughter of the late Chinese diplomat rescuer Ho Feng Shan, has been researching and documenting her father's heroism for the past two decades. She was one of the foreign editors who helped launch China Daily in 1981 and has continued to work with the paper on major projects such as the 1990 Asian Games, the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the launching of the paper's US edition.