Dr. He Fengshan (Feng Shan Ho), Chinese Consul General in Vienna, Austria from 1938 to 1940, was one of the first diplomats to save Jews by issuing them life-saving visas to escape the Holocaust.
He was responsible for saving thousands of Jews in Nazioccupied Austria in 1938 and 1939, yet he was completed unknown, even by the people whom he saved.
Irena Sendler
Irena Sendler is credited with having saved the lives of 2,500 Jewish children in the Warsaw ghetto during the Second World War.
Irena Sendler [pictured above] was a Polish Roman Catholic social worker who had links with Zegota, the code name for the Council for Aid to Jews. [T]he ultimate destination of the Jews was to be the Treblinka death camp and Zegota decided to try to save as many children as possible. Using the codename "Jolanta" Irena Sendler [led] this escape network.
One baby was spirited away in a mechanic's toolbox. Some children were transported in coffins, suitcases and sacks; others escaped through the sewer system beneath the city.
In later life Irena Sendler recalled the heartbreak of Jewish mothers having to part from their children: "We witnessed terrible scenes. Father agreed, but mother didn't. We sometimes had to leave those unfortunate families without taking their children from them. I'd go back there the next day and often found that everyone had been taken to the railway for transport to the death camps."
[In] 1943, her house was raided by the Gestapo and the Nazis took Sendler to the prison, where she was tortured; although her legs and feet were broken, and her body left permanently scarred, she refused to betray her network of helpers or the children whom she had saved. Sentenced to death, she escaped thanks to Zegota, who bribed a guard to set her free. She immediately returned to her work using a new identity.
In her later years Irena Sendler was cared for in a Warsaw nursing home by Elzbieta Ficowska, who - in 1942, at six months old - had been smuggled out of the ghetto by Irena in a carpenter's workbox.
She was nominated in 2007 for the Nobel Peace Prize ( she was still alive at age 97 ). Al Gore was given the prize for that year instead of her. Irena Sendler died the next year, age 98.