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

by Steven Pressman

  HELGA WEISZ (MILBERG) was reunited with her father, Emil, who obtained a visa and arrived in the United States in 1940. They moved to Detroit, where Emil worked as a caretaker in a Jewish cemetery. He was not able to obtain a visa for his wife, Rosa, who remained in Vienna. Years later Helga learned that her mother had been among a group of one thousand Vienna Jews deported by the Nazis in June 1942. The train was originally destined for the Izbica concentration camp but was diverted at the last minute to Sobibor, an extermination camp in Poland. Other than fifty-one men who were diverted to a forced-labor camp, everyone else was killed immediately upon arrival. Rosa was on the same train as Heinrich Steinberger, the young boy who had to forfeit his spot on Gil and Eleanor’s list when he fell ill.

  Helga became a teacher and lived for many years in Tucson, Arizona. She and her husband had three children, four grandchildren, and one great-grandchild. She passed away in 2012.

  HENNY WENKART’s parents arrived in America on September 1, 1939, the same day that Germany invaded Poland. The family lived with relatives in Brooklyn and later moved to Baltimore before eventually settling in Providence, Rhode Island. Henny attended Pembroke College, the women’s branch of then all-male Brown University. She later obtained a master’s degree in journalism at Columbia University and a doctorate in philosophy from Harvard University. Henny has published several books of poetry and founded the Jewish Women’s Poetry Workshop. She and her husband raised three children and have five grandchildren. She lives in New York City.

  FRITZI ZINGER (NOZIK) and ELIZABETH ZINGER (DAVIS) remained with relatives in Utica, New York, and were reunited with their parents, Benjamin and Rosa, who arrived in the United States in January 1940 on a ship that sailed from Trieste, Italy. Fritzi later went to college and became a registered nurse. She had three children and five grandchildren. Elizabeth attended college and worked in public relations, including a position at the American Federation for the Blind, where she met Helen Keller. She and her husband had two children, three grandchildren, and two step-grandchildren. Fritzi and Elizabeth live together in southern Florida.

  HUGO ZULAWSKI lived with a cousin in Brooklyn and was reunited with his parents, who obtained visas for the United States about a year after he arrived. In the summer of 1944, Hugo was inducted into the U.S. Army, where he was assigned to the intelligence corps and deployed to Munich. He later attended City College of New York, where he received a degree in civil engineering. During his career he worked on various construction projects in the New York area, including the building of the Long Island Expressway. He and his wife had three children and four grandchildren. Hugo passed away in 2003.

  BELOW ARE THE names of the remaining children for whom I have not been able to account or locate biographical information:

  Vera Auerbach

  Marlit Beiler

  Erwin Berkowitz

  Edmund Deutscher

  Siegmund Deutscher

  Relly Eisenberg (Katz)

  Fred Freuthal

  Felix Heilpern

  Fritzi Klein

  Irma Langberg

  Franzi Linhard

  Paula Schneider

  Bianca Siegmann (Kirstein)

  Kurt Singer

  Edith Sommer

  Ruth Taub

  Elfrida Toch

  Herbert Vogel

  Julius Wald

  Heinz Weiniger

  Afterword

  It is often the frightening statistics that come to mind when people hear the word “Holocaust.” Six million Jews murdered in the course of a war that took the lives of between 50 and 80 million soldiers and civilians. Over 1.3 million people, including 1.1 million Jews, murdered in a single location, at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Over two million Jews executed at close range in towns and villages in Axis-occupied Soviet territory. The numbers are staggering. The killing was the work of a vast number of perpetrators—Nazi Party members, German soldiers and civilians of every sort and station, civilian and military authorities from countries that were allied with Germany, and local collaborators all across Europe. Those who stood silently by were also complicit in their way, giving full rein to the perpetrators, facilitating genocide, and proving that to be a “bystander” in the presence of evil is not a neutral act.

  The sheer numbers are so daunting that despite decades-long efforts by memorial institutions, scholars, prosecutorial authorities, as well as humanitarian organizations, it has proven impossible to retrieve the names of all the victims of the Holocaust. It has been equally difficult to identify, let alone hold accountable, all the major perpetrators and their closest collaborators, not to speak of the innumerable others who failed to respond as their fellow countrymen, their neighbors and their families, including 1.5 million Jewish children, were targeted, marked, deprived of their possessions, and exterminated.

  By contrast, the number of people who sought to blunt the perpetrators’ actions and took risks to rescue their fellow man was small. Rescue took an act of courage, generally born of a deep-rooted moral sense and “inability to do anything else,” as rescuers have often responded when asked why they acted as they did. Their willingness to stand against the tide, despite risks and disincentives, is what makes every story of rescue worthy of special attention. It is, after all, the behavior of the rescuers that reveals the most noble of all human potentials.

  The stories of the rescuers during the Holocaust are not always easily known. People who became rescuers did not do so to gain recognition, and few sought recognition after the fact. For reasons ranging from fear to greed to shame, acquaintances and fellow countrymen often looked with disapproval at rescuers, not only during the war but after it as well. Being identified as a rescuer could be risky. This was obvious while the Axis powers dominated Europe. Risk remained after the war because rescuers punctured the comforting myth that it had been impossible to help Jews, or in some cases because successful rescues created the possibility that survivors might return to declare the truth of what had happened in a particular town or village, or simply seek to reoccupy a family home or reclaim personal property appropriated by others during their absence. Thus, for the most part, rescuers did not dwell on what they had done. They resumed their normal lives and routines when the war was over. Many did not share their stories even with family. Rescuers generally had no ongoing contact with the individuals they saved. And most have now passed away, without ever having shared publicly the full details of what they did.

  For all of these reasons, discovering the details of rescue stories can be difficult, as the decades-long effort by the State of Israel to identify non-Jewish rescuers and honor them as Righteous Among the Nations makes clear.* Yet each of these rare stories deserves to be individually remembered, studied, and taught, because it is the rescuers’ behavior among all human potentials that most deserves emulation and holds out the greatest hope for the future.

  The story of Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus, who rescued fifty Jewish children from Nazi Germany on the eve of the outbreak of a war that would unleash the systematic murder of millions, is one such story. It shares some characteristics with others, first and foremost that what was at stake was life and death. That filmmaker and author Steven Pressman was able to interview many of the children and meet their families a full seventy years after the event is ample proof. So is the fact that five-year-old Heinrich Steinberger, the child who became ill and was left behind in Vienna, was murdered at the Sobibor death camp three years later. The Krauses took personal risks and confronted numerous—from all appearances insurmountable—obstacles. Consider that they risked travel to Germany, where the Nazi regime had already proven itself ruthless, violent, and unpredictable. A State Department official sounded a clear danger signal, particularly for Jews. Yet the Krauses (and Dr. Schless) left their own children behind to attempt to save the children of others. Social contacts, leaders of the Philadelphia Jewish community, and national Jewish organizations all sought to dissuade them. The public mood in the United States and pol
itical will in the United States Congress were opposed to opening the country to Jewish refugees. American immigration laws were complicated and restrictive. The outcome was uncertain right up to the end. Despite all of this, the Krauses sought no recognition and lived in anonymity after the war.

  But the story of the Kraus rescue mission is also unique in quite startling ways.

  First, while most rescues were the work of Europeans on their own continent, the Kraus rescue mission is quintessentially American. The Krauses were an American couple, spurred on by a quite typical American voluntary association—Brith Sholom—on whose help they knew they could rely if their mission was successful. Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus demonstrated the independence of thought, individual initiative, and persistence that Americans consider to be American national “virtues.” For anyone who believes that the Holocaust was foreign and not American history, this story reveals multiple ways in which the United States was implicated in shaping the fate of European Jewry during the 1930s and 1940s. American isolationism and widespread anti-Semitism made it impossible to craft public policies that might have been more compassionate toward refugees and led the American Jewish community, fearing a backlash, to be exceedingly cautious in advocating on behalf of European Jewry. Racial and religious prejudice, though diminished in recent decades, controversy over immigration issues, and reliance on individual initiative all continue to characterize American society today, making the story of Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus more than simple “history” and powerfully relevant in the twenty-first century.

  Additionally, while finding help from neighbors, clergy, and others of good will was often a determining factor in successful rescue attempts during the Holocaust, the Krauses received assistance from a totally unexpected quarter, which turned out to be critical. It is not overstatement to say that without the aid of George Messersmith and Raymond Geist, the Krauses’ rescue mission would likely not have taken place. Despite his defense of the status quo when it came to American immigration law, Messersmith’s personal experience with and deep disgust for the Nazi regime and his personal exposure to the plight of German Jews created a level of understanding which distinguished him among State Department officers of similar rank. Just as important, the fact that Messersmith and Raymond Geist had served together in Germany created a degree of mutual confidence and “intimacy” between the two men that made it possible for them to consult, through official and unofficial channels, and to proceed in a way that might otherwise have been impossible. Neither feared betrayal by the other, and each was convinced that the other would proceed carefully enough that they would be able to respond effectively to the inevitable after-the-fact inquiries that might—and did—materialize from members of Congress, Jewish organizations embarrassed by the Krauses’ success, the Department of Labor, and the corridors of the State Department itself. Their “personal and confidential” letters to one another did not require the multiple clearances, and did not receive the wide distribution, that would have been typical for “official” diplomatic messages and cables. And it was not by chance that Geist shared with Messersmith via private letter his view that “The Jews of Germany are being condemned to death.” Given the bureaucratic risk, it is not surprising either that Messersmith obtained in advance a letter ruling from the Immigration and Naturalization Service indicating hypothetical approval of the plan to bring in fifty children. Nor that on May 18–19, 1939, just three days before visas were issued to all fifty children by the American Mission in Berlin, Messersmith and Geist exchanged official telegrams mutually affirming to one another that they were acting in full conformity with immigration law. All of this provided bureaucratic cover for two seasoned diplomats who knew they might need it.

  The Kraus rescue story extends beyond the power of the story itself to puncture some of the myths that have persisted for decades regarding the Holocaust. Many myths have survived because they make it easier to contemplate the Holocaust, though they make honest confrontation with the past more difficult. In the Netherlands, the myth was built around Anne Frank and left it to be understood that every Dutch family was hiding Jews. For decades the French myth was that all Frenchmen were in the Resistance. In the United States, the most common myth, embraced to explain America’s failure to act more compassionately toward refugees and more forcefully in the face of mass murder, is that we did not know what Nazi Germany, her allies and collaborators, were doing. But the Krauses were not intelligence agents privy to classified information. They were reading the newspapers after Kristallnacht and learning of the brutality with which Jews were being treated in Vienna and across Germany. What distinguished them from others is simply that they chose not to close their eyes to what they were reading. In 1938–1939 information regarding Germany’s treatment of Jews was publicly available to all Americans. Recent research and the opening of formerly classified American wartime archival documentation have also made it clear how much information American policymakers had regarding the mass killing of Jews that began after the outbreak of war in September 1939.

  Another surprisingly resilient myth is that no one could foresee that accelerating discrimination against the Jews might culminate in mass murder. It is true that the Holocaust exceeded in ferocity, magnitude and intent any mass killing that had taken place up to that time. Yet here, within the confines of this one story, we encounter an American diplomat who sees German Jewry “being condemned to death.” Jews had been killed during Kristallnacht, and some of the thousands of Jewish men sent to concentration camps after Kristallnacht perished there. The Jews desperately seeking to leave Germany understood the potential danger. Parents were eager to hand their children over to Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus because they understood, to quote Klara Rattner’s father, “We may die here.” While the imminence and all-encompassing scale of the Holocaust was probably not understood, and while before war broke out only German Jews seemed immediately at risk, people did recognize that what was at stake for Jews was a matter of life and death.

  Another misconception that, whether intentionally or not, has provided unwarranted durability to the portrayal of Jews as somehow “less than human”—a key aim of Nazi propaganda—is the notion that Jews went to their deaths during the Holocaust “like lambs to the slaughter,” that is, without resisting, as “real” human beings surely would have done. The Kraus story counters this myth on multiple levels. Two American Jews, Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus, responded in a dramatic and courageous way to the imminent danger facing Jews in Germany. In Europe, the Jewish Community of Vienna (Israelitische Kultusgemeinde—IKG), which had mobilized after the Anschluss to assist Jews through complex emigration procedures imposed by the Nazis, provided essential assistance to the Krauses, helping to identify eligible children, communicate with their families, organize interviews, and obtain essential travel authorizations. Much of what happened in Vienna during the Krauses’ time there is known through documents in the IKG archives, which remarkably survived the war and can be consulted today. It is also in those archives that one discovers the fate of children who could not emigrate before the mass deportations of Viennese Jewry began. The Union of Jews in Germany (Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland) fed and housed the fifty children overnight in Berlin. These Jews who assisted the Krauses did so because they were systematically involved in helping others who were seeking to emigrate or in need of food and shelter. The Kraus story reveals the stark reality that they often paid for their courage with their lives. The Holocaust was indeed a slaughter. But the story Steven Pressman has given us makes it clear that Jews did not “go like lambs.” They did what was possible to resist, despite the odds, and even though they knew that most often their efforts would be in vain.*

  Finally, 50 Children challenges the most self-comforting and widespread myth of all. The assertion that “there was nothing we could do” transcends all borders and languages. It makes no difference whether one refers to Germany itself, an Axis allied state, an occupied country, or a member st
ate of the United Nations. Officials and inhabitants of every country have made essentially this same assertion when confronted with the mass murder of European Jews—a genocide that we now call “The Holocaust,” though neither of these words existed at the time. The United States is no exception. And yet, while Great Britain took in 10,000 unaccompanied German children in an organized effort collectively known as Kindertransport, the United States took in a total of only about 1,000 unaccompanied children, of whom fifty—or one of every twenty—were saved by this one couple from Philadelphia. During the years when it was possible for Jews to leave Germany for the United States, American public opinion, government insensitivity, lack of interest, and a depressing failure of human compassion all worked against them. The Kraus rescue mission makes it crystal clear that there were things that America could have done to alleviate the suffering of Europe’s Jews. What the United States could not do was overcome the prejudices of the day to do what was possible. Immigration quotas and restrictive visa practices prevented Jews who might have left Germany from finding a place to go … except for the ghettos, concentration camps, and killing centers where no immigration quotas barred their way.

  TWO SURVIVORS AMONG the many who were permitted entry to the United States after World War II ended have had particular impact on the ways in which the legacy of the Holocaust has been addressed in our own country and internationally. Both born in 1928, each survived as a child, emerging from the catastrophe an adolescent at war’s end. Each had lost most of his family. Barely older than the majority of the children saved by Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus, each became a leading advocate for Holocaust remembrance and human rights.

  The first of these two survivors, Elie Wiesel, in 1986 would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his contribution. Wiesel had survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and described the nadir of humanity during the Holocaust in his seminal work, Night. He captured the depravity of the concentration camp world and humanity’s failure both inside and outside the camp when, in response to Wiesel’s visible concern for his father, who was dying, a Kapo tells him: