Manuel L. Quezon is known to many as the first President of the Philippine Commonwealth and the Father of our Independence. He was also the first Filipino Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of the Philippine Islands. His life and his accomplishments have been well documented, yet there is another episode in our nation’s history which demonstrated the compassion he exhibited towards a distressed people whose race had given the world its Great Teacher.

In an article written by Rodel Rodis in the Philippine Daily Inquirer last April 13, 2013, entitled “Philippines: A Jewish refuge from the Holocaust,” Quezon was revealed as somewhat of a “messiah” to the Jewish people during that terrible episode in the history of the world. When they were facing the greatest threat to the survival of their race during World War II, Quezon opened the doors of the Philippines and sheltered them from the evils of annihilation and genocide.

The Philippine Haven

The movie, Schindler’s List, informed the world about how an Austrian industrialist saved 1,100 Polish Jews during World War II by hiring them as factory workers. The documentary, Rescue in the Philippines: Refuge From the Holocaust, also told of how Quezon helped German Jews escape Nazi persecution in 1939 by providing them with visas and safe haven in the Philippines. Another movie, Voyage of the Damned, showed the saga of the luxury liner MS St. Louis, which left Hamburg, Germany with 937 Jewish passengers bound for Cuba. When the ship landed in Havana, the Jews were refused entry. The ship then headed for Florida where the US government also refused to allow the Jews to disembark. After the ship was refused entry in other ports, it returned to Germany where the Jewish passengers were forcibly removed and dispatched to concentration camps for extermination. In the film, a Nazi official declared: “When the whole world has refused to accept them as refugees, no country can blame Germany for the fate of the Jews.”

At least one country stood out to do what was right. When the MS St. Louis was rejected by all the countries where it sought refuge, the Philippine Commonwealth accepted 1,300 Jews and was even willing to accept as much as 10,000 more, had the US State Department allowed its commonwealth to do so. The Washington Times reported on December 5, 1938 (“Quezon Urges Jews’ Haven”) that the possibility of a haven for Jewish refugees from Germany was broached today by Pres. Manuel Quezon who said “I am willing to facilitate entrance of such numbers of Jewish people as we could absorb.”

‘Conspiracy’ to do Good

The untold story of the Philippine rescue of Jews was first prominently recounted by Frank Ephraim in his book, “Escape to Manila: From Nazi Tyranny to Japanese Terror” (University of Illinois Press, 2003), which was based mostly on his own eyewitness account as a child, being one of 1,300 Jewish refugees who arrived in Manila in 1939.

According to Ephraim, the history of the rescue began with the decision of the Frieder brothers in 1918 to relocate their two-for-a-nickel cigar business from Manhattan to Manila. Alex, Philip, Herbert and Morris Frieder took turns overseeing the business in the Philippines for two years, each joining a community that had fewer than 200 Jews.

The idea for the Jewish exodus to the Philippines came in 1937, when 28 German Jews who had earlier fled Germany for Shanghai, were evacuated by the Germans to Manila after fierce fighting erupted between Chinese and Japanese troops. The Jewish Refugee Committee in Manila, headed by Philip Frieder, was formed to help them settle in the Philippines. From these refugees, the Frieders heard first-hand accounts of the Nazi atrocities in Germany and the uncertain fate of the 17,000 Jews still stranded in Shanghai. The Frieders then decided to seek the help of their poker buddies to make the Philippines a haven for the fleeing Jews. As luck would have it, these were no ordinary poker buddies. One was Paul V. McNutt, the American High Commissioner for the Philippines; another was a young officer named Col. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the aide of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, then Field Marshall of the Philippines; and then there was Manuel Quezon, the president of the Philippine Commonwealth. In one of their late night poker sessions, as Ephraim recounted, the buddies hatched a plan for the Philippines to accept as many as 100,000 Jews to save them from persecution in Germany.

McNutt had served as National Commander of the American Legion and as governor of Indiana (1933-37) before Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt tapped him to be the High Commissioner of the Philippines in 1937. McNutt’s task was to convince the US State Department to grant visas for Jews to enter Manila. Col. Eisenhower’s task was to organize a plan to bring Jews to settle in Mindanao. In the Rescue in the Philippines documentary, Susan Eisenhower, President Dwight Eisenhower’s granddaughter, reflected on his involvement: “It’s one thing to sit around a card table and talk about a worrisome situation – even a dire situation. It’s quite another to actually take some action, and I think that’s why this is a story for all time.”

President Quezon faced the formidable task of winning over the anti-Semitic members of his own cabinet as well as those in the political opposition led by Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo who viewed Jews as “Communists and schemers,” bent on “controlling the world”. In a letter written in August of 1939, Alex Frieder wrote of Quezon’s response: “He assured us that big or little, he raised hell with every one of those persons. He made them ashamed of themselves for being a victim of propaganda intended to further victimize an already persecuted people.”

To the members of his own Catholic Church who were prejudiced against Jews, Quezon asked: “How can we turn our backs on the race that produced Jesus Christ?” In the Rescue film, Manuel L. Quezon III pondered his grandfather’s reason for helping the Jewish people: “I think for my grandfather, it was perhaps that simple. You have a country. You have a little authority. You have an opportunity. Someone has asked for refuge – which is the most basic humanitarian appeal anyone can make. You answer it.”

At the April 23, 1940 dedication of Marikina Hall, a housing facility for Jewish refugees that was built on land that he personally donated, Quezon said: “It is my hope and, indeed, my expectation that the people of the Philippines will have in the future every reason to be glad that when the time of need came, their country was willing to extend a hand of welcome.”

Quezon’s expectation of how future generations of Filipinos will feel about the rescue of the Jews during their time of peril had one flaw: the future generations never learned of the country’s noble deed. After the Rescue documentary was shown at its April 7, 2013 San Francisco premiere, a question and answer forum followed. One Filipina from Vallejo stood up and identified herself as having been a public school teacher in the Philippines before immigrating to the US. “How is it possible that I never heard of this Jewish rescue when I was a student in the Philippines, when I was a teacher there, all the way until I watched this film tonight?” she asked. The answers provided by other Filipinos in the audience (“because it was not taught in Philippine history books”) begged the question of why this significant event in Philippine history was omitted from the Philippine history books.

Tribute to Quezon and the Philippines

Ephraim’s book revealed for the first time Quezon’s role as the “righteous gentile.” Why was this heroic episode hidden from the Filipino people before? Why was it not included in Philippine history books? Strangely enough, what was recounted in the history books was the fact that, on November 29, 1947, the Philippines was the only Asian nation who supported the partition resolution at the United Nations which created the Jewish State of Israel.

On June 21, 2009, a monument to Quezon was unveiled at the 65-hectare Holocaust Memorial Park in Rishon Le Zion, Israel’s 4th largest city located south of Tel Aviv. The monument designed by Filipino artist Junyee is called “Open Doors”. It is a geometric, seven-meter-high sculpture rendered mainly in steel and set on a base of marble tiles shipped from Romblon, showing three doors of ascending heights. Speaking at the dedication ceremonies on behalf of the Philippine government, Tourism Secretary Joseph Durano said: “the monument celebrates the Filipino heart, a heart that touches others with compassion, a heart that makes one a blessing to the world.” But that Filipino heart desperately needs to be informed about the noble act that made it a blessing to the world.

The education of that Filipino heart has begun in earnest with the release of Rescue in the Philippines: Refuge From the Holocaust, followed by another documentary, “An Open Door: Jewish Rescue in the Philippines”, which was produced and directed by a Washington DC-based filmmaker, Noel “Sonny” Izon. In the film, Izon sought to “explore how, together, Filipinos and Jews struggled, endured and ultimately prevailed against overwhelming odds.” Incidentally, Izon had a personal reason for making the film. He was born in Manila in 1946, the year after his “deathly ill” father was saved at a Manila hospital by Dr. Otto Zelezny, one of twelve physicians among the 1300 Jews who found safe haven in the Philippines. This film was supposed to be his chance to thank the good doctor from Berlin who “made my life possible”.