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Novel about Chinese rescuer of Jews raises questions about facts vs. fiction in Holocaust stories
TAIPEI (JTA) — Ho Feng-Shan, the Chinese diplomat stationed in Vienna who helped thousands of Jews escape from Europe during World War II, never met Adolf Eichmann.
But in “Night Angels,” a novel based on his life, Feng-Shan comes face to face with Eichmann several times — and his wife Grace’s Jewish tutor, Lola, tries to kill the architect of the Holocaust.
That detail is one of many that has spurred Ho Manli, Feng-Shan’s daughter, to speak out against “Night Angels,” the fourth novel by the Chinese-American author Weina Dai Randel. Manli says the book distorts elements of her father’s story, which was unknown before she spent decades documenting his heroic efforts to issue visas allowing Jews to escape to Shanghai.
“What I have found in doing this story is it’s very difficult to try to maintain the historical integrity of the facts,” Manli told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Countless people … want to use this for their own means, whether it be commercial like this novelist, whether it be political, or whatever. So over the two decades that I have been doggedly trying to uncover more and more, I’ve been constantly fending off these sorts of opportunistic assaults.”
The dispute is casting a shadow over the novel, released this month, and reinvigorating longstanding debates over the importance of truth in historical fiction — particularly in stories about the Holocaust.
“Night Angels” follows Feng-Shan and his wife, Grace, as they risk their lives by issuing visas that allow thousands of Jews escape Germany and Austria to Shanghai. Grace, one of the novel’s narrators and main characters, is based on Feng-Shan’s real second wife with the same name who was no longer in Vienna after the Anschluss — Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938, and the period in which the novel is set. By that time, Feng-Shan had already sent Grace away to Boston. She never witnessed Nazi rule or Feng-Shan’s efforts to save Jews, Manli writes.
Several other events in the book, including Grace’s friendship with a Jewish woman who attempts to assassinate Eichmann and her development of a morphine addiction, are fully fictional.
Manli first took aim at the book in a column last month in China Daily. The novel, she wrote, “exploits real names, real people, real events and places, in what is essentially a Holocaust-themed melodrama.”
“In online reviews, readers say that they are thrilled to learn of my father and this history — except of course, what they have learned is not really history, my father’s, or anyone else’s,” she wrote.
Randel and her publisher, Amazon Publishing, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Randel dedicated the novel to “Ho Feng-Shan, his family, and all the angels in Vienna and beyond.” The book includes a disclaimer disclosing that its contents are a work of fiction and a product of the author’s imagination.
But that’s not satisfactory to some readers, including Tina Kanagaratnam, co-founder of the heritage group Historic Shanghai, whose book group read a previous Randel story set in Shanghai.
“If you’re talking about a historical character, you have to get the history right. Otherwise, just create a fictional character,” Kanagaratnam told JTA. “This is written for people who don’t know the history, but as Manli said, that’s dangerous, because then that’s what they remember. That’s what they take away.”
Ho Monto, left, and Ho Manli stand in front of the Righteous Among the Nations wall at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, Jan. 23, 2001. (Isaac Harari/AFP via Getty Images)
“Night Angels” has accumulated thousands of positive reviews on Amazon and has been promoted by Jewish organizations across the country. On Wednesday, the Jewish Book Council, in collaboration with Tablet Magazine and the Jewish Museum in New York City, will hold an event with Randel and journalist Jonathan Freedland that will explore “fact, fiction, and the sometimes blurred line between them.”
Randel’s book adds to a long list of Holocaust stories occupying that blurry territory, dating from the genre’s early days. Many readers believed, for example, that “The Painted Bird,” the pivotal work of Holocaust fiction from the 1960s, was based on author Jerzy Koszinski’s experience during the Holocaust; it was not. Scholars and booksellers have long agonized over whether to call Elie Wiesel’s “Night” a memoir or a novel, and whether the distinction matters when it is taught in American classrooms.
The fight has extended to questions over who can tell which stories from Holocaust. In 2014, Haaretz journalist Judy Maltz filed a lawsuit against Penguin Canada and author Jenny Witterick alleging that Witterick’s novel, “My Mother’s Secret,” copied Maltz’s documentary film about her family’s rescue during World War II. The court ruled in favor of Witterick on the grounds that copyright protection does not apply to historical events.
“An author is only ever responsible to their own fiction. They have creative license. And fictionalization of other people against their will is part of the history of literature,” said Helen Finch, a professor at the University of Leeds who studies representations of the Holocaust in German literature. “But that doesn’t absolve the writer from criticism.”
Manli — a journalist who has worked for the Boston Globe and helped found the China Daily, a state-backed media outlet, in 1981 — has made it her mission to set the record straight on Feng-Shan’s story. She began researching her father after his death in 1997, while writing his obituary. One line in his memoir from 1990 that recalled “saving who knows how many Jews” piqued her interest and led to a 25-year quest to document the extent of what her father did during the war.
His story of defying both his own government and the government of Germany to write Shanghai visas for thousands of persecuted Jews had been previously unknown, even to the refugees themselves — most of whom never met Feng-Shan.
Manli’s research led to Feng-Shan’s recognition by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum and memorial authority, in 2000 as “Righteous Among the Nations,” an honor given to those who risked their own lives to help Jews during World War II. Since then, greater attention has been paid to his story, and memorials across the world, from Israel to China to Italy, bear his name today.
Manli said Randel reached out to her several times before her book was published but after it had already been written. According to Manli, Randel sought out her blessing on the book by phone and email, saying that “the Holocaust history and your father’s history is now being forgotten” and adding that she wanted to help spread that history. Manli, who is working on a book of her own about her father, said she refused to answer, “just from the tone of her letter and what she wanted.”
“I have been burned before by this,” Manli told JTA. “I knew immediately that this was not something that I wanted to participate in and certainly that I wasn’t going to endorse.”
In an email shared with JTA in response to Manli’s editorial, Randel wrote that she has “great respect for Dr. Ho Fenghan[sic] and his family. I’m surprised to hear such strong negative criticism. I’m puzzled to see my gesture of respect is viewed in such a hostile way. If Ms. Manli Ho wishes to speak to me, I’m here.”
Randel, according to a biography on her website, came to the United States from China at 24 and became “the first Asian American novelist who intertwined Chinese history with the Jewish diaspora in Shanghai during WWII.”
Her previous novel, “The Last Rose of Shanghai,” follows a Chinese woman who falls in love with a German Jewish refugee living in the Shanghai Ghetto, the restricted area in which over 20,000 displaced Jews lived during World War II, under brutal oversight by Japanese officials who occupied the area. In interviews before the book’s 2021 release, Randel recalled hearing about Jewish refugees while she was living near the district that housed the ghetto.
After moving to the United States, she married an American Jew and is raising her children with both cultures in Boston. She has said “The Last Rose of Shanghai” was inspired by her interest in the history she saw in Shanghai and a desire to pay homage to her Jewish side of the family.
“I think it’s apt to say the survival of Shanghai Jews is also a story of how we as different races and as human beings shine and triumph over war and adversity,” she said in a January 2022 interview with World Literature Today.
But other researchers and authors deeply familiar with Feng-Shan’s story and Jewish history in Shanghai told JTA that “The Last Rose of Shanghai” also contained historical inaccuracies, including misrepresentation of real people who appear as characters, such as Victor Sassoon, a Jewish businessman and member of the dynasty known as the “Rothschilds of the East,” and Laura Margolis, the first female Joint Distribution Committee representative.
The book also includes a character named Goya, described as “a shameless Jew … who somehow had won the Japanese’s trust.”
The Jewish character is based on the real Kanoh Ghoya, who was not Jewish, but a notoriously cruel Japanese officer who had dubbed himself “king of the Jews” and “was infamous for his inhumane treatment of ghetto inhabitants,” according to the USC Shoah Foundation.
According to Publisher’s Marketplace, “The Last Rose of Shanghai” was sold to Lake Union Publishing — an imprint of Amazon Publishing — in 2021 as half of a two-book deal worth between $100,000 and $250,000. It was a finalist for a Jewish National Book Award that year. (The Jewish Book Council, which confers those awards, did not respond to multiple requests for comments about the “Night Angels” event.)
Kanagaratnam said Historic Shanghai’s book group read “The Last Rose of Shanghai” in 2021 and hosted Randel for an event. The group was unsatisfied by Randel’s response when factual issues were brought to her attention, particularly the characterization of Ghoya as Jewish, Randel dismissed them, Kanagaratnam said.
Randel’s novel is only part of a growing consciousness among the general public of the Shanghai Jewish refugee story. In recent decades, especially following the normalization of Israel-China relations in 1992 and Feng-Shan’s recognition by Yad Vashem, both governments have promoted the history, sometimes distorting facts to push different narratives about their wartime past.
New books and other media adaptations about the Shanghai Jewish refugee story have proliferated, such as the musical “Shanghai Sonatas” (2022) and the novels “Someday We Will Fly” (2019),“The Lives Before Us” (2019), and “The World and All It Holds” (2023). Other films and books are forthcoming.
“The audience of people who are interested in, if you will, an ‘exotic’ Jewish story, I think has meant that we’re seeing more and more of these. Everyone’s heard the Holocaust story. But now here’s one in an exotic setting,” said Kanagaratnam. “I think authors need to take responsibility. But honestly, I also blame the publishing industry, because where are the fact-checkers? A lot of the stuff in this can be really easily googled.”
Finch said novels that are set during that period are “always a work of fiction about the present.”
“So the question is, why is this author writing this book now? What does that say about the current moment when she’s writing? And what is with Randel trying to reflect either consciously or unconsciously in contemporary politics as well?”
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Hungarian Filmmaker Says ‘Orgy of Antisemitism Overtaking the West,’ Feels ‘Ostracized’ by Film Industry
Hungarian film director László Nemes attends the photocall of “Moulin” at the 79th Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, France. Photo: Marco Barada / SOPA Images via Reuters Connect
Hungarian Jewish filmmaker László Nemes talked about antisemitism, the “politicization of cinema” regarding Jewish subject matters, and what he believes is an unhealthy “obsession with Jews” in a new interview with The Guardian published on Monday.
Nemes’s latest film, “Moulin,” which is about French resistance leader Jean Moulin, debuted at the Cannes Film Festival on Sunday.
His 2025 film “Orphan” is about a teenage Jewish boy who survived the Holocaust by being hidden in an orphanage. While he searches for his missing father, he discovers the truth about how his mother survived the Holocaust. The film has so far not secured a US distribution deal, and Nemes believes it is because of the film’s Jewish subject matter at a time when tensions are high around the world.
“You should be able to talk about these things without being ostracized,” the filmmaker told The Guardian, adding that he feels “a little bit” ostracized by the industry.
“Even some response [to ‘Orphan’] from the media smells of an ideological standpoint,” he noted, explaining that he thinks the film was “ignored” at last year’s Venice Film Festival.
“There’s an orgy of antisemitism, an absolute, shameless orgy of antisemitism, overtaking the West,” added the director, whose grandmother is a Holocaust survivor. He also described a “race obsession” and a “puritan, moralizing, self-righteousness” ideology that he believes has taken over the cultural world and online.
Nemes won an Oscar in 2016 for his debut feature film “Son of Saul,” which follows a day and a half in the life of an Auschwitz concentration camp prisoner who is forced to clear out the corpses of fellow Jews from the gas chambers and place the bodies in ovens to be incinerated. The film won an array of awards, including the Oscar for best foreign language film. When asked how he thinks “Son of Saul” would be accepted if it was released today, Nemes told The Guardian: “I don’t even think it would make the [Oscar] shortlist today. Because of the politicization of cinema, because anything that’s Jewish is now considered … Nobody would touch it with a 10-feet pole.”
He also said he thinks boycotting Israeli film institutions, which thousands of Hollywood figures have pledged to do, is “anti-humanist regression.”
“And because it’s not identified as this, I think it’s very effective at spreading,” the filmmaker said. “And one of its very potent vectors has been antisemitism … The Jew has always been [cast as] the sort of internal enemy, and I think now [the idea of] the Jew as the internal enemy of the West has reached the dimensions of European antisemitism before the takeover by the National Socialist [Nazi] party.”
He further criticized the thousands of film industry professionals who support cultural boycotts of Israel or protest Israel’s military actions in the Gaza Strip, which target Hamas terrorists in the enclave who orchestrated the massacre in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
“Obviously, they prefer to attach themselves to an ideology that’s been around for a long time and that pretends to be humanitarian, but it’s actually not what it purports to be,” Nemes said. “Had they really cared about the people in this region, they would have revolted against these people being ruled by a totalitarian death cult that’s actually killing its own population and at unprecedented levels.”
He believes there is an “obsession with Jews,” and when referring to the difficulty in finding a US distributor for “Orphan,” he said: “People [would] ask me about Gaza, instead of, you know, asking about the movie. [They ask] if I signed this or that petition.”
“It’s tiring to hear the overclass of Hollywood lecture us morally,” Nemes added. “Not only in Hollywood, but in the world. There’s definitely an overclass of people cut from reality, and they are eager to preach to us … Sometimes I think it’s better if actors don’t, you know, speak up that much, because I don’t think they’re very much qualified to talk about anything. They should try to be actors, the best they can, and not become activists. It’s not really their role.”
While speaking to The Guardian, the Hungarian director also criticized fellow Jewish filmmaker Jonathan Glazer for the speech he made at the 2024 Academy Awards. When the British director went on stage to accept his Oscar for the Holocaust-focused historical drama “The Zone of Interest,” Glazer said he and the film’s producer James Wilson “stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of Oct. 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza.”
Nemes told The Guardian that making a film about the Holocaust “imposes on its maker a need for responsibility.”
“I didn’t feel that he was responsible at all,” Nemes said, referring to the Glazer. “I thought he wanted to please that overclass of Hollywood with the line of good, righteous thought … I don’t believe that he understands anything about the reality of the region, yet he feels the need to do it. And I think it’s very presumptuous, very condescending.”
Nemes is a graduate of the Sam Spiegel International Film Lab, which is part of the Jerusalem Sam Spiegel Film & Television School.
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UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese Urges Germany to Get Over Holocaust Guilt in Antisemitic Tirade
Francesa Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, speaks at a conference, “A Cartography of Genocide: Israel’s Conduct in Gaza,” at the Roma Tre University, in Rome, Italy, Oct. 6, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Remo Casilli
Francesca Albanese, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Palestinian territories, has published a bizarre social media post mixing antisemitic rhetoric with Holocaust revisionism, appearing to urge Germany to move beyond its historical guilt while casting Jews as arrogant and viewing themselves as morally superior to Europeans.
In a Facebook post published on Sunday, Albanese — who has an extensive history of using her role to denigrate Israel and seemingly rationalize the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s attacks against the Jewish state — called on Germans to absolve themselves of responsibility for the Nazi regime’s crimes and the historical burden of guilt tied to them.
The anti-Israel UN official argued that modern Germany’s efforts to come to terms with its past through strong support for the Jewish state do not reflect genuine remorse.
Instead, she claimed this stance reflects a “historical superiority syndrome” that has never been addressed and serves as a “convenient mask” for Germany’s return to the international community.
“The Western club accepted them because they proved themselves capable of tolerating certain members of the group that were previously ‘undesirable,’ and so they accepted the Jews, but not all of them,” Albanese wrote. “They learned that to survive in this world they must be superior. No longer a fragile minority. No longer a people in exile. No longer the people of the book. But the chosen people. ‘Chosen to rule?’ One might wonder when looking at what Israel has become.”
She then went on to claim that Germany does not respect Jews unless they are Zionist and behaves like a “socially deranged” state that enacts discriminatory laws, while calling on its citizens to free themselves from what she described as an obligation to Israel.
“I know Germans can do better,” Albanese concluded. “I have seen them. But they are called upon emancipating themselves. This is their chance.”
This latest controversy is far from the first involving Albanese, who has a mandate from the UN to advise the international body on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In her position, which she has held since 2022, Albanese has faced consistent criticism over a pattern of incendiary anti-Israel remarks, with officials accusing her of inciting violence and hatred.
Earlier this year, top diplomats from Austria, Germany, Italy, the Czech Republic, and France called for Albanese’s resignation after she delivered yet another inflammatory tirade against Israel.
During an Al Jazeera forum in Doha, Albanese described the state of Israel as “the common enemy of humanity” and accused the country of “planning and carrying out a genocide” during its defensive war against Hamas.
“It’s also true that never before has the global community seen the challenges that we all face, we who do not control large amounts of financial, algorithms, and weapons,” Albanese said at the time, appearing to invoke a long-standing antisemitic conspiracy that Jews control wealth and technology.
She also accused Western nations of being complicit in the so-called “genocide” by supplying arms and financing Israel, while claiming that Western media helps defend the Jewish state by “amplifying the pro-apartheid, genocidal narrative.”
Albanese has previously referred to a “Jewish lobby” controlling the US and Europe, compared Israel to Nazi Germany, and stated that Hamas’s violence against Israelis — including rape, murder, and kidnapping — needs to be “put in context.”
Despite her history of antisemitic statements, the UN has consistently refused to fire Albanese, citing her status as one of its “independent experts.”
Since taking on her UN role, Albanese has been at the center of controversy due to what critics, including US and European lawmakers, have described as antisemitic and anti-Israel public remarks.
Last year, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) faced intense pressure to block Albanese’s reappointment for another three-year term, with several countries and NGOs urging UN members to oppose the move due to her controversial remarks and alleged pro-Hamas stance.
Despite significant pressure and opposition, her mandate was confirmed to extend until 2028.
Last year, the UN launched a probe into Albanese for allegedly accepting a trip to Australia funded by pro-Hamas organizations.
In the past, she has also celebrated the anti-Israel protesters rampaging across US college campuses during the 2023-2024 academic year, saying they represent a “revolution” and give her “hope.”
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Kuwaiti Jiu-Jitsu Gold Medalist Refuses Handshake With Israeli Athlete: ‘We Do Not Respect Them At All’
An aerial view shows Kuwait City, Kuwait, March 16, 2020. Photo: Reuters / Stephanie McGehee.
Kuwaiti jiu-jitsu gold medalist Jassim Alhatem refused to shake hands with Israeli bronze medalist Yoav Manor at the Abu Dhabi Grand Slam Jiu-Jitsu World Tour on Friday, saying later in a video posted on social media that he has no respect for an athlete from Israel.
Alhatem won all four of his bouts in the men’s blue belt amateur under-77-kilogram category at the competition and took home the gold, while Manor earned the bronze for winning three of his four matches. At the medal ceremony, Alhatem refused to shake Manor’s hand and also declined to pose with him for the traditional photo of all the winners.
Alhatem later defended his actions in an Arabic-language video posted on Instagram. He described Israel as a “Zionist entity” and claimed he told Manor before the award ceremony, “I don’t want to know you and I don’t want to greet you. Stay on your side and I on my side, so no problem happens,” according to an English translation of the video. He further claimed that “as a Muslim,” he will not respect athletes from Israel and does not believe in separating politics from sports.
“These types we do not respect,” Alhatem said. “As Kuwaitis, we do not respect them at all … as a Muslim man, [you] must have principle. It is not right for me to play with them or respect them. It is not right. You as a Muslim must have a principle, even if you told me sport is separate from politics. No, no. There is no [separation]. If that were true, Russia wouldn’t be banned right now from participating in the Olympics.”
The International Olympic Committee has allowed eligible Russian athletes to compete as neutrals and not under the Russian flag.
The Israeli delegation at the Abu Dhabi Grand Slam Jiu-Jitsu World Tour said in a statement to the Israeli publication Ynet that “despite the tension, the organizers and Emirati hosts tried to calm the situation and persuade the Kuwaiti competitor to take part in the medal ceremony, but he chose to leave the podium area. Manor, for his part, remained focused on the sporting achievement: a bronze medal at a prestigious international competition, after an impressive day of bouts against opponents from around the world.”
Members of the Israeli delegation added that Alhatem said to Manor, “You Israelis kill children,” and “If you had reached the final, I would not have competed against you.”
Amir Boaron, the coach of Israel’s national jiu-jitsu team, also told Ynet that Alhatem called Manor a “child murderer.”
“Yoav continued trying to shake his hand and behave like an athlete. It is important for me to stress that the Emirati hosts welcomed us wonderfully and even apologized for the incident,” Boaron added.
The Abu Dhabi Grand Slam Jiu-Jitsu World Tour is organized by the United Arab Emirates, which normalized diplomatic relations with Israel when it signed the 2020 Abraham Accords, while Kuwait does not have diplomatic ties with Israel. Senior Kuwaiti officials have said the country “will be the last to normalize ties” with the Jewish state.