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

by Steven Pressman

  Back in Philadelphia, Eleanor received a late-night phone call from Jacob Billikopf, a prominent figure in Philadelphia’s Jewish and business circles. Billikopf for many years had been the executive director of the Jewish Federation of Charities but had stepped down in early 1937 so that he could focus all his attention on efforts to get Jews out of Germany. He spent nearly the next two years as the executive director of the National Coordinating Committee for Aid to Refugees and Emigrants from Germany and continued to be involved in rescue efforts even after leaving that post toward the end of 1938. Gil knew Billikopf quite well through mutual business connections; Billikopf was involved in labor-management matters, some of which overlapped with Gil’s legal work for Albert Greenfield’s company.

  Eleanor told Billikopf that Gil was “out of town” and could not be reached anytime soon. Billikopf said he had heard of Gil’s plan to go to Germany as part of an effort to bring a group of children into the United States. Saying that he was calling as “a very close and dear friend” and not in any official capacity, Billikopf told Eleanor that he wanted Gil to be aware of the dangerous conditions in Germany and the grave risks in proceeding with the rescue effort. Eleanor continued to hold her tongue.

  But Billikopf had another message that he wanted Eleanor to pass along to Gil. He said there was “no possibility” of bringing groups of children into the United States, and that Gil, in attempting to do so, would only confirm this impossibility and would “return a failure.” Finally, he reminded Eleanor that Gil had an excellent reputation in Philadelphia and that he “should not do anything that would discredit or hurt him in any way.”

  Before ending the call, Eleanor promised only that she would pass along Billikopf’s message when she next saw her husband. She hung up without ever letting on that Gil had already left for Germany.

  Over the next several days, Eleanor made an effort to resume her normal routine. She visited her sisters. She spent more time with her children. But her thoughts were always with Gil, and she tried as best she could to convince herself—with varying degrees of success—that he would be all right.

  Five days after leaving New York, Gil sent Eleanor a cable letting her know that the Queen Mary had landed safely in Southampton, England. From there, the adventure began. After crossing the English Channel by ferry, Gil and Bob boarded a train to Amsterdam. Gil went straight to the American Express office, where he set up banking arrangements for his upcoming travels. He also rented a safe-deposit box where he could store important personal papers, minimizing the risk of having them in his possession while inside Nazi Germany. From Amsterdam, Gil wired another telegram to Eleanor letting her know that the two men would be leaving for Berlin.

  Upon arriving in the Nazi capital, they checked into the Hotel Adlon, one of the city’s most elegant hotels, which had long been a favorite destination for international celebrities, politicians, and royalty. Kaiser Wilhelm II attended the hotel’s opening in 1907, and over the years the hotel’s guests included Enrico Caruso, Marlene Dietrich, Tsar Nicholas II, and Charlie Chaplin. After Hitler took power, the Adlon continued to serve as one of Berlin’s prime social centers. Its popular bar, located just off the plush lobby, happened to be one of the city’s notorious watering holes for Gestapo agents. The hotel was a short walk from the American embassy, which was housed in the former Blücher Palace, which stood at the edge of the city’s grand Pariser Platz. Under the Nazis, the broad boulevard that led into the plaza had been lined with soaring columns draped with huge red banners that featured the thick black lines of the Nazi Hakenkreuz—the swastika—centered in white circles.

  Just as George Messersmith had promised, Raymond Geist greeted Gil warmly when he and Bob presented themselves at the embassy. Gil took an immediate liking to Geist and also felt a sense of relief and reassurance upon meeting the embassy’s senior diplomat. Geist was a man of imposing physical stature, with broad shoulders and a thick neck that was accentuated by his close-cropped hair. But he had an easygoing manner about him, along with a reputation for being unflappable. Despite his interest in Gil’s rescue plan, Geist, like Messersmith, still offered no promises that the plan would actually work. He was aware of Gil’s proposal to set aside unused visas for the children but made no guarantees that any such visas would become available.

  From the time that Gil and Louis Levine had first discussed the rescue project, Gil always assumed that he would look for the children in Berlin. Even after six years of repression under the Nazis, Berlin’s Jewish community, while diminished in size, still maintained an active organization that was now largely devoted to helping Jews leave Germany. One of Berlin’s Jewish leaders, Julius Seligsohn, had been a well-known lawyer until the Nazis prohibited Jews from practicing law. By 1939, he was serving as the president of the Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden—Aid Association of German Jews—which was Berlin’s main Jewish social welfare agency. “Now that I cannot work anymore as an attorney, I am devoting myself entirely to the work on behalf of Jewish emigration,” Seligsohn wrote that year to Cecilia Razovsky. “I hope I will have some success in spite of the enormous difficulties we must face.”*

  In fact, Seligsohn and other Jewish leaders in Berlin, prodded by Nazi officials, had been remarkably effective in helping tens of thousands of Jews—both individuals and families—find their way out of Germany during the six years that Hitler had been in power. And while there were still plenty of Jews who remained in Berlin by the time Gil arrived in April, Geist knew there was a more pressing need elsewhere for the kind of rescue project that Gil hoped to pull off. He urged Gil to travel directly to Vienna, where conditions for Jews had been deteriorating at an alarming pace since the Anschluss. While he was in Berlin, Gil also met with Seligsohn and other Jewish leaders, all of whom quickly confirmed what Geist had said. Time was quickly running out for Jews in Vienna. That is where Gil should go and find the fifty children.

  Eleanor was understandably confused when Gil sent a tersely worded telegram that said he and Bob were leaving Berlin and traveling immediately to Vienna. It divulged no further information. Her mind began to race but she reminded herself that Gil surely knew what he was doing. Or at least she hoped he did.

  Gil had not been back to Vienna since his first visit there fifteen years earlier, as part of his idyllic European tour the summer before he and Eleanor were married. He still had vivid memories of the city’s wide boulevards, bustling cafés, inspiring monuments, and stately palaces. He knew of its reputation for magnificent hotels and exquisite restaurants. Despite the serious nature of his visit, Gil nonetheless was excited to be back in a city that he had fallen in love with as a young man. After he and Bob checked into the sumptuous Hotel Bristol early in the morning following their overnight train ride from Berlin, Gil quickly unpacked his things and wandered back outside into the bracing air of an early spring morning.

  He strolled down the shop-lined Kärtnerstrasse in search of a favorite restaurant where he had eaten breakfast several times during his earlier visit to the city. As he approached the restaurant, Gil smiled at the memory of the casual bantering friendship he had struck up with the owner. His smile melted away when he spotted a sign on the door that read EINTRITT JUDEN VERBOTEN—JEWS FORBIDDEN TO ENTER. Well, I suppose my old friend has become a Nazi follower. I’ll go to another restaurant, Gil thought to himself. He quickly realized that every restaurant along Kärtnerstrasse featured the same sign. His mind raced back to the vague assurances from the State Department that, as an American citizen, he was reasonably protected while traveling inside Nazi Germany. On the other hand, Gil was a Jew, and he had no doubts that all of these JUDEN VERBOTEN signs were aimed as much at him as at any other Jew in Vienna. “You must walk past these signs and live in trembling and fear that somebody or something or some SS black-uniformed devil might come and do you harm,” Gil recalled later. “When you go to Vienna, which is the home of music, culture, refinement, and gaiety, you are faced at every restaurant, hotel, moving-picture
house, and public park with great big signs that read EINTRITT JUDEN VERBOTEN. Only then can you realize what the real situation is.”

  The next morning, Gil presented himself at the American consulate. Before the Anschluss, the United States maintained a full ministerial legation in Vienna, given Austria’s status as an independent nation. Now that Austria had been folded into Nazi Germany, the American legation had been downgraded to a consulate, whose staff reported to the U.S. embassy in Berlin. Gil introduced himself to Leland Morris, the U.S. consul general, and others in the office, all of whom seemed generally, though somewhat warily, supportive of the Brith Sholom plan. But the underlying message was the same one that Gil had received from Messersmith in Washington and from Geist in Berlin: no one from the United States government could guarantee that any visas would be available to the children whom Gil hoped to bring back with him.

  By the time Gil arrived in Vienna, the American consulate for more than a year had been besieged by Jews, most of whom had little, if any, chance of immigrating to the United States. Because of the quota limits, the sheer volume of people hoping to escape to America made it impossible for more than a fraction to make the journey. The number of families registering for visas had exploded in the days and weeks following the Anschluss. “The visa section is in a state of siege,” John Wiley, Morris’s predecessor as consul general, informed his State Department superiors less than two weeks after Austria was annexed by Germany. In a series of dispatches to Washington, Wiley reported that more than twenty-five thousand people came to the consulate during the last ten days of March 1938 to apply for visas; the small, overworked consulate staff conducted about eight hundred personal interviews during that period. Under normal circumstances, the consulate staff would receive three hundred visitors each month while issuing only about thirty visas. Wiley and the other consulate officials knew precisely why people like Hermann Wenkart were lining up in the predawn hours in order to register for a visa. “We hear constantly of an ever-increasing list of arrests, suicides and tragedies, house searches, plundering and confiscation,” Wiley informed Messersmith in a cable that he sent a week after the Anschluss. “The tragedy here is greater than in Berlin. There it was gradual; here it came from one day to the next.”

  Yet even in the face of such dire circumstances, consulate officers in Vienna were trained to meticulously follow both the letter and the spirit of America’s immigration laws, which offered little recourse to those most in need of it. George Messersmith himself had spelled out the circumspect duties of American diplomats abroad in a detailed memo he had written a few years earlier while he was still serving as U.S. minister to Austria: “The object is not, as some interpret it, to maintain the United States as an asylum or refuge for dissatisfied and oppressed in other parts of the world irrespective of their capacity to become good and self-supporting citizens of our country.” Nor was the objective “to keep out certain classes of persons on account of their race, religion or political ideas.” Rather, wrote Messersmith, “it is the duty of every Foreign Service Officer to administer the law fairly, reasonably and sympathetically, keeping in mind all of the many factors involved in immigration practice so that our procedure in this matter in these difficult times or at posts where the pressure may be the greatest, does not become a concern of the Congress, of the Departments concerned or of the general public.”

  Gil was well versed in the legal and political restrictions confronting the consulate officials in Vienna. He also knew that visas alone provided no guarantee that entire families might be able to leave Vienna. In many cases, Jewish families seeking to come to the United States had no one there to sponsor them. As for children, one of the vice consuls assured Gil there were plenty of them—at least several hundred—who belonged to families that had already registered for visas to the United States and were now waiting for their numbers to come up. These were the children who would be considered for Gil’s plan.

  For the first time since he had taken on the project, Gil felt the weight of selecting fifty children from among the hundreds whose parents had become desperate enough to send their children away—not knowing if they would ever see them again. He was grateful for Bob Schless’s help, but Gil also knew that the responsibility for choosing the children would largely fall to him. Suddenly the burden seemed almost too much to carry. He wished Eleanor were with him.

  On a gray morning in mid-April, Gil slipped out of his room at the Hotel Bristol and walked along the Kärtnerstrasse, which soon spilled into Stephansplatz, the large open square that marked the geographical center of Vienna. Gil stared up at the soaring towers of Saint Stephen’s Cathedral with its distinctive roof covered with tens of thousands of colored tiles. A few blocks farther along brought Gil to the Fleischmarkt, where butchers, fishmongers, greengrocers, cheese sellers, and others offered their goods and wares to Vienna’s housewives. Gil walked for a few more blocks until he reached No. 2 Seitenstettengasse. He entered the shabby three-story building that housed the offices of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde. It was time to go to work.

  Nothing transpired inside the offices of the Kultusgemeinde without the Gestapo’s permission. By the time Gil showed up on that dreary April morning, the skeletal staff at the Kultusgemeinde knew about his rescue plan and had been alerting families to the possibility of a children’s transport to America. They arranged for Gil to use a spare office in the building. They also offered the assistance of a young woman, Hedy Neufeld, who instantly dazzled Gil and Bob with her intelligence and fluent English, along with her charming manner and infectious smile. She was only in her early twenties, with vibrant red hair, deep-set brown eyes, and a pretty face dotted with freckles. Hedy, whose father was Jewish and mother was Catholic, had spent the past few years studying medicine and earning high marks at the prestigious University of Vienna. Because she was half-Jewish, however, she would not be allowed to work as a doctor, she had recently learned. Her younger sister, Lily, was already working at the Kultusgemeinde and likely had a hand in arranging for Hedy to assist Gil with his work.

  Gil arrived at the Kultusgemeinde with an initial list of twenty-five children that he had been given at the American consulate. With help from Hedy and her colleagues, Gil cross-checked each of the children with the Fragenbogen—questionnaires—and other documents that Jewish families had submitted to the Jewish community office. It was painstaking work but necessary in order to formulate a final list of fifty children best suited for the possible trip back to the United States. By the end of the day, Gil discovered that, among the twenty-five names on his list, four of the families had already left Vienna. A few other children were under the age of four—too young, in Gil’s opinion, to be considered. He thought of his own two children, comfortable and safe in the family’s spacious house on Cypress Street. Here in Vienna, Jewish fathers and mothers could now only dream of safety for their children.

  Walking back to the hotel that evening, Gil felt exhausted yet satisfied in knowing that the real work had finally begun. He barely paid any attention to the EINTRITT JUDEN VERBOTEN signs and ubiquitous photos of Adolf Hitler that appeared in almost every window along the way.

  CHAPTER 11

  There is so much work to do here and very little time. I need you to come and help.

  —GIL KRAUS

  PHILADELPHIA–PARIS–LINZ

  APRIL 17–28, 1939

  Eleanor was not at home when Gil first tried to telephone her from Vienna. She had gone out to do some shopping and had not returned until late in the afternoon. The family maid had taken the call and told Eleanor that Gil would try again later that evening. It was Monday, April 17, and Gil had been away for ten days. So far she had received only the few cables he had sent about his arrival in England, his brief stopover in Amsterdam, and the last-minute decision to look for the children in Vienna rather than Berlin. “I was terrified,” said Eleanor, when she heard that Gil had called. “I was sure something was wrong. I was sure he was in trouble. Perhaps
he had been arrested. There must have been an emergency. Perhaps the whole plan had failed and he was returning home.”

  The second call came through at 6:30 P.M. It was past midnight in Vienna but Gil did not sound tired, especially when the couple’s children, Steven and Ellen, grabbed the phone and began talking excitedly with their father. A few moments later, Gil asked the children to hand the phone back to their mother. He hurriedly assured Eleanor that he was fine, and that he had so much to tell her but could not possibly discuss everything during the trans-Atlantic telephone call. Gil quickly walked her through the chain of events that had brought him to Vienna. Eleanor hung on to every word as Gil’s voice crackled through the long-distance telephone wire. She felt immense relief that he had not fallen into danger, that her fears about him being arrested—or worse—had not come to pass. But she had to catch her breath after hearing what came next.

  “There is so much work to do here and very little time,” said Gil. “I need you to come and help.” She clutched the black receiver tightly in her grip and felt a jolt of nervous excitement. Her mind went blank for a second, and she almost missed Gil’s mention of a ship that would be sailing from New York to Europe in a few days’ time. Gil told her to call Louis Levine, who would help with all of the arrangements. Eleanor, fumbling for words, wondered out loud if it would even be possible to book passage on such short notice. Gil’s ready response did little to soothe his wife’s mounting fears. With war rumblings growing steadily louder in Europe, fewer Americans were crossing the Atlantic. He was quite confident that she would be able to reserve a stateroom aboard the SS Washington, which was the next ship leaving for the Continent.