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

by Steven Pressman

  Gil and Eleanor made their way back to the American embassy, where a few remaining children still had to be interviewed. By midmorning, the last of the paperwork had been completed. They walked back to the Adlon across the Pariser Platz with the fifty visas in Gil’s briefcase. No amount of gold or diamonds could have been as valuable. Bob was waiting for them at the hotel. They quickly collected their luggage and took a taxi to the train station, where the children were already assembled. The train to Hamburg left the station right on time—a few minutes before noon. Eleanor, recalling the emotional departure from Vienna, was relieved to be leaving Berlin without another wrenching set of farewells.

  “The weather was beautiful—sunny and mild,” she wrote. “The children had a very good night’s sleep. More than a dozen men and women had attended to them and had arranged our departure in a most orderly fashion.” The children had been provided with lunches to eat during the three-hour train ride to Hamburg. Gil and Eleanor walked through the train throughout the journey, changing seats often so that they could sit with different groups of children along the way.

  “The attitudes of the children were interesting to us,” wrote Eleanor. “For Gil, they had lost all feeling of awe. He had become the father of them all. The little ones climbed on him and showered him with affection. The older ones clung to him and talked to him, sometimes even putting an arm about his shoulders.” As for Bob Schless, some had begun calling him Uncle Bob while others continued to address him formally as Herr Doktor. “They were witty with him, but always conscious of his revered title,” said Eleanor. “A doctor was a man to be respected, and they never forgot that.”

  And Eleanor herself? “I had become the fairy godmother. If I touched one child, the others were noticeably jealous. I had to be very careful not to show special attention or affection. I was not a replacement for their own mothers.”

  A pair of buses operated by the United States Lines ship company was waiting at the Hamburg train station to bring the children and adults directly to the company’s offices. To Eleanor’s chagrin, the German employees who worked for the United States Lines in Hamburg were a surly bunch. They acted put out to be helping Jewish children. “No one there was pleasant,” said Eleanor. “The red tape was endless. We missed the friendliness and help we had gotten at the embassy. There was none of that attitude here. We were kept at the office for two hours until it was time to leave to make the steamer.”

  Finally, the buses brought the children and adults to the dock. Once all of the baggage had arrived from the Hamburg train station, there was yet another hurdle. Everything had to be inspected again, this time by the German customs authorities. “All of the children were lined up with their suitcases, and each one was opened for inspection,” said Eleanor. “There was a complete search of every piece of luggage. Several boys and girls were selected and chosen for a search for money.”

  Few, if any, of the children had ever seen an ocean liner. As they waited to board, several kept staring, wide-eyed, up at the Harding, with its immense oil-belching smokestack and rows of lifeboats hanging off the side of the ship. “It was an awesome sight to see—this large ship that was going to take us to America, with the American flag flying,” said Kurt Herman, who had never seen a boat larger than the small barges that would occasionally float down the Danube in Vienna. “This ship was something to be remembered.”

  As she waited on the dock with the children, Eleanor wanted nothing more than to board the ship. “I stared up at the gangplank,” she wrote. “I thought to myself that any minute now we would be back on American soil.”

  Eleanor’s joyful anticipation was marred only by the sorrow of saying good-bye to Hedy Neufeld. She had been allowed to travel this far with the children, but Hedy was not permitted to walk along the platform that led onto the ship; the Nazi authorities were not going to risk letting someone slip away that easily. Hedy and Marianne had no choice but to stand alone behind a wire fence and watch as the children boarded the ship with the Americans. “I felt so mean pulling away from them,” said Eleanor. “We had all grown particularly close. It was a dreadful moment to see them both standing there, forlorn and dejected. It was sickening to leave her behind. I could see Hedy crying, and I could feel my own tears running down my face.”

  On board the Harding, the children were divided four to a cabin throughout the third-class deck. As the children made their way to their rooms, Eleanor caught the attention of a ship steward and handed him two of the children’s suitcases, asking him to deliver them to their cabins. “I don’t carry baggage for the steerage,” the steward curtly replied. Livid, Eleanor told Gil about the steward’s rudeness. Not wanting to make a scene, Gil quietly sought out the chief steward, diplomatically explaining the situation and agreeing to pay an additional sum of money—basically, an extra tip to all of the stewards—in exchange for their agreement to help, however grudgingly, with the children.

  Not until everyone had settled into their cabins did Eleanor finally allow herself to relax. Throughout most of the ten-day voyage, Gil and Eleanor ate their meals with Bob in the ship’s first-class dining room while the children ate in a separate area. On the first night, however, Eleanor remained with the children while they ate dinner. As she looked around the room, she attempted a head count to make sure that all fifty were on hand. Several children were flitting from table to table, and Eleanor found it difficult to keep an accurate count. “I just prayed that we hadn’t lost anybody,” she said. A waiter came in with a tray of marinated herring, which caused great excitement among the children. “Rollmops! Rollmops!” several of them shouted in unison as they recognized the sight—and perhaps pungent scent—of the pickled fish. “Can we have some? Oh please, can we have some?” Eleanor asked the waiter to bring trays of rollmops for all the children. As the dinner progressed, Eleanor pulled aside one of the busboys and asked if he happened to have any American cigarettes. “Sure, lady,” he replied in a thick Brooklyn accent. He reached into his pocket and handed her a pack of Lucky Strikes. She lit one, took a long drag, and sighed contentedly. “I clung to the pack,” she said later. “This was my first link with home. I was so grateful.”

  Rollmops and Lucky Strikes aside, Eleanor was far less impressed with the Harding itself, which she dismissed as “old, small and hideous.” She and Gil had long since become accustomed to considerably higher standards of luxury and comfort when it came to travel. The Harding was hardly the Queen Mary, nor did it compare favorably even with the Washington. Despite their first-class fare, “our stateroom was most unsatisfactory,” she said. “Our beds were so narrow that we were sure we would roll out if there should be a rough sea. The idea of spending ten days at sea this way seemed unendurable to us.”

  The ocean voyage also proved to be an ordeal for many of the children. Seasickness was a frequent problem. For some, the fears of their upcoming journey across the sea began even before the journey itself. “I was frightened even about walking across the plank onto the boat because there was the ocean below that plank, and I didn’t know how to swim,” recalled Helga Weisz. “I also couldn’t understand anything that was being said to me, and I kept looking at the other kids who were looking back at me. A few of the older children knew English so they felt at home. But that wasn’t the case for the rest of us.” Gil and Bob wasted no time in dividing the children into smaller groups and conducting daily English lessons while at sea. “I paid a lot of attention because my parents had told me back home, ‘Be sure you listen to anything in English so that you learn it faster.’ At the time, the only English words I knew were yes, thank you, and toilet,” said Helga.

  The ocean voyage also held a few unexpected delights for many of the children. Six-year-old Friedrich Lifschutz tried out chewing gum for the first time in his life. “I had no idea what it was,” he remembered decades later. “But soon a lot of us were just chewing away on the boat. It was a real treat.”

  Two days after leaving Hamburg, the ship docked briefly a
t Southampton, England, where it took on more passengers and cargo goods before heading westward into the Atlantic. Some of the children had relatives in England who had been notified about the ship’s port stop in Southampton and were allowed to come aboard for short visits. Erwin Tepper received an unexpected visit from his father, who had arrived in England from Vienna only a few weeks earlier. Juda Tepper was among a few thousand Jewish men from Germany and Austria who found refuge at Camp Kitchener—a former World War I army camp in Kent that had been turned over to a Jewish relief group in England. Although Erwin and the other lucky children were overjoyed to see their relatives, the stopover in Southampton was difficult for the rest. “These visits made all of the other children homesick, and many began to fuss and cry,” said Eleanor. “We were glad to see the visitors go ashore.”

  Gil had a more pressing reason to get the relatives off the ship. Shortly after leaving Hamburg, he was horrified to discover a few pieces of jewelry hidden in a suitcase belonging to one of the younger children. The jewelry had gone undetected during the German customs search, and Gil only learned about it when the child handed the jewelry to a relative who had come aboard in Southampton. Gil flew into a rage, railing that the entire rescue mission might have been jeopardized had the jewelry been discovered by the Germans. In his anger, he even thought about sending the child back to Berlin. It took all of Eleanor’s powers of persuasion to talk Gil out of taking such a drastic step, finally convincing him that it would be cruel to punish an innocent child for the parents’ foolish action.

  With England behind them, the children now spent long days at sea playing on the decks, writing letters to their parents, and concentrating on their daily English lessons. As part of their language exercises, the children learned to sing “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean,” a decidedly odd choice for a group of refugee children from Vienna. In an effort to combine English lessons with a dose of American civics, the children also practiced singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” (which had been officially established as America’s national anthem in 1931), only to be utterly baffled by the song’s confusing lyrics and challenging melody. Despite the homesickness and other more minor maladies, the children turned out to be wonderful passengers. “It would be difficult for anyone to believe how good the children were,” wrote Eleanor. “They were sweet tempered, and at all times they were obedient and courteous. I couldn’t help but contrast the difference between what fifty American children would have been like against these Viennese children.”

  The group, however, was not without at least one young prankster. Eight-year-old Oswald LeWinter, whom Eleanor later remembered for his “twinkling brown eyes and wonderful smile,” was also “our mischievous little boy” who always seemed to be doing something to attract a little extra attention. One morning, the young boy gathered up several keys that were used to lock some of the children’s suitcases, merrily skipped over to the ship’s railing, and dropped them into the ocean. “He said he did it to be funny, and I am sure that was his motive,” said Eleanor. “Yet this caused great inconvenience, and the children were most resentful over having lost their keys.”

  Gil somehow managed to find other keys that opened the suitcases but in the process made an unexpected discovery. “Most of the children still had food packed in their suitcases, which had been provided by their mothers before they left Vienna,” said Eleanor. “Since we were well on our way, having been out at sea four days, the food was beginning to smell.” Gil and Eleanor promptly embarked on a thorough inspection of every suitcase. Soon enough, they were faced with a pile of spoiled food—everything from rotting pieces of fruit to pungent hunks of salami. The children’s group included two brothers who came from a family that kept a strictly kosher home in Vienna. Their parents, fearing—correctly—that the boys would find no kosher food on the ship, had packed away some fish that had long since begun to go bad. “Somewhere out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, I remember seeing Mr. Kraus and a steward each carrying a small suitcase at arm’s length, running up to the railing and dropping it into the ocean,” recalled Robert Braun. “I thought that was hilarious because I had never seen Mr. Kraus run so fast.”

  Midway through the voyage, Bob Schless joined Gil and Eleanor one evening after dinner in the ship’s first-class smoking salon. He was tense and unhappy that night, an unusual state for the mild-mannered and easygoing doctor. Eleanor asked him what was wrong. “I made a very great mistake in leaving Hedy behind,” he confessed. “I am in love with her and want to marry her. I never should have left her in Austria.”

  Eleanor was never one to mince words. “Now you tell us!” she exclaimed. “Why didn’t you think of it while you were there?”

  Bob said that he had done just that many times during their stay in Vienna but did not want to act on his feelings until he was completely sure. “I know I have made a serious mistake,” he confessed. In an effort to remedy the situation, he sent Hedy a ship-to-shore cable that included a proposal of marriage. “I was terribly pleased at the news, but I really could have kicked Bob for not having come to his senses while we were over there,” wrote Eleanor. “I told Gil several times that I thought Hedy was falling in love with Bob. Gil said it was my imagination, and that she naturally was attached and devoted to all of us.”

  Early the next morning, Bob greeted Gil and Eleanor at breakfast with a broad grin on his face. Not only had Hedy received his cable, but she had already dispatched her response. She would gladly agree to get married. “It seemed like such a wonderful and magical ending,” said Eleanor. “It was a happy, fairy-tale ending that we shared with Bob.”

  CHAPTER 21

  The persons responsible for bringing the children into this country were strongly adverse to giving any information to newspaper men on board the ship.

  —THE NEW YORK TIMES

  JUNE 3, 1939

  NEW YORK HARBOR

  A soft spring breeze and the promise of a warming sun greeted the passengers aboard the President Harding on the final morning of the trans-Atlantic passage that had begun ten days earlier in Hamburg. As the ship approached the wide mouth of New York harbor, the calm ocean felt as gentle as a smoothly flowing river. Ambrose Light—the floating station that marked the entry point to the harbor—was a soft pink in the early morning light. All seemed unusually quiet as the Harding’s noisy oil-burning engines began to decelerate. The ocean liner, its single stack no longer belching out plumes of black smoke, aimed for the piers that jutted out along the lower west side of Manhattan.

  Despite the calm seas, Eleanor found herself maneuvering precariously at a sharp right angle down the narrow hallway outside her stateroom. Indeed, the boat was listing so hard to starboard that Eleanor had to grab hold of a wooden railing to keep from toppling over as she gingerly made her way to one of the upper decks. The ship’s ballast had shifted during the night, resulting in the peculiar pitch at which the liner was now edging its way into the harbor.

  On one of the lower decks, Bob Schless stood careful watch over several of the children who, despite the early hour, were already gazing eagerly out beyond the ship’s railing toward the horizon. He pointed to a small object that was only barely recognizable in the morning mist but had already become a source of gleeful excitement among the children who were gathered around him. They knew they were on the verge of their first real glimpse of America. Some of the older children vaguely knew about the Statue of Liberty, either from their parents or from having seen pictures of it in newspapers or newsreels. “We all ran to the railing on one side of the ship to see the Statue of Liberty,” recalled Helga Weisz. “I was crying because my parents had told me all about the Statue, and I just remember thinking, ‘Well, I made it here.’”

  As the soaring copper-green figure of a torch-bearing woman draped in flowing robes emerged more clearly into view, some of the younger children shrieked joyfully while waving little American flags. A few of the older children, while happy to have arrived, recognized the sobering
significance of their first sighting of America. “Some of the older kids were certainly conscious of the fact that we had escaped Nazi Germany, where things weren’t so good for Jews,” said Kurt Herman. “And we knew that we were going on an adventure to a new country where we would have all these rights and freedoms. But we also understood, at least most of us did, that it was possible that we would not see our parents again.”

  After gliding past the Statue of Liberty, the children turned their wide-eyed attention to the incredibly tall buildings that loomed before them. The skyscrapers clustered toward the lower tip of Manhattan only seemed to grow taller and taller as the ship inched closer to its West Side berth. Eleanor delicately balanced her way to the ship’s B Deck, where she joined Bob and the children for the Harding’s arrival into port. Gil, who had been up since before dawn, remained in his stateroom, reviewing arrangements for immigration and customs inspections. Louis Levine, the Brith Sholom leader, and Congressman Leon Sacks from Philadelphia had boarded the ship at Ambrose Light and had been working with Gil all morning to ensure a smooth transition onto shore. The three men did not emerge back up on the deck until just before the ship was tied up at the pier, which jutted out into the Hudson River at the foot of West Eighteenth Street in Manhattan.

  Excited shouts and welcome-home greetings broke the morning silence as the ship’s passengers made their way down the gangplank and into the embrace of awaiting family and friends. Eleanor stayed on deck with Bob and the children, bracing herself as she spotted newspaper reporters heading in their direction. “They made a beeline for the group of children I was standing with,” wrote Eleanor. “Gil remained below with Louie and Congressman Sacks. I was cornered by the press.” The reporters had been alerted that fifty German children were onboard the Harding. “We didn’t want any publicity, yet I was afraid to say nothing at all about the children,” said Eleanor. “I was as non-committal as I could be.” As the reporters flung questions at her, Eleanor described the children’s arrival as a “quiet, private project” that resulted from “friends of ours who had become interested in bringing some children into this country.”