LEON SACKS, THE Philadelphia congressman who assisted in the Brith Sholom rescue mission, left Congress in 1943 to enlist in the U.S. Army Air Force. After the war, he became active in veterans affairs and was twice elected as a national judge advocate for the Jewish War Veterans organization. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Sacks as chief counsel for the U.S. Customs Office. He died in March 1972 at the age of sixty-nine.
GEORGE MESSERSMITH LEFT his position as assistant secretary of state after President Roosevelt appointed him U.S. ambassador to Cuba in 1940. The following year he was chosen as ambassador to Mexico, where he served until 1946. President Harry Truman that year selected Messersmith to be ambassador to Argentina, where he remained until he retired from the Foreign Service the following year. Messersmith died in Mexico in January 1960 at the age of seventy-six.
The Fifty Children
While researching this book and a related documentary film, I was able to account, one way or another, for thirty-seven out of the fifty children rescued by Gil and Eleanor Kraus. Among that group, nineteen were living as of the summer of 2013, and eighteen were deceased. I was unable to find any information about the remaining thirteen. To help in the ongoing effort to account for all fifty children, I would welcome hearing from any of these remaining men and women or their relatives.
The following are brief updated sketches of the children for whom I was able to account, following their arrival in the United States in June 1939. They are listed according to their original given and family names in Vienna. Names that appear in parentheses reflect Americanized given names and married names.
PAUL BELLER LIVED with the Amram family in Feasterville, Pennsylvania, for about a year. His mother, Mina, obtained a visa for the United States, arrived in February 1940, and settled in New York City. His father, Leo, waited out the war in a British detention facility in Mauritius, where he had been sent after being caught trying to enter Palestine illegally. After the war, he was allowed to immigrate to the United States, sailing on a freighter that arrived in Baltimore in July 1946. Paul attended City College of New York and later obtained a master’s degree in public administration from New York University. He spent two years in the U.S. Army, after which he began a forty-year career with the federal government, most of it working for the national Medicare office in Maryland. He and his wife, Glenda, have three children, seven grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. They live in New Jersey.
ALFRED (FREDDY) BERG and his younger sister, Charlotte, lived with distant relatives in Jersey City, New Jersey, until they were reunited with their parents in December 1939 and moved to Brooklyn, New York. Freddy entered the navy toward the end of World War II and was deployed to Okinawa, Japan, where he served until the war came to a close in August 1945. He later studied business and worked for many years as a stockbroker. He and his wife, Marianne, had two children and three grandchildren and lived for many years in New Jersey. He died in 2013.
CHARLOTTE BERG (HOFFMAN) remained in Brooklyn with her parents until getting married. She and her husband raised two children and lived for many years on Long Island, New York, and in Boca Raton, Florida. Charlotte passed away in 1999.
ROBERT BRAUN and his older sister, Johanna (always known as Hanni), lived with Gil and Eleanor and their children in Philadelphia for two years. During that time, Robert and Hanni attended Friends Select, the Quaker school in Philadelphia where the Krauses’ daughter, Ellen, was enrolled. “Once a month or so, Mr. Kraus would give all of us a whole handful of nickels, and we’d take them to the Automat where we could eat anything we wanted,” Robert recalled. “I thought that was just the biggest thrill in the world, picking out your own food, even if it meant having nothing but cake or pie. It was great.”
In 1941, Robert and Hanni went to live with a cousin, another Viennese emigré, in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Their parents, Max and Karoline, survived the war in Vienna thanks to Karoline’s official Nazi certificate that, based on her ancestors’ birth and marriage records, identified her as an Aryan, even though she had converted to Judaism at the time of her marriage. The couple obtained visas for the United States and arrived on Christmas Day 1947.
Robert studied dentistry and served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War. He later became an orthodontist in Fairfield, Connecticut. One of his patients was Gil and Eleanor’s granddaughter Liz Perle, who grew up in nearby Rowayton. Robert and his wife, Nancy, raised six children, have six grandchildren, and continue to live in Fairfield.
JOHANNA BRAUN (GITLIN) studied at the University of Connecticut School of Pharmacy, where she met and married her husband. They moved to Bridgeport, where they owned a pharmacy and worked side by side for nearly thirty years. They had three daughters and seven grandchildren. Johanna died in 1997.
INGE BRAUNWASSER (STEINBERGER) lived with a great-uncle and great-aunt in Texas until she was reunited with her parents, Simon and Elsa, who arrived in the United States in December 1939. After getting married, she moved to Cincinnati, where she worked for many years as a teaching assistant. In 1995, she was reunited after fifty-six years with Helga Weisz, her bunk mate aboard the SS Harding, during a Brith Sholom anniversary celebration near Philadelphia. Inge and her husband had two children and six grandchildren. She died in 2003.
FRITZ (FRED) HABER lived for a year with a foster family in Philadelphia and, after being reunited with his parents, moved to the Washington Heights section of New York City. He later enrolled at UCLA. After working for several summers as a hotel waiter in New York’s Catskill Mountains, Fred and his older brother Henry (who escaped from Vienna to London only days after Fred left for the United States) bought a hotel in Fleischmanns, a resort town popular with European refugees. Fred and his brother also started an office supply business that grew into a national company with offices in Los Angeles, New York, Las Vegas, and Miami. Fred has two sons and three grandchildren, and lives in Riverdale, New York.
GERDA HALOTE (STEIN)lived with her grandmother and other relatives in New York City until she was reunited with her parents in 1941. She grew up in Queens, where she became the first female member of her high school’s chess club—by beating the club president. She later studied economics at Brooklyn College and attended graduate school at New York University. After living briefly in Israel, Gerda and her Israeli husband returned to the United States and settled in Los Angeles, where she worked for many years as an accountant. She and her husband have three daughters and six grandchildren and live in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles.
KURT HERMAN and another rescued child, Julius Wald, lived together with a foster family in Allentown, Pennsylvania, after their summer in Collegeville. Kurt’s father, Heinrich, left Vienna in May 1939 with nearly one hundred other Jewish passengers aboard a French steamship, the Flandre, which sailed for Cuba around the time of the SS St. Louis. After being turned away in Havana, the Flandre returned to France, where Heinrich was sent to a displaced persons camp. Kurt’s mother, Martha, obtained a visa and sailed to America on a ship that left from Genoa, Italy, in October 1939. Heinrich spent a year in the refugee camp and then obtained a visa for the United States, where he was reunited with his wife and son in April 1940. The family lived in Allentown.
Kurt received a business degree from Pennsylvania State University, after which he served for three years in the U.S. Coast Guard. He worked for many years as the chief financial officer of the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia during which he learned about Brith Sholom’s role in the children’s rescue. After becoming a member of the group, he was elected president of its Kraus-Pearlstein Lodge—which was named partly in honor of Gil’s father, Solomon. Kurt and his wife have three daughters and eight grandchildren and live just outside of Philadelphia.
ROBERT KELLER was reunited with his parents, Viktor and Amalia, and his older brother about two years after his arrival in the United States. The family lived in Trenton, New Jersey. An accomplished musician, Robert entered the U.S. Army toward the e
nd of World War II; he was sent to the Pacific where he performed in jazz bands that entertained in officers’ clubs. He later studied at Champlain College in Illinois and the University of Denver before obtaining a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Pennsylvania. He became the associate director of microbiology and immunology at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago and also served as the dean of the School of Allied Health Sciences operated in conjunction with the University of Chicago. He and his wife had one child. Robert passed away in 1982.
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OSWALD LEWINTER, the mischievous little boy who tossed the children’s suitcase keys into the ocean, lived with a foster family until he was reunited with his parents, who both obtained visas for America and settled in Brooklyn, New York. At the age of twenty, Oswald was arrested for illegally wearing a Marine Corps uniform—a federal offense—in an attempt to hitch a free ride on a Coast Guard plane. After graduating from college, he earned some acclaim as a published poet and taught literature for a few years at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York.
Oswald was arrested again in 1971, this time in London, after authorities accused him of unlawfully possessing a New York City police detective’s badge and papers falsely identifying him as a foreign diplomat. Over the next several years, he had several more scrapes with the law, culminating in an incident in which he presented himself as a CIA operative who was allegedly involved in the release of American hostages held in Iran. His final hoax, which resulted in a prison sentence in Austria, involved his attempt to sell fabricated documents claiming that the British spy service MI6 was behind the 1997 car crash deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed. Oswald later moved to South Carolina, where he died in 2013.
FRIEDRICH (FRED) LIFSCHUTZ lived with his grandmother and aunt in the Bronx, New York, after spending the summer in Collegeville. To avoid arrest in Vienna, his father, Morris, tried to escape to Switzerland but was caught at the border and sent back to Vienna. Unable to obtain a visa for America, he returned to Podhajce, the town in Poland where he was born and where other relatives were still living. Just as Fred’s mother, Bertha, was about to join him, Morris warned her not to come after hearing that the town was no longer safe for Jews. Bertha obtained a visa for America soon after and was reunited with her son in January 1940. Morris remained in Podhajce, which the Germans occupied in June 1941. He was killed two months later, though Fred and his mother did not learn of his death for several years. Fred attended City College of New York and has worked for years as a sales representative for various toy companies. He and his wife have two daughters and four grandchildren and live on Long Island, New York.
PETER LINHARD, whose father committed suicide in Vienna shortly before the children’s departure, lived for several months with a foster family in New York. His mother, Regina, obtained a visa and came to America in November 1939. After living in Brooklyn, the family later moved to Philadelphia, where Peter spent much of his time in the city’s pool halls. Following his discharge from the U.S. Army in 1955, he worked in a number of jobs before settling on a career as a semiprofessional pool player—and self-described compulsive gambler—who went by the nickname of “Peter Rabbit.” He died in Philadelphia in 2005.
KLARA RATTNER (KAY LEE) lived in New York with a great-uncle and great-aunt while waiting for her parents to obtain their own visas for America. Her father, Jakob, was among the thousands of Jewish men from Nazi Germany who found temporary refuge at Camp Kitchener, a former British Army base. Her mother, Esther, also left Vienna for England, where she worked as a domestic servant in a Jewish household. After the family was reunited in May 1940, they moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where another uncle was living. Klara graduated with a teaching credential from the University of California at Berkeley. She and her husband, who owned a commercial refrigeration business, raised three children and had four grandchildren. She has lived for many years in Atherton, California.
KURT ROSENBERG lived with cousins in Brooklyn and was reunited with his parents, Simon and Regina, who succeeded in escaping from Vienna in time to celebrate their son’s bar mitzvah in December 1939. Kurt later attended City College of New York and had a long career in the retail business, starting out as a shoe salesman and winding up in executive management positions for companies in Los Angeles and San Diego. He and his wife had three children and four grandchildren. Kurt passed away in 2007.
KURT ROTH (ADMON) lived briefly with a foster family in Albany, New York, before moving to another family on Long Island. After his father died at Buchenwald in October 1939, his mother obtained visas for herself and her younger son Herbert. She arrived in the United States, by way of Italy, in March 1940. After starting college in New York City, Kurt moved to the newly created state of Israel in 1948 where he joined a kibbutz and changed his last name from Roth to Admon (a name similar to the Hebrew word for rot—German for “red”). He later studied economics, specializing in kibbutz-related management issues.
During the 1980s, Kurt took a family trip to Vienna, where he went in search of his father’s gravesite. “The Jewish part of the cemetery there had not yet been reconstructed. A lot of the gravestones were broken and thrown all around,” he recalled. A woman who worked at the cemetery provided him with the precise location of his father’s burial site. “You can destroy the graveyard. And you can kill everyone,” he said. “But these people were very good at keeping order.” Kurt has six children and eleven grandchildren and lives in Netanya, Israel.
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ELLA SPIEGLER (GOLDSTEIN) lived in Hagerstown, Maryland, and later Newark, New Jersey, after leaving the Brith Sholom camp. Her parents escaped from Vienna to England in 1939, and her father served in the British army during World War II. Ella was reunited with her parents after they immigrated to the United States in 1948. She spent most of the rest of her life with her husband in West Orange, New Jersey, where she worked as an office secretary and raised two children. At the time of her death in 2004, she had four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
ROBERT SPIES lived with distant relatives in the Bronx and later moved to Brooklyn after his parents obtained visas and arrived in the United States in April 1940. He earned a degree in mechanical engineering from Cooper Union, after which he got married, moved to California, and enrolled in graduate school at the University of Southern California. After many years as a mechanical engineer, Robert obtained a law degree in 1975 and went into private law practice. He lives in Los Angeles.
KURT STEINBRECHER lived with relatives in the Bronx for a couple of years after his arrival in the United States. He later learned that his parents escaped from Germany to Russia before making their way to Vancouver and then Seattle. Kurt remained with his relatives in New York until shortly after his bar mitzvah in 1941, after which he joined his parents in Seattle. He attended the University of Washington, where he obtained undergraduate degrees in zoology and pharmacy. He served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War although he was deployed to Europe rather than to Asia. He later earned a Ph.D. in pharmaceutical chemistry and worked for many years in the Seattle office of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. He has one son and continues to live in Seattle.
ERIKA TAMAR was the youngest of the fifty children, a week away from turning five when she arrived in the United States along with her older brother, Heinz. After living briefly with a foster family in Houston, Erika and Heinz were reunited with their parents, Julius and Pauline, who arrived in the United States in the fall of 1939 and settled in New York City. Erika later attended New York University, where she studied creative writing and film. After college, she worked as a production assistant and casting director for the daytime soap opera Search for Tomorrow. Years later, after she married and raised three children, Erika enjoyed a successful writing career as the author of several best-selling young adult novels. Her second novel, Good-bye, Glamour Girl, featured a young Jewish refugee from Vienna determined to abandon her European heritage in favor of becoming an all-American glamour queen al
ong the lines of Rita Hayworth. Erika has lived for many years in New York City.
HEINZ (HENRY) TAMAR studied biology at New York University and later earned a Ph.D. in sensory physiology at Florida State University. He was a university professor for many years, and remains an emeritus professor of protozoology at Indiana State University, following his retirement from active teaching in 1998.
ERWIN TEPPER lived with an aunt and uncle in the Bronx after his summer in Collegeville. His parents, who had originally escaped to England from Vienna, obtained visas for the United States shortly before America entered the war in 1941. After being reunited with their son, the Teppers moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut. Coincidentally, Robert Braun’s Viennese cousin was Erwin’s doctor while he was growing up. “I remember going over to the doctor’s office with my mother or father, and there was a young woman there who would occasionally help out. I knew she was a foreigner because she had a slight accent, and I thought it might’ve been the doctor’s daughter.” In fact, the young woman was Robert’s sister, Hanni, though Erwin did not recognize her or realize until much later that she was one of the rescued children. He earned a degree in zoology at Yale University in 1953 and obtained a medical degree six years later at the University of Basel in Switzerland. After spending two years in the army, he practiced radiation oncology for many years at Monmouth Medical Center in New Jersey. Erwin has three children, two grandchildren, and five step-grandchildren, and continues to live in New Jersey.
KITTY WEISS (PENNER) and INGE WEISS (MICHAELS), were reunited with their parents in August 1939 and raised in New York City. Kitty attended Brooklyn College and transferred to Barnard College, where she studied art history. She has spent the past several decades both as an artist and art teacher. Kitty has two children and four grandchildren and lives in Maine. Inge, who had one daughter, passed away in 2002.
50 Children: One Ordinary American Couple's Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany Page 22