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

by Steven Pressman

  Gil and Eleanor, meanwhile, were happy to learn that Hedy Neufeld and Marianne Weiss, another young woman from the Kultusgemeinde, had been given permission by the Gestapo to help look after the children all the way to Hamburg.

  Nothing was left to chance as the departure date approached. “We spent hours making out baggage tags for each child,” wrote Eleanor. “It seemed there was no way we would ever be finished with the red tape and all of the paperwork.” Gil received a phone call from the United States Lines informing him that payment for the children’s boat passage, which had been arranged back in New York by Louis Levine, fell short by twenty-five dollars. The cruise line had also offered a complimentary first-class ticket to go along with the fifty third-class tickets that had been purchased for the children. Gil decided to give the free ticket to Bob Schless while paying for his and Eleanor’s own passage.

  As Gil and Eleanor checked off the remaining items on their to-do list, they also faced the emotional ordeal of hearing from parents whose children would not be making the trip to America. “We were deluged by letters, visits to our hotel and telephone calls from parents whose children had not been selected,” wrote Eleanor. “We had always been most careful to refrain from arousing hopes for emigration among all these families. We could not blame these parents for persistence in trying their luck. They naturally enough did not believe we were restricted as to what we could do.” Even as the parents begged Gil and Eleanor to take their children, she was struck by how politely they did so. It was wrenching to explain that they simply could not take more children with them.

  Amid the packing and preparations for leaving Vienna, Gil had been slipping off in the evenings, walking to the Kultusgemeinde after dinner and not returning to the Hotel Bristol until well after midnight. “Gil was quite mysterious about these trips, and I couldn’t imagine what it was he was doing there at night,” wrote Eleanor. Finally, on the eve of their departure from Vienna, Gil explained that he had been spending the evenings inside the Stadttempel—the ransacked synagogue adjoining the Kultusgemeinde—with men who were intent on smuggling Jews into British-controlled Palestine. “It was a wonderful thing to see these men with hope again, willing to risk everything, even their lives,” Gil told his wife. Eleanor had a very different reaction. “I was glad I hadn’t known about them, and I was very pleased to hear it was over,” she said. “I was afraid Gil would get into trouble.”

  On one of their last evenings in Vienna, Gil and Eleanor, along with Bob and Hedy, accepted Richard Friedmann’s invitation to supper at his home. He lived in a tiny one-room apartment in the basement of a four-story building that had been owned by his grandfather and confiscated from the family after the Anschluss. His guests arrived to find a veritable feast laid out in the cramped apartment, accompanied by wine, beer, nuts, and candies. “The whole setting was sweet and touching,” said Eleanor. She cast a knowing glance in Hedy’s direction, surmising that the young woman had somehow managed to lend a hand.

  Friedmann talked late into the night about the difficult life he had been leading in Vienna since the Anschluss put an end to his work as a journalist and pushed him into helping thousands of other Jews get out of Vienna. “But what about you, Richard,” Eleanor asked him that evening. “Where will you go?”

  “I have no interest in leaving Vienna until every other Jew has left,” the young man replied. “My hope is that I will be the last to go.” Gil and Eleanor had grown very fond of him and all that evening tried to talk him into coming to America. Gil offered to sponsor him if Richard wished to emigrate.

  But Friedmann politely rebuffed Gil’s invitation. “I will not enter another land where there is any anti-Semitism,” he told Gil and Eleanor. “Austria is my home. And if I am forced to leave it, I will only leave for a piece of soil that I can truly call my own. We were betrayed here in Austria. We thought the soil belonged to us. Next time, I will have to make sure that it really will belong to me. And since I can no longer be an Austrian, I only wish to go where I can claim a bit of Jewish soil.” Palestine was the only place on earth he wished to live.*

  On the morning of Saturday, May 20, Hedy Neufeld telephoned Gil and Eleanor at their hotel to let them know that the staff at the Kultusgemeinde had planned a farewell reception later that afternoon to which all of the children and parents had been invited.

  Eleanor did not think she had enough emotional strength to carry her through yet another such gathering; it had been difficult enough to get through the meetings and interviews with the children and their parents. But Hedy had promised that the Americans would be there. One more day, Eleanor kept reminding herself. She only had to make it through one more day.

  When they arrived at the Kultusgemeinde, a few of the children presented Eleanor with little flower bouquets. Some of the parents then stepped forward, offering words of grateful appreciation for taking their children to safety. The children quickly occupied themselves with games and songs, leaving the parents to stand around a long table, where they chatted awkwardly among themselves while keeping steady gazes on their children. Parents kept approaching Gil to shake his hand and thank him for what he had done. Eleanor noticed that Hedy and Bob sat together in a corner of the room, immersed in a quiet conversation. Eleanor made an effort to keep a smile on her face until she could do so no longer. “This entire party filled me with absolute misery,” she said. She finally excused herself from the room and walked into an adjoining office, where she burst into tears. “I was unable to control myself and was too ashamed to return. It seemed so peculiar to me that I should be the only one who broke down. My lack of bravery was certainly no match for the parents who were charming and gay and acted as if nothing untoward was happening.”

  Before the party ended, the parents presented Eleanor with a gift. It was a delicately carved porcelain sculpture, set atop a wooden oval base and standing about eight inches high. The porcelain depicted two female figures, kneeling and facing each other. One of the figures was leaning toward the other, caressing the woman’s hand and gently kissing it. Along with the sculpture was a note card with a vintage ink-drawn sketch of Vienna. The message inside, from “the grateful children and parents,” was printed, in English, in an elegant script:

  In memory of a Mother-Day

  in hard times never to be forgotten,

  of the day on which you have taken upon

  yourself with motherly love

  the care for Jewish children.

  For the second time that day, Eleanor’s eyes filled with tears. It had completely escaped her attention that Mother’s Day had been celebrated in the United States the previous Sunday.

  Gil and Eleanor had one more social engagement to attend that final Saturday in Vienna. They had been invited to tea at the home of Arthur Kuffler, whom Gil had first met shortly after he had arrived in the city. Kuffler had been one of Austria’s leading textile industrialists, heading a company that manufactured and traded cotton. Five years earlier, in February 1934, Kuffler had visited several cities in the United States as part of an Austrian trade mission that had been appointed by Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss. Three months later, Dollfuss was assassinated during a failed coup attempt by Austrian Nazis. Coincidentally, Kuffler and the other trade delegates had sailed to America on the SS President Harding.

  Kuffler’s business career, of course, ended with the Anschluss, after which he joined an effort led by a Dutch businessman to help wealthy Jews emigrate from Austria. When Gil and Eleanor arrived at Kuffler’s home late in the afternoon, they were surprised to discover that he and his family were still living in a large apartment filled with splendid French furniture, Oriental rugs, tapestries, paintings, and other valuable objets d’art. Kuffler explained that he had been temporarily permitted to remain in the apartment until it was turned over to a high-ranking Nazi official. Eleanor thought of her own home and how much pride she took in it. As she looked around Kuffler’s apartment, Eleanor was filled with both sadness and rage at th
e indignities that her hosts were forced to endure.

  Kuffler’s wife, Edith, carried in a pot of tea along with a tray that she had carefully arranged with small sandwiches and a few pastries. She quietly caught Eleanor’s attention and pointed to the jewelry that she was wearing. “It all comes from the five-and tencent store,” she whispered. “They took all my jewelry, and now I am wearing glass.”

  Gil and Kuffler spent part of the evening in a conversation about the situation in Palestine. The British government only days earlier had issued its “White Paper,” which reinforced the limits on the number of Jews allowed into Palestine. Gil expressed the deep admiration he had for the young Viennese men he had met who were intent on settling there, legally or not. Eleanor was curious to hear Kuffler’s thoughts about Britain’s policy toward Palestine, which had flip-flopped over the years, stretching back to the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which the British government announced its support for a Jewish homeland. “It’s really very simple, Mrs. Kraus,” he replied. “England sold the horse twice. First it sold Palestine to the Jews and then it sold it back to the Arabs.”

  Kuffler’s wife, who apparently had another agenda that evening, steered the conversation back to the plight of Jews still living in Vienna. She turned to Eleanor and asked if it would be possible to obtain an affidavit for herself, her mother, and her brother. Although her husband said he intended to remain in Austria, she was determined to leave. “Did you see the sandwiches? Did you see the pastries?” she told Eleanor. “I made them with my own hands. I could go to work for a caterer in America and support myself. All I need are affidavits to get myself, my mother, and my brother there.” It pained Eleanor to hear this proud and elegant woman beg. And while she replied vaguely that she would try to help, Eleanor knew there was little she could do.

  At the end of the evening, Arthur Kuffler walked downstairs with Gil and Eleanor. Before saying good-bye, he asked them to ignore his wife’s pleas for affidavits. He was confident that he could easily obtain affidavits for himself and his family, which included two grown daughters. But he did not think that his wife’s mother or brother, given their ages, were likely candidates for immigration to America.*

  Eleanor felt completely drained by the time she and Gil returned to their hotel that evening. As she got ready for bed, it dawned on her that their work in Vienna had come to an end. Every last bit of paperwork had been completed, reviewed, and then reviewed again. Everything was in order for the next day’s journey out of the city.

  CHAPTER 18

  Jews are not permitted to give the Nazi salute. If the parents raise their arms to wave, they will be arrested.

  —HEDY NEUFELD

  VIENNA

  MAY 21, 1939

  The sun was shining, and Gil and Eleanor had nothing to do on their final day in Vienna other than pack their luggage and settle their accounts with the hotel. The train to Berlin would not leave until that evening, and it felt strange to be dawdling over breakfast instead of rushing off to a meeting or an appointment.

  As she finished her coffee in the hotel dining room, Eleanor was suddenly gripped with fear: What would happen if they got to Berlin with the children only to learn that the American embassy did not have any visas for them? “My God, don’t think about it!” Gil implored her. “We’re sure to get some visas. I’m afraid we won’t know exactly how many until we get there.”

  Eleanor was hardly comforted. “Suppose there are only seven or eighteen or whatever other number,” she said. “What will we do then?” Gil threw up his hands, even as he tried to remain calm and patient. He told her that she and Bob would continue on to America with as many children as they could. He would return to Vienna with the rest of the children. But there was no point in even considering such a gloomy scenario, he implored his wife.

  In the afternoon, the sky began to darken and rain threatened. Gil and Eleanor walked a few blocks from the Bristol to Vienna’s Kunstlerhaus, one of the city’s main art exhibition halls, which had been built in the 1860s by the Austrian Artists’ Society. Located next to the Musikverein, the home of the Vienna Philharmonic, the Kunstlerhaus, which had been designed to resemble a villa from the Italian Renaissance, was one of the earliest buildings constructed along the Ringstrasse. Gil wanted to visit an art exhibition that had opened two weeks earlier and that had originally been conceived by Joseph Goebbels. The exhibition was called Entartete Kunst (“Degenerate Art”) and consisted of hundreds of modernist artworks that had been banned by the Nazis as either un-German or influenced by “Jewish Bolshevist” ideology. The paintings and sculptures on display were among thousands of pieces of art that the Nazis had confiscated from museums and art collections throughout the Reich. The exhibition, which included works by prominent artists such as Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, Max Ernst, and Otto Dix, was aimed at singling out the “perverse Jewish spirit,” which the Nazis viewed as the sinister force behind the art. Hitler himself lavishly praised the exhibition at its opening in Munich, after which it traveled to nearly a dozen cities throughout Germany and Austria.

  “I was profoundly shocked and deeply sickened by this display of German depravity,” wrote Eleanor. “The deliberate ugliness of obscenity mingled with the beautiful—the mediocre next to the fine, the ridiculous next to the sublime, all labeled ‘Jewish degenerate art.’” Surprisingly only a half-dozen or so among the more than one hundred artists whose works were shown were actually Jewish. But that was of no consequence to the Nazis, who were intent on ridiculing all artistic expressions that ran counter to their obsessive notion of pure German culture.

  Gil and Eleanor returned to the Bristol late in the afternoon in order to finish packing and settle their bill, this time without any delays. Joined in the lobby by Bob Schless, the three Americans piled into a taxi for the short ride to the train station. Although a light rain began falling, the streets remained congested with crowds that had been enjoying the late spring Sunday. As the cab neared the station, Eleanor’s thoughts turned to her first day in the city, only a few weeks earlier. During that initial taxi ride from the station to the hotel, she could hardly have been prepared for the emotional and physical impact the city would have on her. Now, as she traveled in the opposite direction, she was eager, desperate even, to leave Vienna behind. She was tired of being afraid, but above all else she missed her children and the comfort and safety of her own home.

  The overnight train to Berlin was not scheduled to leave until 9:20 P.M., but almost every parent and child was waiting at the station three hours earlier. “We got to the train station early and saw that it was filled with storm troopers,” remembered Kurt Herman, who stood with his mother in the anxious silence. “I think my mother immediately thought that the Germans had changed their minds and that they were not going to let us go.”

  “It was the first time in my life that I ever rode in a car,” recalled Robert Braun, who came to the station with his parents and his older sister Johanna, who had also been selected for the trip. “My parents engaged a taxi to bring us to the station because they didn’t want to be seen walking the streets with suitcases. It wasn’t safe.” Helga Weisz clutched her soft brown teddy bear tightly to her chest as her mother and father—Emil Weisz had been released from Dachau shortly before his daughter’s departure from Vienna—escorted her onto the platform, where everyone gathered in the long, tense hour or so before the children were allowed to board the train. “It was a very rainy night,” remembered Helga. “The train was there, along with all of the soldiers with their guns, wearing brown shirts, black shirts, brown boots, black boots. There were German shepherds and dobermans and rottweilers. I mostly remember the darkness.” That morning Helga had asked her mother to pack some of her favorite roast chicken for the train ride to Berlin. “I don’t know where they got the money for it, but they managed. She packed it into a little sort of lunch box, along with some candy and a piece of fruit.”

  At last the children were allowed onto the train. Helga’s mothe
r and father gave her one last kiss good-bye. “My mother said to me, ‘Be a good girl and listen to your foster parents and make sure you get a good education. Before you know it, we’ll be there, and we’ll all be reunited, and I’ll see you in America.’ ” Helga had no way of knowing that she would never see her mother again.

  Hedy Neufeld, meanwhile, was becoming agitated as she paced up and down the platform, keeping a watchful eye over the children but also monitoring the parents as well. She warned them they could not wave to their children as the train departed. When Eleanor demanded to know why, Hedy quietly explained that Jews were not allowed to give the Nazi salute. The parents risked being arrested if they raised their arms to wave good-bye.

  They stood along the platform, staring in silence at their children through the train’s glass windowpanes. Before boarding themselves, Gil, Eleanor, and Bob slowly made their way down the line of parents, shaking hands, solemnly promising to look after their children, attempting to offer words of hope and consolation. Hedy and Marianne, the other young woman from the Kultusgemeinde, were already on board and doing their best to comfort several of the younger boys and girls who had begun to cry.

  “I was also in tears by that time,” remembered Henny Wenkart. “It seemed as if the train was never going to leave, and we were all inside looking out the window and waving to our parents. I could still see my father’s hat. He was standing on his tiptoes in order to see me. But my mother was shorter, so I didn’t even see her while we were waiting.”

  Officials at the Kultusgemeinde had managed to arrange for all of the children to sit together in one train car. “I remember the smell of the locomotive so vividly,” said Robert Braun. “All fifty children were in one car, and we were told that the doors would be locked until we got off in Berlin. On the platform, before getting on the train, there was a great deal of crying and wailing. But my sister, Johanna, and I did not cry because our parents had maintained a very cheerful attitude. They just kept telling us about this wonderful life we would have in America.”