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

by Steven Pressman

  Finally the train sounded a piercing whistle as it slowly edged its way out of the station. Eleanor, surrounded by several of the children, peered out the window as the platform gradually receded from view. “The parents stood in completely orderly and quiet fashion. Their eyes were fixed on the faces of their children,” she wrote. “Their mouths were smiling. But their eyes were red and strained. No one waved. It was the most heartbreaking show of dignity and bravery I had ever witnessed.”

  Gil, Eleanor, and Bob had booked sleeping compartments for themselves for the trip to Berlin. After finding their compartments, they rejoined the children. They made an effort to keep the mood as light as possible. “On the whole we were all very cheerful at the start,” wrote Eleanor. “We turned it into a picnic.” Helga Weisz was eager to eat her mother’s roast chicken, and most of the other children hungrily began tucking into the suppers their parents had packed. Once they had eaten, however, many of the younger children began to cry as the night grew dark and the train traveled farther away from Vienna. The hard wooden benches in the train car were useless when it came to sleeping. Hedy and Marianne tried to console the younger ones who were becoming increasingly upset about leaving their parents. “It was really most unfortunate that our traveling had to be done at night,” wrote Eleanor. “We had been told, however, that we would not have the right to engage sleepers [for the children], and it was thought that the children would be subjected to jeering if they traveled during the daytime. We realized that nothing could have been more uncomfortable or worse than the conditions we had. But we were stuck with them.”

  By two in the morning, all of the children, miraculously, finally managed to fall asleep. Their adult guardians—Gil, Eleanor, Bob, Hedy, and Marianne—remained in the car with them for a while, reviewing the next day’s arrangements. But everyone was exhausted, both physically and emotionally. Gil suggested that Eleanor and Hedy get some sleep. He, along with Bob and Marianne, would remain with the children through the night.

  Eleanor, reluctantly, made her way back to the compartment. But she was unable to sleep. “I could not get the picture of the parents standing on the platform out of my mind,” she wrote. “Their eyes haunted me. I prayed that God might comfort each parent who had returned home to watch an empty bed.” Her thoughts kept returning to the agonizing possibility of having to bring the children back to Vienna if Raymond Geist did not come through with the visas. “Would this all turn into one big fiasco?” Eleanor wrote. “Would we have to bring them back the next day? I cursed the Germans for their ways. And then I cried and cried for the parents.”

  As the first gray streaks of dawn filtered through the window of her compartment, Eleanor groggily returned to the children’s car. She was surprised to find that all was calm. The younger children were still sleeping, and some of the older ones were sitting quietly, studying the passing scenery through the small windows. Nearly an hour before the train arrived in Berlin, the adults scampered around the car, gathering together the children’s belongings, lining up their suitcases, and making sure everything was in perfect order for their arrival. The train pulled into the Anhalter Bahnhof at 7:52 A.M. on the dot.

  CHAPTER 19

  Mr. Kraus was yelling at the SS officer, who was yelling back at him in German. I thought the officer was going to shoot him right there.

  —ROBERT BRAUN

  BERLIN

  MAY 22–23, 1939

  Heinrich Stahl, the president of Berlin’s rapidly dwindling Jewish community, was waiting at the station to greet the travelers from Vienna. Once a prominent insurance executive in Germany, Stahl had been presiding over the city’s imperiled Jewish population since Hitler took power in 1933. Joining him on the platform was Julius Seligsohn, the Jewish leader with whom Gil had met during his earlier visits to Berlin. Several other men and women from the Hilfsverein—Berlin’s Jewish aid group—stood alongside the two Jewish leaders, ready to help shepherd the tired and hungry children as everyone made their way off the train. The Anhalter Bahnof, as always, was filled with storm troopers, many of whom gazed sternly at the arriving passengers. Eleanor this time brushed dismissively past them as she stepped off the train and onto the platform.

  Once the children had been gathered together and their luggage and other belongings accounted for, Hedy and Marianne, assisted by the attendants from the Hilfsverein, shepherded them into several vehicles for the short ride to the nearby community building where they would be staying. The building had been set up as a dormitory, and as Gil had arranged, a hot breakfast was waiting to be served. Gil drove separately with Stahl, who—presumably because of his position in the Jewish community—appeared to own one of the few remaining private automobiles still allowed to Jews. At the age of seventy-one, Stahl was a proud man who had lived his entire life in Berlin. But he had long since devoted himself to doing everything he could to urge Jews to leave Germany. “To those … who have not yet decided to emigrate, I say there is no future for the Jews in this country,” he declared nearly ten months before Kristallnacht.*

  Eleanor and Bob gathered their own luggage into a taxi, asking the driver to take them directly to their hotel. Gil had booked rooms at the splendid Hotel Adlon, only a stone’s throw away from the American Embassy. As the taxi wended its way through the morning traffic, “I cleaned myself up as best I could, putting on some powder and lipstick and combing my hair,” wrote Eleanor. She also donned her red hat, adjusting it carefully as the taxi approached Unter den Linden near the hotel.

  A few moments later, the driver turned around and announced to his passengers that he could not go any farther, even though the hotel was still several hundred yards ahead. The street was blocked off for a parade, he said, speaking in German. Eleanor, though she did not understand what the driver was saying, could see for herself that the street, which spilled into the Pariser Platz, was blockaded. Bob asked the driver the cause of all the commotion. He explained that Galeazzo Ciano, Italy’s foreign minister—who also was Mussolini’s son-in-law—had just arrived in Berlin. He was there to sign a new military alliance between Italy and Germany, an agreement that would come to be known as the Stahlpakt—the Pact of Steel. With a beaming smile, the taxi driver announced that this would be a day of great celebration all throughout the city.

  Indeed, Ciano had arrived in Berlin the day before and had been treated by his German host and counterpart, Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, to a lavish motorcade from the train station to the Adlon, where he was staying. “The route over which Count Ciano passed to the Hotel Adlon was a swirling mass of color,” reported a New York Times correspondent on the scene. “Bands every hundred yards provided martial music as the automobile cortege proceeded along the festively decorated streets. Massed formations of military and party organizations drawn up along the route presented arms and the large crowd lustily cheered as Ciano and von Ribbentrop drove past.”

  The enormous crowds had gathered again the following morning to continue their celebration. Later in the day, Ciano and Ribbentrop, along with Hitler himself, would formally ratify the Stahlpakt in an elaborate ceremony at the German foreign ministry, which was located not very far from the hotel. Inside the stalled taxi, Bob Schless abandoned his gentle, easygoing demeanor, and—speaking in fluent German—barked out orders to the driver. “We are staying at the Adlon! We certainly cannot get out here with all of our baggage. You will have to pull up in front of the hotel!”

  It was a tone of voice that Eleanor had come to recognize during her stay in Nazi Germany. “I had discovered by this time that a German will always take orders if they are shouted with an air of authority,” she later wrote. Bob’s strategy worked like a charm. The taxi driver carefully steered the car back out into the blockaded boulevard and, moments later, pulled up directly in front of the hotel. “After we stopped,” said Eleanor, “the driver turned to us and said, ‘Pardon me, sir. Pardon me, madam. I did not realize you were part of the Italian party.’ ” The two Americans q
uickly got out of the taxi without saying another word.

  Two rows of uniformed German guards stood between the taxi and the entrance to the hotel. Eleanor glanced nervously at Bob. “Walk right into the hotel,” he said. “Don’t look back. Don’t wait for me. Don’t do anything else. Just keep walking.” Eleanor looked straight ahead as she walked along the plush red carpet that led up a few steps and into the hotel lobby, which was filled with dozens of men in German and Italian military uniforms. A loud chorus of “Sieg Heils!” echoed throughout the lobby as she made her way to the front desk. Her legs were trembling as the clerk brought out the hotel registry. “I glanced over to my left,” wrote Eleanor. “Count Ciano and von Ribbentrop were in conversation at the foot of the stairs. I looked around and noticed about fifty Italian officers in black uniforms. I must admit they were the handsomest collection of men I’d ever seen.”

  Bob joined her at the front desk and, in the officious tone that had worked magic with the taxi driver, instructed the clerk to send a bellboy for their luggage. Eleanor suddenly found it difficult to focus on the hotel registration form the clerk had asked her to complete. Her nerves were at a breaking point. “I was stumped when it came to the question of my husband’s birthday,” she said. “I could hardly remember my own.”

  After receiving their room keys, Eleanor and Bob threaded their way across the congested lobby, which was humming with the animated conversations of German and Italian military officers. The two Americans stepped into the metal-cage elevator, eager to retreat to their hotel rooms. The elevator operator did not follow them into the cage, however, but hovered just outside, an anxious look on his face. A few moments later, two uniformed men—deep in conversation—entered the cage without so much as a glance at Eleanor or Bob. They continued their conversation while the elevator operator tugged the metal gate shut with a resounding clang and swung the lever that set in motion the elevator’s ascent. Eleanor had directed her gaze at the floor when the two men had walked into the elevator car. Now, as the car climbed upward, she looked up. She instantly recognized the two officers—Ciano and von Ribbentrop. Within moments the operator brought the elevator to a stop, pulled open the gate, and waited as the two foreign ministers exited and walked across a hallway onto a hotel balcony, where they stood waving to the crowds gathered on the streets below. It felt to Eleanor like an eternity before the operator pulled the gate shut and set the elevator back in motion.

  Gil had a standoff of his own earlier that morning. Having settled the children into the dormitory, he found himself in a heated shouting match with an SS officer who had been sent to keep an eye on the group. “A few of the older boys, including myself, were peeking around and saw Mr. Kraus sitting in some sort of anteroom next to this big room where we were all staying,” recalled Robert Braun. Gil, who was yelling in English at the SS officer, apparently needed the officer’s signature on a document, and the officer appeared to be in no immediate hurry to cooperate. Gil’s tolerance for bureaucratic paper shuffling had long since been exhausted. Robert and the other boys who caught sight of the altercation had never seen anything like it before. “Anytime we saw an SS officer on the street in Vienna, we’d make sure to get out of the way and try to pretend to be invisible,” said Robert. “But here Mr. Kraus was yelling at the SS officer, who was yelling back at him in German. I was frightened because I thought that the officer was going to shoot him right there.” After a few tense moments, the officer finally picked up the pen and signed the paper.

  Once she had settled into her room at the Hotel Adlon, Eleanor picked up the telephone and ordered a large pot of coffee to be sent up to the room. A stiff drink might have done more to calm her nerves, but it was a little too early in the day for that; the coffee would have to suffice. After freshening up, Eleanor went back downstairs to meet Bob and walk with him to the American embassy. By this time, Ciano and von Ribbentrop had left the hotel for the signing ceremony, and the crowds that had gathered earlier in front of the Adlon had begun to disperse. The surrounding streets remained crowded, but Eleanor and Bob were able to reach the embassy without incident.

  Many of the children were already there by the time they arrived. “They looked very tired,” she said. “As soon as the children saw us, some of them became very tearful. We did our best to comfort them and cheer them up.” The younger children were especially upset by the strange surroundings and were suffering from homesickness. “They all looked so weary, and most of the little ones kept crying. The more I tried to stop them, the more they seemed to cry.” Eleanor was told that Gil had already taken the first group of children upstairs to be examined by embassy officials. She grew anxious while she waited for him to appear. Finally he came downstairs and sat next to her in the hallway.

  “What about the visas? What about the visas?” she asked in a trembling voice. Gil leaned close and whispered, “There are fifty visas waiting for us. All our worries are over.” Raymond Geist had lived up to his word: he had set aside all of the unused visas that they needed. None of the children would have to return to Vienna. Eleanor looked up at her husband and, for the first time in weeks, allowed herself the luxury of pure relief.

  There were still bureaucratic procedures to complete. Each child needed to be interviewed and to undergo a physical examination. Many of the interviews were conducted by Cyrus Follmer, one of the American vice consuls who had been handling the visa requests that had been flooding the embassy. One child at a time was ushered into Follmer’s office and seated on a chair in front of his desk. The vice consul, aided by his German-speaking secretary, asked his questions in a gentle and patient manner. However, some of the children, exhausted and disoriented by the constant change in their surroundings, found the process distressing. The questions themselves were perfunctory—name, address, and other identifying information that, according to procedure, had to be asked directly of each child, no matter how young they were. When eight-year-old Charlotte Berg was brought in, she nervously settled herself into the chair across from Follmer, looking “like an Alice in Wonderland figure, sitting there with her long blond hair and her bright blue eyes,” wrote Eleanor.

  “Can you write?” Follmer asked the quiet little girl. He smiled at her and waited for his secretary to translate his question.

  “Ja,” she replied timidly, in German.

  “Write your name here,” said Follmer as he handed her a pen and pointed to the place on the form where he wanted her to sign.

  Charlotte took the pen but suddenly began to sob. Eleanor leaned in close and heard the girl mumble something but was unable to make out the words.

  “What’s the matter?” Follmer asked Charlotte. “Don’t cry. Raise your head. We can’t hear you.” But the little girl, her chin down, continued to cry into her lap.

  Finally, she lifted her head and managed to speak clearly enough that everyone in the office could hear. “Muss ich Sara schreiben?” she asked as the tears continued to stream down her face. At first, Eleanor did not understand what the girl was saying.

  The name on her German passport was listed as Charlotte Sara Berg. But Sara was not her middle name. In an effort to easily identify Jews, one of Hitler’s edicts required Jewish females to list Sara as a middle name if their first names were not recognizably Jewish. Males were required to use Israel as their middle name.

  Once everyone understood what the young girl was asking—“Must I write Sara?”—Follmer buried his face in his hands for a few seconds. He then looked back up at the pretty little blond-haired, blue-eyed girl sitting across from him with tears streaming down her cheeks. She was still clutching the pen in her hand.

  “Schreibe Charlotte,” he told her, speaking as soothingly as he could. Write Charlotte. “You will always keep your name where you are going,” he said. “You will never have to write Sara again.”

  CHAPTER 20

  It was an awesome sight to see this large ship that was going to take us to America, with the American flag flying.

>   —KURT HERMAN

  BERLIN–HAMBURG–SOUTHAMPTON

  MAY 23–25, 1939

  After the children completed the interviews, they returned to their dormitory, where they continued to be looked after by Hedy Neufeld and Marianne Weiss. Someone from the Hilfsverein had invited a Jewish musician to entertain the children. He arrived with a banjo and spent about an hour singing songs in Yiddish and Hebrew, which he tried to teach to the children. “It’s the only place where I ever heard a Yiddish song because I had never before heard anyone even speak Yiddish,” said Robert Braun. “In Vienna, we always spoke German, and my parents didn’t have any acquaintances who spoke Yiddish. As we were listening to these songs in Berlin, I realized that Yiddish sounded a lot like German, but not quite.”

  Gil and Eleanor went back to their hotel to get some rest and then returned to check on the children early that evening, just as supper was being served. “There’s room for you here at our table. Why don’t you come and sit with us?” Henny Wenkart asked Eleanor. “Oh, that’s so nice of you, dear,” replied Eleanor. “But we already ate at our hotel.” Eleanor’s response did not sit well with the sharp-tongued Henny. “We are all traveling together, and you’re staying in a hotel while we’re staying here?” she chided Eleanor. “I guess I hadn’t become aware yet that I was now a refugee,” she recalled years later. “I was not the lawyer’s daughter from Vienna anymore.”

  Early the next morning, Bob Schless took a couple of the children to a dentist after they complained about toothaches. He and Gil were determined to avoid having to leave anyone behind because of health concerns. Fortunately, the toothaches proved to be minor.