In between their English lessons and sports activities, the children were required to write letters to their parents or other relatives in Vienna. “It is very hot here,” one of the children, Robert Keller, wrote to his mother. “We are always busy. The food is wonderful. We are all healthy. I’ve already written to the grandparents. How are they? Every Sunday we go to the movies together with the American children. On the opposite side from us is the camp of Brith Sholom. There are lots of Jewish children. Today we will have a bonfire. A thousand kisses, Robi.”
The letters from Collegeville brought pure joy to the parents who remained trapped in Vienna. “Today is another beautiful day for me since I got mail from you,” Rosa Zinger wrote to her daughters Fritzi and Elizabeth. “You do not know, my darlings, what it means to get a few sentences from you. You give your mother great pleasure. Did you get the pictures of Mama and Papa? Please write us as often as you can so that we may have many letters from you. Greetings and kisses from your loving Mother.”
For some children, the letters only increased their homesickness by reminding them of the relatives and friends they had left behind. While the correspondence helped to keep them connected with their parents, it also underscored the uncertainty, at least in some cases, of whether the children and parents would see each other again. “Your letters are scribbled, but nevertheless we—I and Mama—could not restrain our tears of joy, picturing your young group being photographed with the Statue of Liberty,” Hermann Roth wrote to his son Kurt less than two weeks after the children had arrived in the United States. “For the first time in my life, tears of joy. God has granted you such fortune, and granted us, the parents, to partake in it.”
A week later, Hermann wrote again to his son, though this time with an added, and good-natured, parental admonition. “I must call to your attention again that in your letter, only the address on the envelope is legible. The letter itself is all scribbled, and you aren’t even a doctor yet. You must write neatly.”
The next letter, however, did not come from Vienna. Hermann Roth wrote it instead from a Nazi-operated work camp located outside of the city where he was now living. He had decided that it was too risky to remain in the city, where more and more Jewish men were being arrested and sent away to concentration camps. He felt that he was safer at the work camp, where the ability to perform hard physical labor seemed to provide an alternative to the risks of arrest. “I am well and have become more or less accustomed to the work, which is, of course, very strenuous. Maybe it’s even good for me,” Hermann wrote to his son on July 16. “How are you coming along with your English? I have my English books with me here but I study only on Sundays. On weekdays I am too tired.”
Throughout the summer, Kurt’s parents had been trying, without success, to obtain visas and exit documents for themselves and their younger child, Herbert. By the middle of August, Hermann had managed to book passage on a Holland Line ship that was scheduled to leave from Hamburg in late September and arrive in New York on October 3. But he had run into problems with his exit permits and now needed an extension on his passport. In an August 27 letter, he explained that affidavits from relatives in America also had to be renewed and that Kurt’s mother had been going to the American consulate to try and resolve additional snags that were delaying their departure from Vienna. “The consulate [officer] was very nice,” wrote Hermann, who was still living in the labor camp. “He played with Herberti, gave him candy and, at parting, said ‘God be with you,’ in reference to our situation, as you can understand.” Once again, he reminded his son to “Write diligently, be obedient and well behaved. It is not always to be regretted. How is your English coming along?”
Five days later, on September 1, German tanks rumbled into Poland. Two days after that, Britain and France declared war on Germany. The formal outbreak of World War II put an end to the Nazis’ policy of Judenrein in places like Vienna and Berlin. Instead of pressuring Jews to immigrate to other countries, a far deadlier formula for the Final Solution was about to take hold. Kurt Roth received no more letters from his father. On October 2, Hermann was deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he was assigned to a forced labor detail. He died there twenty-two days later. He was forty years old.
CHAPTER 23
While the number fifty is but a small drop among the hundreds of thousands of lives yet to be saved, still in all each life is worth a world unto itself.
—GIL KRAUS
SUMMER 1939
ATLANTIC CITY–PHILADELPHIA–NEW YORK CITY
Shortly after 2:00 P.M. on the afternoon of Sunday, June 11, 1939, Leon Sacks stepped to the dais in the chandeliered Ritz Gardens ballroom inside the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The Philadelphia congressman looked out across the lectern at the hundreds of men and women gathered for the opening session of the thirty-fourth annual convention of the International Order of Brith Sholom.
“As I stand before this assemblage, proud of my being here, I know I am standing before a group of men and women, unselfish in their service to humanity and fearless in their endeavor to preserve American democracy,” said Sacks. “Here meets an organization whose humanitarian endeavors stand today as a beacon light to all whose hearts beat for the oppressed.” As a swell of applause rippled across the room, Sacks added, “May I take this opportunity of congratulating you for this noble work, especially in being the first to aid in bringing fifty living orphans to the shores of liberty and freedom.”
Sacks, of course, had played an important supporting part in the rescue mission. He had used his influence as a member of Congress to introduce Gil six months earlier to George Messersmith at the State Department. Once the plan was set in motion, Sacks kept in touch with Messersmith and other officials as part of the effort to secure as much cooperation as could be expected from an otherwise recalcitrant State Department. In his speech, however, the Philadelphia congressman reserved his most glowing words of praise for Gil’s role in the mission. “He has endeared himself to all of us and has become a most distinguished member of American Jewry,” said Sacks. “Going to a land filled with hatred, he carried hope to our brethren in the throes of despair, stretched out his hand and by his ability and courage was able to rescue those innocent souls from the depths of hell such as you and I could not realize ever existed.” Sacks then turned to Eleanor. He paid warm tribute to a woman “who left her own babies and went to this land of despair to salvage the lives of those whose only crime was that they were Jewish children.” Sacks also singled out Bob Schless—who was not in attendance—for leaving behind his medical practice “to aid Brith Sholom in its noble cause” and who, in doing so, became a “true healer in the suffering of humanity.”
Sacks was followed to the podium by Samuel Einhorn, a Philadelphia lawyer and Brith Sholom’s vice grand master. Einhorn reminded the audience that Gil’s father had led the campaign years earlier to save lives by building a sanitarium for tuberculosis patients. “It seems to me but fitting,” said Einhorn, “that all these years later, Solomon Kraus’s beloved son should sit down with others and think of saving lives, this time the lives of unfortunate children, this time the lives of those who all said could not be saved.” Eight days earlier, Einhorn had been among the contingent of Brith Sholom officials that had met the President Harding when it docked in New York. “In my twenty-five years of communal work, I know of nothing in my life that has given to us greater happiness, happiness beyond measure, than meeting and greeting those children as they came off the boat,” he said. “And the first individual that I saw, the first happy face that I saw—a face, however, that to me gave every evidence of having borne great grief, a face that showed every evidence of having been through great strain—was that of Gil Kraus.”
Einhorn looked up from his notes and out across the ballroom. “These children are children like yours,” he declared as ripples of applause began to spread around the room. “They were saved from that inferno in Germany by Gil Kraus.” Th
e applause grew louder as Einhorn motioned for Gil to come to the podium.
The applause died down as Gil, impeccably dressed as always, took his place at the lectern. “The credit for whatever achievements were accomplished is yours,” he began. “My associates and myself were only the medium through which fifty souls were given the right to live and grow up into good American citizens.” For the next thirty minutes, Gil delivered a speech that painted a grimly realistic portrait of the crumbling conditions facing Jews inside Nazi Germany. “If you could see, as I have with my own eyes, the sad plight of our people in Middle Europe, then would you realize the immediate need of palliative relief until something of a permanent nature could be accomplished,” he said. “When fathers and mothers of small children are willing, and even plead for you to take their children from them out of the land of darkness into the light of liberty, you can well realize the dire necessity for relief… . While the number fifty is but a small drop among the hundreds of thousands of lives yet to be saved, still in all each life is worth a world unto itself, and each child shall be privileged to live and breathe in a land consecrated to freedom and liberty.”
The crowd in the ballroom jumped to their feet, the room echoing with the sounds of loud, sustained applause as Gil concluded: “May I convey to you the warm and sincere thanks of fifty little children who, with one voice, bow their heads in prayer and gratitude for their safe deliverance from the land of bondage.”
An unexpected visitor to the Brith Sholom convention followed Gil to the podium. Kurt Peiser had never attended a Brith Sholom convention even though he had worked for Jewish community groups for many years. Still, he was widely known to many Brith Sholom members because of his position as the executive director of Philadelphia’s Federation of Jewish Charities. But only a few in the room were aware that Peiser had been among the city’s Jewish leaders who had tried to talk Gil out of the rescue mission. He certainly had no intention of reminding anyone on this day of his earlier opposition. Instead he took to the podium to “pay my tribute to your grand master and to Mr. Kraus and his wife and to Doctor Schless for their accomplishment. It is truly an incentive to all those [other] organizations that are engaged in refugee work.” Peiser referred to the rescue of the fifty children as a “symbol” that hopefully would lead to “future accomplishments … that you have never dreamed of before.”
A few days before the Brith Sholom convention, the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent published an editorial about the successful rescue of the fifty children from Vienna. Under a headline that read “A ‘Now It Can Be Told’ Story,” the sharply worded piece began with an acknowledgment that the newspaper’s editors had known about the rescue plan for months but had kept quiet so as not to potentially jeopardize its success. Now that the children were safely lodged at Brith Sholom’s summer camp, “this intriguing story may—indeed should—be told.” The editorial cast a critical eye on other Jewish leaders and groups that had attempted for months to block the Brith Sholom project. “The question is asked,” the editorial concluded. “Why did German-Jewish Children’s Aid try to dissuade Brith Sholom? Was it merely a case of poor judgment or worse? An explanation is in order.”
Other newspaper articles, meanwhile, that reported on the arrival of the fifty children and their temporary custody at the Brith Sholom house in Collegeville served to further sharpen the original criticism other groups had leveled against the enterprise. On June 12, Jacob Kepecs, the Jewish children’s advocate from Chicago, sent another letter to Clarence Pickett, the Quaker official, which reiterated his earlier concerns. “To my knowledge, neither Mr. and Mrs. Kraus nor Brith Sholom have had any experience in the foster care of children,” Kepecs tartly noted. “Undoubtedly similar individuals and organizations will attempt the same thing. In my opinion, this is a risky procedure all around, and the welfare of the children is jeopardized.”
Two days later, Razovsky wrote again to A. M. Warren, the State Department’s head of the visa division, this time in direct response to the stinging editorial in the Jewish Exponent. “The effect of this editorial and the success of Brith Sholom’s plan,” she wrote, “is likely to start an avalanche of similar organizations.” To be sure, Razovsky had been working tirelessly since 1934 to bring Jewish refugees—adults and children—to the United States. But in the immediate aftermath of Gil’s triumph, Razovsky clearly feared that her own efforts had been eclipsed.
While the success of the Brith Sholom project captured the attention of others who likewise hoped to rescue European Jews, it also raised eyebrows in Washington, particularly among members of Congress who opposed any attempts to ease America’s immigration laws. “My attention has been called to a newspaper article which describes the arrival in the United States of fifty Jewish refugee children aboard the United States Liner President Harding en route to foster homes awaiting them in Philadelphia,” Senator Rufus Holman wrote to Secretary of State Cordell Hull on June 8. “I will be obliged if you will furnish me with a detailed statement of the manner in which these immigrants were admitted to the United States under existing immigration laws.” A conservative Republican from Oregon, Holman had recently joined several other senators in sponsoring legislation to reduce the immigration quotas by 90 percent. He was not happy to hear that fifty Jewish children had somehow managed to make their way into the country. In his two-page reply, Hull assured Holman that the children had properly received visas because their “turns on the waiting list had been reached in the regular order” and that they were all legally admissible under the immigration laws. Hull also told the senator that the children had been “selected abroad by representatives of the Brith Sholom Lodge of Philadelphia, which has undertaken to place the children in a home where they will be supported in the United States.”*
Within a few weeks of the children’s arrival, the earlier speculation over the details of Gil’s mission had given way to a series of critical—and largely inaccurate—conclusions about how he had carried it out. On the afternoon of June 27, leaders of the National Coordinating Committee, a coalition of organizations that had been working to bring Jewish refugees into America, met at the New York City home of Marion Kenworthy, a prominent New York psychiatrist and social worker who had become a passionate advocate for Jewish refugees. The discussion at Kenworthy’s Fifth Avenue apartment quickly turned into a critical investigation of the Brith Sholom project. Kenworthy mentioned that committee members had told Gil long before “there would be a great deal of damage done should he go to Europe and take a group of children. He said he was going to do this, and he was so annoyed at what he thought was an attempt to block him that he decided he would prove it could be done.”
Given Gil’s fierce streak of stubbornness, Kenworthy may well have been accurate, at least partly, in ascribing his original determination to fulfill the rescue mission despite the opposition of others. But she then veered off into a wholly imagined account of his actions, asserting that Gil had somehow managed to obtain fifty “preferential” visas for the children. Kenworthy also claimed another member of the National Coordinating Committee had heard that in advance of his own trip to Europe, Gil had “sent people abroad to search for children” and had obtained lists of Jewish children from orphanages in Vienna.
The committee’s leaders reconvened at Kenworthy’s apartment two days later, on June 29. Once again, the discussion turned to the still-vexing issue of how Gil had managed to bring a large group of children into the country at a time when other rescue efforts remained stalled. Committee members were perplexed in particular by Gil’s success in satisfying the Labor Department’s rigid affidavit requirements.
Throughout the summer of 1939, the rescue mission continued to receive scrutiny. “Just how the children were selected, just who selected them, and how it cleared with the consular service—all these things are part of a great mystery to folks in New York and Philadelphia,” Robert Balderston, from the American Friends Service Committee, wrote in a July 16 memo apprising other
Quaker officials of ongoing refugee efforts. “Apparently the Kraus children shipment [sic], arranged outside the regular coordinating committee created quite a commotion, for it was done apparently to show up the regular Jewish organizations.” Balderston noted that Gil’s plan had been “severely criticized because the children [were] placed in a home or orphanage in Philadelphia and not in private homes as is the regular practice.”
Was it envy that prompted others to criticize what had clearly been a stunningly unique and successful rescue? Whatever their motivation, some of these same people now wondered if they might simply duplicate Gil’s strategy. In his letter accusing Brith Sholom of jeopardizing the rescued children’s welfare, Jacob Kepecs enthusiastically suggested that German-Jewish Children’s Aid and the American Friends Service Committee search for other unused visas that could be reserved for additional children. “I think it would be worth exploring the possibility of using unused quota numbers for children,” replied Clarence Pickett in a June 20 letter to Kepecs in Chicago. “However, at the present time I doubt very much whether there would be a single unused quota number.”
The historical record, unfortunately, is silent on whether anyone from these groups ever spoke again with Gil about his rescue mission. But there is no doubt that he, along with Eleanor, forever remained convinced that he had done the right thing despite—or perhaps because of—the strenuous efforts to stand in his way.
50 Children: One Ordinary American Couple's Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany Page 20