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

by Steven Pressman

  Eleanor, who could barely breathe during the meeting, wanted only to flee the building at this point. But there was still plenty of business to conduct inside the Rothschild Palace. The families had gathered in a large room on the main floor. They had been told to appear in anticipation of the decision to grant the passports, which would entail completing reams of paperwork that were required by Eichmann’s highly bureaucratic emigration process. Gil had to prove that he was authorized to take the children with him to America. In one office, he produced the documents that the parents had signed granting him guardianship of their children. In another office, he paid what amounted to a head tax for each departing child. Before leaving the building, Gil also had to provide proof that each child had a ticket for the ocean passage to America. Throughout this painstaking process, the parents and children stood still and silent as statues. There were no seats provided for them. Gil was seething inside, but he remained outwardly calm throughout the long day, determined to keep focused on the task at hand without letting his anger get the best of him. It took nearly two hours to complete all the paperwork.

  Finally it was time for the parents to be questioned by the Nazi authorities, a process that would involve the approval of yet another set of documents. There was no need for the Krauses to stay at the palace, Friedmann assured them. He would remain with the families until every last bit of paperwork was completed. Gil and Eleanor made their way out of the building and walked, weary but triumphant, back to their hotel.

  CHAPTER 16

  It would be illegal for the American consul general at Vienna to grant nonpreference visas under the German quota.

  —R. C. ALEXANDER, U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT

  BUDAPEST–VIENNA

  MAY 13–17, 1939

  Gil had been working nonstop, almost around the clock, from the moment he arrived in Vienna. “Gil was so overworked, so taut, so used up that we both agreed that we needed a couple of days of relaxation away from Germany,” wrote Eleanor. Bob Schless, who had visited Budapest a few weeks earlier, urged them to spend a weekend in the Hungarian capital. Budapest was the “gayest, most dazzling city in the world—far more entertaining than Paris,” he told them. That was all the encouragement they needed. Eleanor in particular was eager for a respite from Vienna’s storm troopers and Nazi banners, however brief.

  As they would be gone for the entire weekend, Gil thought it would be prudent to check out of the Hotel Bristol in order to save some money. After telephoning the front desk several times, however, the bill never arrived. Gil had booked an evening train to Budapest and was running out of patience with the hotel staff, which by late afternoon still had not presented him with a bill. Finally he paid a visit to the front desk and, in no uncertain terms, demanded that the clerk hand over the bill. The clerk apologized for the delay, explaining that it had been a very busy afternoon and that the bill would soon be ready. Gil had been in Vienna long enough to realize what was happening. “The clerk had been trying to get orders from somebody as to whether or not it was all right to let us go out of the country,” wrote Eleanor. Clearly, the orders had not yet come through. Eleanor kept glancing at the large clock above the front desk. The seconds were ticking away, and she and Gil had no intention of missing their train to Budapest. “Is that clock fast?” Eleanor asked the somewhat sheepish desk clerk.

  Bob came downstairs to say good-bye and could not resist having a little bit of fun. “I see there are two kinds of time in Austria,” he told the clerk, as a sly smile crossed his face. “Fast and half-assed.” Gil and Eleanor broke out in laughter. The clerk looked blankly at the three Americans; despite his command of English, he clearly did not catch the meaning of Bob’s pun. Finally, the clerk received permission to produce the hotel bill. Gil and Eleanor arrived at the train station with only minutes to spare.

  They awoke the next morning in their hotel in Budapest feeling refreshed. “We felt as if we had been let out of jail,” said Eleanor. “Our room was beautiful and sunny. When the waiter brought our breakfast, he did not say ‘Heil Hitler.’” As she dressed for the day, Eleanor thought appreciatively of her sister Fannie, who had helped select her wardrobe during the hasty preparations for Eleanor’s journey to Europe. Uncharacteristically, Eleanor had originally thought to restrict herself to relatively plain outfits in light of the somber purpose of her journey. But Fannie convinced Eleanor that, her mission notwithstanding, she still had no good reason to dress down. Eleanor crossed the ocean with an assortment of evening dresses, along with a fox cape, strands of her favorite pearls, and a variety of other jewelry and accessories.

  Walking through the city on a bright Saturday morning, Eleanor felt her spirits lifting as she and Gil drank in the colorful Hungarian sights and sounds. “It was wonderful to look into a shop window without seeing a picture of Hitler,” she wrote. “No banners, no soldiers, no parades. Just busy people going about their own affairs.” Hungary, of course, was hardly isolated from the menacing shadow that Hitler had cast across Europe in the late 1930s. By the time of Gil and Eleanor’s visit to Budapest, the country’s 450,000 Jews had already been subjected to a variety of anti-Semitic laws put into place the previous year. Similar to Germany’s anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws, the Hungarian edicts stripped away all rights of equal citizenship that had been granted to Jews in 1867. But it would be another year before Hungary would formally align with Nazi Germany. While Gil and Eleanor were hardly naïve about Jewish persecution in Hungary and the rise of Nazi sympathies throughout the country, on this particular sunny weekend, Budapest appeared to Eleanor like a world apart from Vienna.

  They dawdled over a delicious lunch at Gundel, the famed Budapest restaurant that opened in 1910 and had long been one of the city’s foremost gathering spots for artists, writers, politicians, and business leaders. Coincidentally the restaurant’s owner, Karoly Gundel, had just set up a temporary branch of his celebrated establishment on the grounds of the World’s Fair, which had opened less than two weeks earlier in New York. Following lunch, Gil and Eleanor spent the rest of the afternoon taking in the sights, strolling along the Danube, marveling at the majestic Parliament Building with its Gothic spires and soaring dome, and—for the moment at least—feeling like carefree tourists. That evening brought them to dinner at Kis Royale, yet another of Budapest’s fanciest restaurants. “I had never seen so many beautiful women in any one place in my life,” wrote Eleanor, grateful once again that she had packed appropriately for the trip. The restaurant was known for both its Hungarian paprika chicken and its lively Gypsy music, along with small statuettes of the Duke of Windsor that were placed atop each and every table. Attached to each figurine was a note reminding diners that the recently abdicated king of England had frequented the restaurant during his younger days as the Prince of Wales.

  On Sunday morning, Gil and Eleanor took another leisurely walk before making their way to the opulent Saint Gellert Hotel. Perched at the foot of Gellert Hill on the Buda side of the Danube, the art noveau-style hotel boasted one of the most beautiful spas—complete with a series of exquisitely decorated Roman-style thermal baths—in all of Europe. The Gellert spa also featured one of Europe’s unique novelties—a gigantic swimming pool that provided bathers with the illusion of frolicking in the ocean. “The water splashed about in enormous waves,” wrote Eleanor, who found the sight amazing. “There was some sort of machine that kept churning, and it was like swimming in an open surf.”

  A reminder of the purpose for their trip to Europe hit them during the Monday-morning train ride back to Vienna. Although Gil knew that the German authorities did not allow anyone to bring foreign currency into Austria, he discovered that they still had a small number of American dollars with them, which had gone unspent during the weekend in Budapest. “As the train slowed down on the Hungarian side of the border,” wrote Eleanor, “Gil threw the money out of the window at a group of small children who were playing by the railroad.”

  Back at the Hotel Bristol, Hedy Neufeld
had left a message that required their immediate attention. One of the children who had been chosen for the trip to America—a sweet-faced, five-year-old boy named Heinrich Steinberger—had fallen ill and would need to be replaced. Gil and Bob realized they could not take the risk of traveling with a sick child, particularly since the children would be examined in Berlin for any health issues before they would be allowed to leave Germany.

  Eleanor was crestfallen at the thought of having to leave the little boy behind. The notes from the interview at the Kultusgemeinde with Heinrich and his parents described him as a “nice boy, intelligent, healthy” and without any history of serious illnesses such as tuberculosis or trachoma. His father, Josef, had worked in an insurance company in Vienna, and his mother, Hilda, was a housewife. The family had a relative who lived in Detroit. But none of that mattered now. Eleanor could not bring herself to think what might happen to Heinrich in the future. Gil, while sharing his wife’s concern for the boy, confirmed they had no choice but to remove him from the group.

  Gil and Bob went back over the list of those who had not been chosen for the journey to America. All of these children deserved to be selected; all of their parents lived in mortal fear of what might happen if they were not. Gil settled on Alfred Berg, a tall fourteen-year-old who was older than any of the other children in the group. But he was a logical choice because his younger sister, Charlotte, had been selected, and the group included six other sets of siblings.

  But even as Gil attended to the arrangements for completing the paperwork and obtaining a passport for Alfred, new complications arose on the visa front. A State Department official in Washington drafted an internal memorandum on May 16 that appeared, at least on the face of it, to render it impossible to obtain the visas from the American consulate in Vienna. The memo, written by R. C. Alexander from the visa division, stated that “it would be illegal for the American consul general at Vienna to grant nonpreference visas under the German quota so long as he has eligible preference applicants waiting for visas at his office.” (The children all fell into the nonpreference category, as opposed to those eligible for preference visas, including parents and other immediate relatives of current American citizens.) On the same day, Leland Morris, the consul general in Vienna, received a tersely worded confidential cable sent out under Secretary of State Hull’s signature. “Referring fifty nonpreference German quota numbers assigned to you from Berlin for German children, such numbers should not be used in issuing nonpreference visas if you have eligible … preference applicants waiting,” read the cable. The next day, the Vienna consulate confirmed that it would return all fifty visas to the embassy in Berlin.

  The cables only confirmed what Gil had already learned in his frustrating conversations with Morris and other consulate officials in Vienna: if there was any hope of bringing the children to America, the visas would have to come directly from the American embassy in Berlin. Gil could only hope that Geist was sincere when he had promised to do his best on their behalf.

  Although he had no way of knowing it at the time, the project was ruffling feathers back home in America as well. Cecilia Razovsky, the refugee advocate at German-Jewish Children’s Aid, happened to hear about Gil’s mission to Vienna from someone who had recently bumped into Louis Levine in Philadelphia. Fearing that Gil’s ploy to obtain visas would jeopardize her group’s own rescue efforts, Razovsky fired off a letter on May 15 to A. M. Warren, chief of the State Department’s visa division. “This plan, as carried out by Brith Sholom, is raising many inquiries in the minds of our officers and constituents,” Razovsky informed Warren. “We have many free homes waiting to receive the children whom we had selected for over a year and, because of the wait in the quota, our children have not been able to enter. To learn now that children are in the process of being admitted through some other means is, of course, very interesting to us.” In his matter-of-fact reply, Warren told Razovsky only that Brith Sholom had “informally” approached the State Department earlier in the year and that the department had neither approved nor sponsored the mission that Gil had proposed. Razovsky could hardly have been pleased with Warren’s decidedly indifferent response.

  Several days later, another leading Jewish refugee advocate sounded a similar alarm bell about the Brith Sholom effort. “It seems to me quite hazardous to permit this venture to go through,” Jacob Kepecs, executive director of the Jewish Children’s Bureau of Chicago, wrote to Clarence Pickett, the Quaker official who was now leading the recently formed Non-Sectarian Committee for German Refugee Children. “The Brith Sholom lodge to my knowledge has no experience whatsoever in the foster care of children. Its program, if permitted to go through, would constitute a hazard to the children involved and might discredit any other undertaking on behalf of children.”

  While Gil busily attended to the details of the upcoming journey back to America, Eleanor had a free afternoon to herself. She decided to get her hair done and walked to a hairdresser’s salon located along the Kärtnerstrasse, near the hotel. During her time in Vienna, she had noticed that people rarely spoke to either Gil or herself when they were out together. But things were different whenever she ventured out by herself. That afternoon at the hair salon was no exception. The other women were eager to speak with her, particularly once they realized that she came from the United States. “Why does the United States want to make war against Germany?” asked one of the women, with others quick to nod in agreement. “Why does America threaten Germany all the time?” another woman asked. “We cannot understand why America wishes to start a war.”

  “My words of protest were wasted on them,” Eleanor later wrote. “No matter what I said, I was not able to change their opinion.” Although she made no reference to it in her account, it is unlikely that she would have happened to mention that she was Jewish.

  Gil and Eleanor were invited to dinner that evening at the home of Emil Engel, who served as secretary of the Kultusgemeinde and who, with the approval of Adolf Eichmann, had been left in charge of the Jewish center when other community leaders had been arrested and imprisoned after the Gestapo raided the premises in the immediate aftermath of the Anschluss.

  Up till that point, neither Gil nor Eleanor had been invited to anyone’s home in Vienna. Eleanor braced herself for the visit with Engel and his wife. She knew that most Jews throughout the city had long since been forced out of their homes. The Engels lived in an apartment with several rooms that had already been converted into separate flats for families to share. The kitchen was bare, the table and chairs moved into another small room that served as the dining room. The Engels had also invited Bob Schless and Hedy Neufeld. Eleanor, while dismayed by the condition of the Engels’ home, was delighted to see Richard Friedmann, who had guided them through their tense meeting with the Gestapo officer at the Rothschild Palace. Richard, it turned out, was the Engels’ nephew.

  Eleanor struck up an animated conversation with the young man. “I was surprised at how orderly and agreeable everything was at Prinz Eugenstrasse the day we got the passports,” she told him. He responded with a hearty laugh, telling her that the Nazi officials had “put on one good show for you.” Indeed Richard had gone in advance to inform the Gestapo officials that the two Americans would be arriving later to request passports for the children. Upon hearing about the visit, one of the officials barked out orders over the loudspeaker that the Krauses were to be treated with respect and courtesy, Richard said.

  But what about the guard who had angrily shouted at Gil for not shutting the door behind him after they all had been brought before the Gestapo officer in charge? That hardly seemed like respect and courtesy, Eleanor pointed out. Richard laughed again. Apparently the guard had been in the bathroom when the orders had been given. He was the only one acting naturally that morning.

  Engel’s wife had prepared a delicious dinner of stewed chicken—no longer easy for a Jewish cook to come by—and the lively conversation around the bare kitchen table lasted well into the n
ight. “We had a most enjoyable evening,” wrote Eleanor. “These were all such delightful people. Gil and I were terribly impressed that people living under such circumstances could be so carefree and gay even for one evening.” As the night wore on, Eleanor found herself thinking about her own dinner parties. Here in Vienna, the world had become such a foreboding place for people like Emil Engel and Richard Friedmann. The evening made her homesick for her children and the comfortable surroundings of her life in Philadelphia. Her heart broke for the cruelty that confronted every Jew who remained stuck in Vienna. She yearned more than ever to go home.

  CHAPTER 17

  I have no interest in leaving Vienna until every other Jew has left. My hope is that I will be the last to go.

  —RICHARD FRIEDMANN

  VIENNA

  MAY 18–20, 1939

  Only a few days now remained before the departure from Vienna. Gil still had plenty of work ahead of him as he ironed out the endless details for transporting the group to Berlin and, from there, to the port in Hamburg.

  “Gil and Hedy checked the children’s baggage lists,” wrote Eleanor. “They had to approve what apparel, trinkets, and toys the children would be able to take.” The Nazi authorities imposed harsh restrictions on the amount of money that emigrating Jews were allowed to take out of the country. Each child would be permitted to leave with the equivalent of about ten dollars. “My father thought that was an awful lot of money for a child,” recalled Henny Wenkart. When it came time to pack for his daughter’s impending exodus, Hermann Wenkart carefully counted out only the equivalent of $6.75; he could not imagine Henny needing any more than that.