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

by Steven Pressman

  Four years later, in July 1928, Gil’s father died suddenly in Atlantic City, where he and his wife had recently taken up residence in an apartment at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Solomon was sixty-two years old and had retired only a few years earlier from his position as vice president of Albert Greenfield’s real estate and finance company. A memorial service, which took place at Keneseth Israel, attracted an overflow crowd of more than three thousand people and was attended by Philadelphia’s mayor, district attorney, and scores of other political, civic, and business leaders. At the time of his death, Solomon was still serving as grand master of Brith Sholom, and he was lauded by many for his years of service and commitment to the organization and its goals. “To work for his people was his great passion,” Rabbi Max Klein, the spiritual leader of the city’s Adath Jeshurun synagogue, wrote in a memorial tribute. “And to help make their dreams come true was the joy of his life.”

  Seven months later, Eva Kraus passed away in Philadelphia at the age of fifty-four. In sharp contrast with the publicity that accompanied her husband’s death, Eva’s obituary was limited to a three-paragraph item in the Jewish Exponent, one of Philadelphia’s two Jewish newspapers. A private funeral service was held at the home of her daughter Edna. She was buried next to her husband in a Jewish cemetery in Northeast Philadelphia. Gil, barely into his thirties, now found himself heir to the Kraus legacy even as he continued to thrive professionally and socially.

  By the early 1930s, Gil and Eleanor had two young children—Steven, born in 1926, and Ellen, who arrived four years later. Although the Great Depression was wreaking havoc on the economy and creating misery for millions of Americans, it did not appear to have much effect, if any, on the Kraus household. Gil’s law practice continued to grow in size and prominence, and by the late 1930s he had formed a new partnership with Edward Weyl, who was related to Eleanor through marriage. Gil and Eleanor themselves had become part of a prominent Jewish world in Philadelphia that was cultured and affluent, trimmed with all the social niceties that accompanied that stratum of society. It was, as Eleanor later wrote, a truly “serene existence” and idyllic life that the couple enjoyed.

  And a well-connected one, too. Gil’s law partner had a brother, Charles Weyl, who together with his wife, Ollie, were close friends of the Krauses. Charles was a pioneering professor of electrical engineering at Penn, who also happened to be keenly interested in classical music. During the 1930s, Weyl collaborated with Leopold Stokowski, the acclaimed conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, on new techniques in sound engineering that resulted in technologically advanced recordings by the highly regarded ensemble. “Stokowski pioneered what later became a standard recording practice,” the New York Times reported decades later. “But in the early 1930s, the Philadelphia recordings were unmatched for fidelity.” The overlapping relationships among Gil, Eleanor, the Weyls, and Stokowski eventually led to rumors, which were never confirmed, of a romantic fling between Eleanor and the maestro, who was more than twenty years older. Rumor, of course, frequently followed glamour—and Eleanor’s beauty attracted a lot of attention.

  Throughout this same period, Gil became increasingly active in Brith Sholom and its various philanthropic efforts. At its height earlier in the century, the Jewish organization boasted more than fifty thousand members around the country. By the 1930s, the group’s membership had fallen to about half that number, but the organization itself, divided up into smaller lodges, remained a vital one. The largest Brith Sholom lodge in Philadelphia had been renamed in Solomon’s memory, and Gil had expanded his own visible presence in the city’s circle of Jewish business and civic leaders.

  Not everything went smoothly. A potentially awkward family rupture occurred in 1935, when Gil’s emotionally volatile sister, Edna, abruptly flew off to Tijuana in order to obtain a quickie divorce from Albert Greenfield, leaving him to care for the couple’s five children. Despite the uncomfortable marital break between the Krauses and the Greenfields, Gil and his now ex-brother-in-law managed to maintain a good and prosperous relationship.

  Gil also recognized how fortunate his family was to remain unaffected by the country’s economic woes. At the same time, he was becoming aware of a very different set of challenges faced by Jews and others in far-off Europe. For the moment, however, Gil had no way of knowing where that awareness would lead.

  CHAPTER 3

  Up until the time that the Nazis marched in, our family was living a very nice and comfortable life.

  —PAUL BELLER

  VIENNA

  BEFORE THE ANSCHLUSS

  Robert Braun’s family could trace its Viennese roots back some six hundred years. The blue-eyed, dark-haired youngster’s ancestors had lived in Vienna during the time of the Ottoman Empire’s siege of the city in 1529, when Suleiman the Magnificent first attempted to conquer the Austrian capital. Centuries later, Robert’s father, Max, proudly served in the Austrian emperor’s army in the early 1890s, during a time when soldiers, many of them sporting broad and bushy mustaches, still wore gaudily colorful uniforms that looked as if they came straight out of a Gilbert and Sullivan production. “My father always felt one hundred percent Viennese, and he thought of himself as an Austrian patriot,” recalled Robert. “As a matter of fact, I would describe him as a super patriot.”

  Jews had long been extremely loyal to the Habsburg monarchy, which had endeared itself to them by opposing anti-Semitism and relaxing a series of laws that had historically oppressed the empire’s Jewish population for centuries. Men like Max Braun had been more than happy to fight for Austria both before and during World War I. Those who survived the battlefields later wore their medals and ribbons with immense pride, sharing Max’s patriotic feelings for the Fatherland that, at least during this period, did not discriminate against them because of their religion.

  Max and his brother later went into the wine business, buying a small vineyard near Baden, a spa town twenty-five kilometers south of Vienna. Along with growing their own grapes, the Braun brothers also purchased wine from neighboring grape growers and stored it in the cellar of a building in Vienna’s First District, at No. 2 Schulhof.

  As a young child, Robert would sometimes descend with his father into the cool damp darkness of the wine cellar, which had originally been carved out of part of Vienna’s ancient catacombs. “The building had a steep stairway, and I remember going down there with my father, and the aroma of wine would permeate everything.” Robert naturally assumed that he might take over his father’s wine business when he grew older.

  Robert had been born in 1928, the youngest of Max and Karoline Braun’s three children. The family, which also included two daughters, Martha and Johanna, lived in a comfortable apartment at No. 22 Porzellangasse, in Vienna’s heavily Jewish Ninth District. They lived on the second floor, and Robert loved to hang his head out of the bedroom window, which overlooked a sidewalk café directly beneath their apartment. Through creeping vines that grew around a string of wires supporting a canopy above the café, the young boy would watch the men playing chess, drinking strong Viennese coffee mit schlag, reading the newspapers, arguing endlessly about issues of the day. The apartment building was right around the corner from the Schubert Schule, the grammar school that Robert and his sisters attended. The school had been named for Franz Schubert, the beloved Vienna-born composer who had taught at the school as a young man.

  Max Braun came from a Jewish family, but his wife, who grew up in a small village in Bohemia (which later became part of Czechoslovakia), had been raised as a Catholic. At the time of their marriage, shortly after World War I, Austrian law did not permit marriages among couples from different religious faiths. Karoline, without giving the matter much thought, agreed to convert to Judaism. “But we were not religious at all,” recalled Robert. “Once a year my father would go to a large hall for a Yom Kippur service, and he would drag me along with him. I didn’t like it at all, mostly because there were a lot of older men there with horrible breath beca
use they hadn’t eaten for twenty-four hours. That was about the extent of my Jewish upbringing.”

  In the summertime, the close-knit Braun family rented two rooms on the second floor of a farmhouse in Piesting, a little village located about twenty-five miles south of Vienna. During the week, Max would remain in the city to tend to his wine business and then take the train down to Piesting, where he savored the lazy summer weekends with his wife and children. “My sisters and I would spend the summer going barefoot and playing with the farm kids. I remember walking in the morning with the cows up into the hills, where they would graze during the day, and then riding them back down with their bells clanging,” remembered Robert. “Altogether, I had an extremely happy childhood.”

  ….

  SLENDER, BLOND, AND energetically precocious, Henny Wenkart, like Robert Braun, was born in Vienna in 1928. Her father, Hermann, had been born and raised in Galicia, which later became part of Poland but at the time was still part of the sprawling Austro-Hungarian Empire, in the waning glory days before it splintered into pieces in the aftermath of World War I. Hermann’s parents had made their way to Vienna when he was six years old, and he grew up in a peaceful city presided over by Emperor Franz Josef, who was endearingly known as “The Old Gentleman.”

  Like the Brauns, the Wenkarts were Viennese to the core. They were also Jewish. But in Vienna, that didn’t seem to matter. Life within the Wenkart household blossomed amid a robust atmosphere of social and cultural sophistication. Henny’s mother, Ruchele—who, like her husband, originally came from Galicia—enjoyed the comforts of being a lawyer’s wife, spending her days at the city’s French and English clubs and her evenings at the opera or the symphony. For much of her childhood, Henny was an only child; she was nine when her younger sister, Eleonore, was born. She was particularly close to her father. “He was supposed to take me to nursery school when I was very young, and I would cry and cry and cry to the point that he wouldn’t want to leave me there,” Henny remembered years later. Instead, Hermann would bring his daughter to his law office inside a magnificent baroque-style building on Franz-Josefskai, a wide street filled with commercial and office buildings directly across from the Danube Canal. “He would set me down in his office and let me type away on his typewriter. Then he would try to read what I had typed.” From the time she was very young, Henny immersed herself in piano lessons, English studies, and Hebrew instruction with teachers who came to the splendid Wenkart apartment at No. 5 Ferstelgasse for private sessions with the young girl. Saturday mornings were spent at her father’s side at a nearby synagogue, and the major Jewish holidays were celebrated with grandparents and other relatives. “During the holiday of Simchat Torah, we’d all go up into the rabbi’s apartment, which was a tiny place,” Henny recalled. “The women would be in the bedroom and the men would be in another room, dancing around the table with the Torahs. And we’d all be singing and clapping with them.”

  The weekly Sunday outings to the Vienna Woods, where Henny and her father would speak in reverent whispers, helped to forge an inseparable bond between them. During the summers, the family would sometimes take short vacations to the Austrian Alps or to nearby Czechoslovakia. Like the Braun family, the Wenkarts would also rent modestly priced summer quarters in the country as a welcome retreat from the humid hustle and bustle of city life. “Daddy would spend the week at work, but he would come out Friday afternoon on an early train,” according to Henny. “He was always the father who came out earliest on Fridays and then he wouldn’t leave until Monday morning. I would hear my parents whispering and then he would leave, and I would go back to sleep because I didn’t want to wake up into a morning when he wasn’t there.”

  EMIL WEISZ SHARED Hermann Wenkart’s love of the Vienna Woods but for very different reasons. Weisz was an avid horticulturist who loved to spend his spare time grafting trees and grapevines on a small plot of land in the woods that had been handed down through several generations in the family. He pored over landscaping and gardening books, sharpening his green-thumb skills, which greatly benefited all of his friends and acquaintances who relied on him to help culture their own crops and grapes for making wine and other products. Along with two sisters, Emil owned a stall in Vienna’s bustling Fleischmarkt, where he sold sausages, smoked meats, chickens, eggs, cheeses, and other dairy products.

  From the time she could first read, Emil’s shy daughter Helga loved to memorize the Latin names for the flowers and plants she found in her father’s gardening books. She also reaped the rewards from Emil’s hobby of making children’s toys out of pieces of scrap wood and other odd bits of material lying around the house. “He once made an electric play oven, and I also remember a wonderful dollhouse and a firehouse that he had put together,” recalled Helga, who was born in 1930. “I really lacked for nothing, and I was certainly loaded with toys.”

  Helga’s mother, Rosa, had been a nurse during World War I and later found work as a midwife. But after she and Emil got married, Rosa—as was the custom for most married Viennese women, Jewish or otherwise—did not work outside the home. She loved to sing, however, and would often take Helga to one of the local cinemas, where the little girl always clamored to see the latest Shirley Temple film from America. Helga began singing herself at an early age and was known around the neighborhood—the Weisz family lived at No. 6 Krongasse—as Mopsi because her dark brunette curls made her look like a mophead.

  Helga attended local public schools, which at the time were operated by the Catholic Church. Classes were held six days a week, with Sundays the only day off for the students, who were expected to attend church services that day. Jewish students, however, were often excused from Saturday classes, particularly if they came from Orthodox families that observed the Jewish Sabbath. But the Weisz family was not that religious, and Helga’s parents chose not to have her excused from Saturday classes. Still, there was a nod to the family’s Judaism. While Catholic students received regular instruction in catechism and other Catholic rituals, students from other faiths—usually Protestant—would be taken to another room at the school for a different set of lessons. Helga’s mother sent in a note confirming that Helga would be attending Hebrew lessons rather than join in with the Catholic students.

  LIKE THOUSANDS OF other Jewish families in Vienna, Kurt Herman’s family lived in Leopoldstadt, the city’s teeming Second District carved out of an island formed by the Danube Canal to the west and the much wider Danube River that ran along the district’s eastern edge. His father, Heinrich, had been born in Poland but grew up in Vienna and, as an adult, ran a fabric business with Kurt’s grandfather. Kurt’s mother, Martha, was born in the eastern German town of Görlitz, just across the border with Poland. As a youngster—Kurt was born in 1930—the round-faced boy with oversize ears and an impish smile remembered the joyous experience of accompanying his father to one of Vienna’s public bathhouses, not far from the family’s apartment at No. 8 Lilienbrunngasse. “Little kids were always bathed in the sink in the apartment building where my family lived, so it was a thrill for me whenever I could go to the bathhouse with my dad,” he said. “We would either walk or take one of the trams. My uncle was a traveling salesman and was also the only person in the family who owned an automobile. So a really big thrill was to go to my uncle’s house on Sunday for a ride in the car.”

  FOR GENERATIONS, THE residents of Leopoldstadt—Jews and non-Jews alike—had enjoyed the green and leafy surroundings of the Wiener Prater, the former imperial hunting grounds that had been transformed into a large public park during the eighteenth century. At the edge of the Prater stood the gargantuan Wiener Riesenrad, the famous Vienna Ferris wheel that was built in 1897 to celebrate the golden jubilee of Emperor Franz Josef I. Such was life in the late 1920s and early 1930s for the tens of thousands of Jewish boys and girls growing up across Vienna. Erwin Tepper’s parents, Juda and Schifra, had both come to Vienna from their native Poland so that Erwin’s father could study accounting at the university
. The family lived in a nice apartment, at No. 11 Georgsiglgasse, near the Danube Canal in the Leopoldstadt area that had become known as Mazzesinsel—Matzo Island—because of its concentrated Jewish population.

  FRITZI AND ELIZABETH Zinger also lived with their parents in an apartment, at No. 7 Rauscherstrasse, near the Danube and the lovely green parks not far from the canal. “I was always busy playing ball on the porch of our apartment, and of course the ball would always fall down to the street below,” remembered Elizabeth, who was born in 1933 and known in the family as Lisl. “My mother would come to the rescue by looking down and asking whoever was walking by to please deposit the ball in a basket and bring it back up to the apartment. So that was even more fun than being outside.” Her older sister Fritzi would roll her eyes at Lisl’s childish antics, but the two girls were extremely close. Their mother regularly dressed them in matching outfits, accentuating the tight bond that held the Zinger girls together.

  TEN BLOCKS AWAY, Kurt Roth lived with his parents, Hermann and Bertha, at No. 32 Treustrasse, tucked away near the Danube Canal in Vienna’s working-class Twentieth District that, like the Second and Ninth districts, included a significant Jewish population. Kurt’s parents, neither of whom were particularly religious, sent him to an afternoon Jewish school so that he could acquire at least a rudimentary knowledge of his faith and culture. But Kurt was more inclined to play hooky whenever he could get away with it, sneaking off with a friend from the neighborhood who owned an impressive collection of tin soldiers “with which we could conduct sweeping war maneuvers on the apartment floor.”