Law Offices
Kraus & Weyl
Gilbert J. KrausBell Telephone
Edward S. WeylKingsley-4416
_____________ Bankers Securities Building _____________
Philadelphia
H. J. SemanCable Addres
Milton Brooks“Kreyl”
Jerome L. Markovitz
February 3, 1939
Hon. George Messerschmidt
Assistant Secretary of State
Washington, D.C.
Dear Mr. Messerschmidt:
Following our recent interviews and as suggested by you, I wish to submit a general outline of our plan.
The members of the Independent Order Brith Sholom are extremely eager to bring fifty refugee children from Germany to the United States. They are ready to provide a home and education for them. The Society was founded in 1905 as a Jewish fraternal institution, to provide a refuge for immigrant Jews in America. Brith Sholom has become an organization of large size and substantial wealth, with membership in fifty-three cities, in twenty States of the Union. Mr. Louis Levine, who attended our conferences with you, is the present Grand Master. He is a substantial citizen of New York City.
The Society has just completed a home in Collegeville, Pa., at a cost of $250,000. It has eighty-five acres of beautiful farm country ground and is twenty-eight miles from Philadelphia. Due to the anxiety and distress of the members over the pressing need for aid for German refugees, the Order wishes to turn over this new home for the housing of the refugee children. Last summer, the grounds were used as a summer camp for one hundred and fifteen children. The home has complete modern equipment, tile swimming pool, recreation hall, infirmary, solarium, large spacious bedrooms, kitchens, dining hall and other necessary facilities.
We will supply satisfactory affidavits and guarantees from individuals of good standing and character to fulfill the public charge requirements. Each child shall have his own affidavit. There are ample private funds to provide transportation of the children from Germany to Philadelphia and for their support, maintenance, and education.
The children are to be selected from those within the quota regulations whose numbers have been reached or are about to be reached and have met all other essential requirements except that relating to the public charge clause. For these, we will be prepared to supply satisfactory affidavits and guarantees from the United States, executed by private individuals.
To accomplish our purposes as promptly as possible, Mrs. Kraus and I are prepared to go to Germany to arrange with the proper Governmental authorities for the selection of eligible children, the filing of the affidavits, and the transportation of the children.
We should like, if possible, to get under way immediately, since there is still the better part of three months of this year’s quota left for emigration from Germany to the United States. Before planning any further, we await word from your Department concerning the feasibility of our plan and news from Germany.
Hoping to hear from you as promptly and conveniently as possible, and with sincere thanks for all the assistance you have given us, I remain,
Respectfully yours,
[signature]
Gilbert J. Kraus
GJK/B
Shortly after posting this letter, Kraus journeyed to Washington, DC, to discuss his proposal with Messerschmidt. During the interview, the assistant secretary suggested that the real difficulty lodge members would likely encounter in sponsoring the children lay in the current U.S. quota system, which set strict limits on immigration from foreign countries. In the early months of 1939, the number of German emigrants registering with U.S. consulates had already filled the German quota for the entire year. There would be no exceptions, Messerschmidt noted; each youngster would have to wait until his or her quota number came up in order to obtain a visa.
Returning to Philadelphia, Kraus tried to discover a legal way to work within the existing quota system in order to secure the appropriate paperwork for the children. He seized upon the idea of using so-called dead-number visas—visas that for various reasons had gone unused in the previous year and might be carried over and applied to the next year’s quota. Uncertain that such a strategy would prove successful, the Krauses resolved to go to Germany themselves and to work with consular officials to bring a group of children back to the United States.
Their efforts met with stiff opposition from many local and national aid agencies. Representatives of several established Jewish refugee and charitable organizations wrote to the Krauses and to their State Department contacts, suggesting that they abandon their plans.44 The Krauses “should be [. . .] stopped from this undertaking at all costs,” wrote one director of an American Jewish aid agency to George Messerschmidt:
44. See “Fifty German-Jewish Refugee Children,” The Jewish Exponent, June 9, 1939.
They could be harmful and a hindrance to those agencies which are properly qualified to do this work. We are certain they could not possibly be successful in this endeavor. [. . .] As you know, we are sincerely engaged in trying to bring children to this country and we feel that personal and sensational publicity on the part of outsiders would make trouble for all. We must discredit these people in every way and I urge you to give this matter your serious consideration. You must be fully aware that the only thing they seek is private publicity.45
45. Kraus, “Don’t Wave Good-bye,” 17–18.
In the face of intense criticism, Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus set sail for Europe in the early spring of 1939. Despite the danger the Jewish Krauses faced in traveling to Nazi Germany, the couple journeyed from Berlin to Vienna, where representatives of that city’s Jewish Community Organization (Israelitische Kultusgemeinde) helped to interview potential young candidates for emigration, together with their parents. On May 21, the Krauses left the former Austrian capital with fifty children, aged four to fourteen, whom they had chosen for sponsorship by Brith Sholom members. The Krauses traveled with their young charges by train to Berlin in order to apply for formal visas from the American consulate. In the end, Gilbert Kraus’s gamble to make a claim for dead-number visas paid off, and all fifty Austrian youngsters received the necessary papers for entry to the United States. On June 3, 1939, the Krauses and their wards sailed into New York Harbor aboard the SS President Harding. The children were bussed directly to “Sholomville,” Brith Sholom’s residence outside Philadelphia, which had been equipped to house the youngsters. Despite the excellent facilities available there, community leaders quickly resolved that the young refugees would thrive best in private homes rather than in an institutional setting, and by Labor Day of 1939, Brith Sholom members had found foster families for each of the fifty children. Eleanor and Gilbert Kraus themselves took in a pair of siblings from Vienna, Robert and Johanna Braun. These children remained with their benefactors until the end of the war and were ultimately reunited with their parents.
Document 9-15. Aided by philanthropists Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus, a group of Austrian Jewish children finds safe haven in the United States, June 3, 1939, USHMMPA WS# 96464, courtesy of Anita Willens.
An oft-cited African proverb suggests that it takes a village to raise a child. The same may also be said of saving the lives of children during the Holocaust. The Krauses’ successful rescue of fifty Austrian children in 1939 demonstrates that, with community support, a few committed individuals could overcome enormous odds in order to bring Jewish youngsters to the safety of American shores. But often it took a veritable network of agencies to protect Jewish children from the threat of deportation. In the years immediately preceding World War II, the Committee to Assist Jewish Refugee Children (Comité d’Assistance aux Enfants Juif Refugiés, or CAEJR) had worked to shelter Jewish refugee youths in Belgium. The organization had been founded by Marguerite Goldschmidt-Brodsky, whose husband, Alfred, served as treasurer of the Belgian Red Cross. In re
sponse to the thousands of German and stateless refugees fleeing persecution in Nazi Germany, Goldschmidt-Brodsky and a handful of determined society matrons, among them Lily Felddegen, worked to persuade the Belgian government to grant asylum to Jewish children until they could safely emigrate to other countries. Many of the children under their protection had entered Belgium illegally or come as a part of organized transports from the German city of Cologne, adjacent to the Belgian border. The CAEJR arranged foster families for many of the children; over one hundred of their charges lived in homes in the Brussels suburbs organized under their auspices, Home Speyer for boys and Home General Bernheim for girls. Following the German invasion of Belgium, most of these youngsters escaped on one of the many refugee trains to southern France. For nearly a year they lived in primitive conditions on a large farm in Seyre, near the city of Toulouse; there many of the older youths aided in agricultural work on-site or on the neighboring estates.
In the meanwhile, Marguerite Goldschmidt-Brodsky had also fled to southern France, where her husband and his Red Cross colleagues were working to settle hundreds of Belgian Jewish refugees. From their home in Cahors, she used her husband’s connections with the Swiss Red Cross, persuading members of its auxiliary organization, the Secours Suisse aux Enfants (Swiss Children’s Aid) to rescue “her” children. Local members of the Secours Suisse were able to furnish the youngsters and their caretakers, Elka and Alexander Frank, with much-needed food and supplies, and in the early spring of 1941, they succeeded in moving the young people to an abandoned castle, the Château de la Hille, in a rural area of the Pyrenees near the Spanish border. During the children’s tenure at La Hille, an unknown youth created the drawing shown in Document 9-16, capturing the arrival of his companions and rescuers at the old château. Although the castle was located near the French town of Pamiers, the young artist placed a Swiss flag upon its ramparts in honor of the welfare organization that had done so much to support them.
Document 9-16. Child’s drawing of Château de la Hille, La Hille, France, c. 1942, USHMMPA WS# 45699, courtesy of Vera Friedlander.
Nearly all of La Hille’s young occupants survived the Holocaust. Through the intervention of Lily Felddegen, one of the children’s Belgian benefactors now working through the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS)46 in New York, the U.S. Committee for the Care of European Children and the American Friends Service Committee,47 a Quaker organization, furnished seventeen of the youngest children at La Hille with visas to enter the United States in the summer of 1941. A year later, in August 1942, French police conducted a raid upon the château, arresting forty teenagers from the group aged fifteen or older and incarcerating them in LeVernet internment camp to await deportation. Desperate to rescue them, Rösli Näf,48 the educator who had inherited the directorship of the La Hille colony, immediately contacted their benefactors in the Secours Suisse. At her instigation, chief Secours Suisse administrator Maurice Dubois49 successfully negotiated with Rene Bousquet,50 secretary general of the Vichy police, for the release of the children. After this narrow escape, Näf initiated efforts to smuggle the remaining children into neutral Switzerland or nearby Spain. A handful of these youngsters were apprehended by border police and perished at the Auschwitz and Majdanek concentration camps.51 Ninety of the original La Hille children survived the war. In the 1980s, the Yad Vashem remembrance authorities declared Maurice Dubois and Rösli Näf “Righteous Among the Nations.”
46. An international organization established in 1881 in New York City to assist the emigration of Jews fleeing czarist Russia, HIAS offered important immigration and resettlement services to Jewish populations fleeing the persecution of Nazi Germany. After the Nazis came to power in early 1933, the most urgent mission of HIAS became the emigration of Germany’s Jewish population. By providing an emigration route through France, Spain, and Portugal to North and South America during wartime, HIAS (joining with two other immigration services under the name HICEM) continued to provide emigration assistance to Jews who escaped the occupied territories. In the postwar period, HIAS joined with an arm of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee to form the Displaced Persons Coordinating Committee and administer emigration and family reunification services in hundreds of displaced persons camps.
47. The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) is a Quaker organization founded in 1917 to provide an alternative to military service in the pacifist tradition and to furnish humanitarian aid to civilians overseas. Headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the refugee section of the AFSC worked during World War II with Jewish welfare organizations to provide relief for those persecuted in Germany and in Nazi-occupied Europe. Operating chiefly out of its Geneva, Berlin, and Rome offices in continental Europe, the AFSC also worked to procure travel visas for refugees of German persecution, particularly those residing in North Africa and in neutral countries. Following the cessation of hostilities in 1945, the AFSC engaged in relief and reconstruction work in postwar Europe. See Howard Wriggins, Picking Up the Pieces from Portugal to Palestine: Quaker Refugee Relief in World War II (New York: University Press of America, 2004).
48. Swiss-born Rosa (Rösli) Näf (1911–1996) had worked for Dr. Albert Schweitzer in Africa for three years before undertaking the responsibility for the castle of La Hille. After the war, Näf settled in Denmark. In 1986, Yad Vashem named her “Righteous Among the Nations.”
49. After the military defeat of France, Maurice Dubois (1905–1998) provided aid to hundreds of refugees in southern France. He soon became responsible for the Swiss Aid Cartel for Child War Victims in unoccupied France and, after this organization became affiliated with the Red Cross, for Swiss Children’s Aid. He worked for the employment of Swiss nurses in the internment camps of Gurs and Rivesaltes and helped to develop a network of children’s homes for refugee children. He was declared “Righteous Among the Nations” in 1985.
50. René Bousquet (1909–1993) was a high-ranking member of the collaborationist Vichy regime who was instrumental in the infamous roundup of Parisian Jews at the Vélodrome d’Hiver in July 1942. This action resulted in the arrest and deportation of thirteen thousand Jews. Bousquet remained influential in French politics until serious allegations about his Vichy past resurfaced in the late 1980s. After initial efforts by political allies to prevent Bousquet’s prosecution, French justice officials indicted the aging civil servant in 1991, accusing him of crimes against humanity in the deportation of 194 children. Bousquet was assassinated on June 8, 1993, shortly before his trial was to take place.
51. Just one of those deported, Werner Epstein succeeded in surviving Auschwitz and a death march before liberation in the spring of 1945.
When Rescue Fails
For every successful rescue of a child during the Holocaust, many such efforts undoubtedly ended in tragedy. The fate of the children of Izieu is a case in point. Their would-be rescuers, Sabine and Miron Zlatin, were eastern European Jews who made their home in northern France, obtaining French citizenship in 1939.52 At the outbreak of World War II, Sabine Zlatin trained as a Red Cross nurse. After the couple fled occupied France, Sabine became involved with the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (Children’s Aid Society, or OSE), through which she assisted in the release of several youngsters from the Rivesaltes and Agde internment camps. When German forces occupied Vichy France in 1943, Zlatin and her husband received permission to take possession of an empty farmhouse in the remote mountain village of Izieu in southeastern France. There the couple established a refugee children’s home, La Maison d’Izieu, some sixty miles from Lyon in the Rhone Valley. The local subprefect of Belley (Ain), Pierre-Marcel Witzler, who had offered the retreat to the Zlatins, perfectly understood that the small home would provide Jewish youngsters safe haven from deportation. The first arrivals to the refuge came from Lodève in the Herault department in the Languedoc; others came from internment camps in the south of France. Ranging
in age from three to eighteen, the children lived, by wartime standards, an idyllic existence, enjoying their school lessons as well as varied and nutritious meals, weekly hikes in the beautiful countryside, and abundant time for games, drawing, and play. The Jewish identities of the youngsters and their caretakers were a closely guarded secret, and official records identified the young persons only as refugee children. Surrounded by the Zlatins and five other staff, the children felt safe and secure.
52. Sabine Zlatin (née Chwast, 1907–1996) was born in Warsaw and emigrated as a young woman to France; she met Russian-born Miron Zlatin (1904–1944), an agronomy student in Nancy, where the couple married in 1927.
Document 9-17. Jewish refugee children pose at a children’s home in Izieu, France, summer 1943, USHMMPA WS# 15513, courtesy of Serge Klarsfeld.
That security was shattered on the morning of April 6, 1944, when SS-Hauptsturmführer Klaus Barbie (1913–1991), chief of the Lyon Gestapo, led a raid upon the children’s colony at Izieu. SS and police authorities found the youngsters and the staff in the refectory eating breakfast. As Barbie indicated in his now infamous telex, he and his men seized the forty-four children resident in the home (the original document states forty-one children, as three of the teenagers were counted as adults) and seven grown-ups, including Miron Zlatin. His wife, Sabine, had gone to Montpellier to collect supplies and thus escaped the dragnet. Only one youngster, Leon Reifman, managed to leap from one of the home’s windows and escape.
The captive children and their adult attendants spent the night in Lyon’s Fort Montluc prison. Fearing that local authorities might intervene on the children’s behalf, Barbie arranged for their immediate transfer to the Drancy transit camp, near Paris. Miron Zlatin and two of the oldest youngsters were ultimately transferred from there to Tallinn, Estonia, where they were shot to death. The rest of the children traveled on the next available transport to Auschwitz, where they were gassed immediately upon arrival. Of the adults who accompanied them to the killing center, only one, twenty-four-year-old Léa Feldblum, was spared at selection and survived Auschwitz.53 Together with Sabine Zlatin, by then eighty, a sixty-nine-year-old Feldblum testified against Klaus Barbie at his trial in Lyon in 1987. The tragic fate of the Izieu children played a pivotal role in Barbie’s indictment and conviction. The so-called Butcher of Lyon died in prison in 1991.54
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