50 Children: One Ordinary American Couple's Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany

by Steven Pressman

  Gil spoke with a growing resolve in his voice, which Eleanor recognized. It signaled her husband’s steadfast determination to proceed, regardless of any obstacles that might stand in his way. She shot a wary glance at him, but he cut her off before she could say anything further. She was not surprised when Gil added that he and Levine had already made plans to travel to Washington early the following week in order to meet with officials at the State and Labor departments.

  Carlotta Greenfield and her fiancé were due to arrive any moment. Eleanor could hardly imagine how she would make it through the evening with her head spinning with all this talk about Nazi Germany and rescuing Jewish children. Gil, meanwhile, had one more startling piece of information for his wife. If the rescue plan had any shot at succeeding, he would need to round up fifty individual sponsors—one for each child that he hoped to bring back to the United States. Each sponsor would have to fill out an extensive affidavit required by the government to ensure that they would provide sufficient financial support for any immigrant entering the United States. “How would you like to work on this with me?” he asked Eleanor in a voice that was at once both calm and insistent. “It will mean asking our friends and others we know for help. Are you game for that?” Gil figured that it would take several weeks both to find enough people in Philadelphia who would be willing to sponsor the children and to submit the detailed affidavits required by the government. Although he was anxious to begin at once, he told his wife they should wait until he was able to talk to officials at the State Department. “It might all come to nothing,” said Gil. “It may all be impossible.”

  BY THE MORNING after the dinner party, Gil seemed even more determined to move ahead. “He said there must be some legal way to bring children into the United States,” Eleanor jotted down in a diary that, years later, she would turn into a private written account about the rescue project. Eleanor knew how much confidence Gil had in his own abilities as a lawyer and also how resourceful he could be when it came to tackling tough problems. Still she tried to avoid becoming too enthusiastic about her own potential role in the mission. “I told myself this going-to-Germany idea was out,” she wrote. “No one, not even Gil, could consider this a practical idea.”

  Other considerations stood in the way of Eleanor’s enthusiasm. Only a few weeks earlier, she had talked a friend into offering her a part-time job in the advertising office at the Blum department store on Chestnut Street, not far from the equally fashionable Bonwit Teller and Lord & Taylor stores. Eleanor did not have to work. Gil’s law practice was thriving, and he was more than capable of providing for his wife and two children while keeping the family in upper-middle-class comfort. Eleanor, for her part, embraced the lifestyle that came with the couple’s elevated social standing in Jewish Philadelphia. She was a beautiful woman who rarely hesitated to remind others of her great looks. Having married into the socially prominent Kraus family, she was also mindful of the societal obligations that went along with being Gil’s wife. She was in charge of the couple’s social engagements, while also making sure that the family household ran smoothly. Her dinner parties were always elegant affairs, and she filled their busy schedule with evenings at the symphony, trips to art museums, and leisurely summer weekends at their oceanfront house on New Jersey’s Long Beach Island. Her children attended Friends Select, Philadelphia’s prestigious Quaker school that traced its beginnings back to 1689. Above all else, Eleanor was truly happy being a woman of her time.

  Yet as a devotee of fine clothes, jewelry, and fashion, Eleanor was excited about working at the department store and hated the thought of having to give up her brand-new job before it had even started. After Gil’s initial conversation about the plan, she knew, however, that she would almost certainly play a part. She explained to the friend who had offered the job that she might have to leave on short notice in order to help her husband with his work. Although she did not offer details, Eleanor casually mentioned that it might involve travel to Washington and, possibly, to Germany. In the end, the department store job fell by the wayside.

  The more Eleanor thought about the project, the more she had to admit that it sounded like something she and her husband should do together. But she also kept reminding herself what an unlikely adventure it would be. “To think of being able to help even a handful of children is a beautiful thought. It is a luxurious dream but most impractical,” she wrote. “After all, we are living a most serene existence in our pretty house on Cypress Street. My own two children seem most secure. Gil is very busy, and his work is going well.”

  Over dinner a few nights later, Gil showed Eleanor a couple of affidavit forms he had brought home from his office. The idea of having to ask anyone—let alone her closest friends—to fill out a document with such an exhaustive list of detailed financial questions made her deeply uncomfortable. The affidavits required the applicant to reveal intensely personal information about their income, bank accounts, stock holdings, life insurance policies. Eleanor preferred not to talk about money, and in fact considered the topic virtually off-limits. She rarely even spoke to Gil about the couple’s own finances. How on earth could she even think of asking friends and casual acquaintances to reveal intimate financial details that would almost certainly embarrass them all?

  Realizing how awkward this would be for his wife, Gil suggested that she begin by working on his own affidavit. Louis Levine would provide the second one. Once Eleanor grew more comfortable with the process, Gil would give her the names of four or five of his close friends from the Locust Club, the private establishment that served as a social gathering spot for Philadelphia’s most prominent Jewish business, civic, and political leaders. “I don’t think we’re going to have too much trouble finding fifty sponsors,” Gil assured Eleanor. “Everybody wants to help.”

  Even as he spoke, Eleanor realized that it was simply a matter of convincing herself—and her circle of friends—that saving children’s lives was more important than concerns about violating social proprieties. Above all else, Eleanor knew that she had to help. It was simply the right thing to do.

  CHAPTER 2

  Miss Eleanor Shirley Jacobs, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Harris D. Jacobs, was married to Gilbert J. Kraus today at the home of a brother of the bride.

  —EVENING PUBLIC LEDGER

  PHILADELPHIA

  BEFORE 1939

  Although Eleanor had plenty of persuasive reasons to avoid involving herself in the rescue project, her husband never hesitated for a moment. If he harbored any doubts about his ability to succeed where others had not, he never expressed them to anyone, including his wife. Above all, Gil Kraus was a strong-willed man with a resolute sense of what was right. And he would pursue that no matter what anyone else thought of him.

  Gil’s almost bullheaded conviction for doing the right thing did not come out of nowhere. His father, Solomon Kraus, had devoted years of his life to a wide variety of social, charitable, and philanthropic organizations and causes. Gil belonged to a German Jewish family that by the 1930s had long been an integral part of Philadelphia’s Jewish society. He certainly shared his father’s passion for championing the rights of those far less fortunate than himself. A long-shot effort to save the lives of imperiled children threatened by Hitler’s campaign against Jews no doubt struck in Gil the same empathetic chord that Solomon had responded to in earlier years.

  All four of Gil’s grandparents made their way to the United States as part of the great migration of German Jews that took place during the 1840s and 1850s. His paternal grandparents, Leopold and Charlotte Kraus, immigrated to America in 1859, a few years after they were married. Their two oldest children, Fannie and Herman, were born in Austria, while two younger sons, Solomon and Milton, were born in Philadelphia. Leopold earned a middle-class living as a merchant—the 1880 U.S. census listed his occupation as a purveyor of “gents’ furnishings and goods.” Solomon, however, had bigger ambitions, and after a brief stint in the dry-goods business, he began a succe
ssful career as a Philadelphia real estate broker. In 1893, he married Eva Mayer, whose parents had come from Germany and settled in the small town of Tamaqua, Pennsylvania, where Eva was born. By the time she married Solomon, he was both a prominent businessman and an active participant in Philadelphia’s rough-and-tumble Democratic politics. In 1892 he was chosen to cast a vote in the electoral college for Grover Cleveland, the successful Democratic presidential candidate that year. A few years later, Solomon ran for a judicial magistrate’s position, competing in a raucous citywide political convention that was held to select the Democratic slate of local candidates. The gathering turned into “an unparalleled scene of disorder lasting for nearly five hours,” reported the Philadelphia Inquirer, and culminated in fistfights on the convention floor. “Just before the close of the proceedings it became necessary to call in the police to clear the stage. Chairs were broken, several blows exchanged, and a handsome piano was treated in a manner that robbed it of its beauty.”

  Solomon’s would-be career as an elected official soon came to an end after he decided to focus on business rather than politics. But he continued to cultivate valuable political as well as business contacts that served him—and later his son Gil—quite well. Chief among these useful contacts was Albert Greenfield, a scrappy young Russian immigrant who eventually would preside over a vast real estate and financial empire in Philadelphia comprising department stores, hotels, and a highly profitable mortgage banking company that helped to finance his various commercial enterprises. The two men seemed destined to be business partners when, in 1906, a precocious nineteen-year-old Greenfield first proposed a modest real estate deal with Kraus, who was twenty years his senior. “Greenfield and Kraus had similar personalities—aggressive, competitive, overbearing, tempestuous—and thus they took an instant dislike to each other,” a Philadelphia journalist wrote about the two men. “Each liked to be in charge of whatever he did, so the two did not work well together. On the other hand, as businessmen, each recognized the benefits to be gained from working with the other.”

  In 1914, business ties turned into family ties when Greenfield proposed to Solomon’s oldest daughter, Edna. Solomon’s critical personal opinion of Greenfield had not changed simply because the blustery would-be mogul had been courting Kraus’s attractive, blue-eyed daughter. But Solomon was nothing if not a pragmatist, and he recognized a good deal when he saw one. The marriage would be socially advantageous and also good for business. And it would certainly be much easier to deal with Greenfield as a son-in-law than as a potential business rival. Solomon swiftly consented to the marriage. By the time that Gil began his own career as a corporate lawyer in the early 1920s, the Greenfield-Kraus enterprise controlled more than two dozen building and loan associations spread across Philadelphia, with assets approaching $35 million. The Russian immigrant and the son of German Jews also formed a highly profitable mortgage company that, soon enough, extended the reach of their business ties to New York City.

  Solomon, along with many other German Jews, was avowedly nonreligious, espousing instead a highly secular form of Judaism that placed little stock in traditional religious practices. Although the Krauses were members of Keneseth Israel, Philadelphia’s most prominent Reform synagogue (which at the time eschewed—as most Reform congregations did—bar mitzvahs for thirteen-year-old boys), they embraced social assimilation, celebrating what they felt were true American holidays like Christmas and Easter. When he turned sixteen, Gil participated in a religious confirmation ceremony at the synagogue but, like the rest of his family, otherwise paid little attention to Jewish rituals.

  But the Jewish spirit of social service and tikkun olam—the Hebrew phrase meaning “healing the world”—remained an integral part of life for the city’s Jewish community leaders, including Solomon Kraus. In the early decades of the twentieth century, even as assimilation threaded through the social fabric of upper-class German Jewish life, Jews were still Jews. There were Jewish social clubs, Jewish charities, and an abundance of Jewish philanthropy. In 1905, a group of forty-four prominent Philadelphia Jews formed a fraternal organization, which they named Brith Sholom—Hebrew for “Covenant of Peace.” The group pledged itself to providing an array of social services for newly arrived immigrants—primarily poor Jews who had been arriving in increasingly large numbers in the wake of pogroms in Russia and other Eastern European countries. By the time of Brith Sholom’s second convention, which took place in June 1906, Solomon had been chosen to be chairman of the group’s Committee on Charity.

  Three years later, his commitment to public service resulted in the establishment of the Philadelphia Jewish Sanatorium for Consumptives—a hospital for patients suffering from tuberculosis. Solomon played a leading role in the project by making the financial arrangements to purchase farmland in Eagleville—a rural area thirty miles west of Philadelphia—that became the site of the hospital. He also offered the farm owner one hundred dollars out of his own pocket as a down payment on the land, which was purchased for a total of $6,500. Barely eight months after Solomon and others began discussing the hospital project, the facility opened its doors to its first four tuberculosis patients. In the years that followed, Solomon played prominent roles in several other Jewish organizations, serving as vice president of the American Jewish Congress, vice president of the Zionist Organization of America, and, in 1927, chairman of the United Palestine Appeal campaign in Philadelphia. By then, he had also been elected as Brith Sholom’s grand master.

  As Solomon’s only son—Gil was sandwiched between his older sister, Edna, and his younger sister, Lillian—it was expected that he would follow in his father’s footsteps. Solomon cast a long shadow, and Gil wanted his father’s respect. Gil, in turn, was all Solomon could ask for in a son. Tall, ruggedly handsome, and determinedly athletic, he had sailed through the University of Pennsylvania, completing his undergraduate degree during the waning days of World War I. Along with several other classmates from Penn, Gil enlisted in the army even as the war was ending in the fall of 1918. He underwent a quick round of basic training at Camp Gordon in Georgia, which led to his continued assignment there as a bayonet instructor. His brief military career concluded in December, just weeks after the armistice silenced the guns in Europe and brought an end to the War to End All Wars. After returning home to Philadelphia, Gil, along with three army buddies, enrolled at Penn’s law school and wound up racing through the normal three-year course of studies in two years. Without obtaining a formal diploma, Gil was officially admitted to the bar in October 1921, sworn in by a prominent Philadelphia judge whose son had been one of Gil’s friends from the army.

  At the age of twenty-three, he began his legal career in a small Jewish-owned firm, where he spent most of his time handling routine business matters—lease negotiations, small property disputes, simple bankruptcies—for the firm’s most prominent client, Albert Greenfield’s company. It was hardly glamorous or particularly interesting work. “Will you write to Miss Margaret Andrews, threatening foreclosure proceedings, as she has failed to pay her taxes for 1922,” Greenfield’s corporate secretary instructed Gil in one typical transaction. “Give her about a week or ten days to pay it, and if she doesn’t produce the receipted tax bill, I will then send you the papers to commence foreclosure proceedings.”

  Patience was never Gil’s strong point, and he quickly grew eager to make his own mark both in the law and in society. Within a few years of starting his career, he formed his own small firm with two other attorneys while continuing to handle legal and business matters for his brother-in-law Greenfield, which guaranteed a steady stream of work. Gil by now was living in an apartment in Philadelphia’s stately Hotel Majestic, located only a short distance from his law office. The Majestic also happened to be just a quick trolley ride away from Baker Bowl and Shibe Park, Philadelphia’s two baseball stadiums that were home to the National League Phillies and the American League Athletics, respectively. Given its location, the Majestic was the prefer
red hotel for many of baseball’s top stars in the 1920s, including Rogers Hornsby and Babe Ruth. The prestigious address certainly would have appealed to Gil, who proudly relished his own athletic career at Penn.

  It was during these early days of Gil’s legal career that he began courting Eleanor Jacobs, the beautiful young daughter—one of six children—of Harris and Rosa Jacobs. Eleanor’s parents had immigrated to the United States from Latvia and settled in New Jersey several years before Eleanor was born, in Philadelphia, in 1903. Precisely how and when Gil and Eleanor first met is not known, but it is unlikely that their families would have been close or even known each other, given the significant disparity in their social standings. Whatever the circumstances of their meeting, however, it is hardly surprising that Gil and Eleanor, despite a six-year age difference, were attracted to each other. A photograph accompanying a newspaper announcement of his appointment as an assistant city attorney in February 1924 revealed a young man with a full head of dark wavy hair and a strong jawline. The handsome lawyer also happened to be witty, intelligent, urbane, and ambitious—in other words, quite a catch. But in Eleanor Jacobs he had met his equal: with her soft doe eyes, porcelain skin, keen sense of fashion, and a charming wit of her own, she immediately enchanted all those around her. She certainly proved enchanting to Gil.

  That summer he traveled alone on the SS Paris steamship, which sailed from New York City to Le Havre, France. From there, Gil journeyed to Germany and Austria during an extensive European tour that apparently did not interfere with his obligations back home in Philadelphia. He must have done quite a bit of thinking about the petite brunette he had been seeing while he was away. Not long after his return from Europe, he and Eleanor were married in a small ceremony held at the Philadelphia home of Eleanor’s brother Frank. Presiding over the ceremony, which took place on October 9, 1924, was Rabbi William Fineshriber, who had arrived in town only a few weeks earlier to take up his new position as chief rabbi at Keneseth Israel. At the time of the wedding, Eleanor had not yet turned twenty-one, which meant that her father had to sign a legal form—“Consent to the Marriage of a Child or Ward”—that gave permission for his daughter to marry.