50 Children: One Ordinary American Couple's Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany (16 page)

The eerie timing of Hitler’s speech added a sobering note to Eleanor’s arrival into Nazi Germany. Hitler had been born in a small Austrian border town but moved to Linz as a young child. He had lived in the area until he left for Vienna as a young man with aspirations of becoming an artist. On a warm spring day, Eleanor found herself standing next to armed storm troopers, listening to the staccato bursts of a savage dictator’s diatribe aimed at the American president. “This was Hitler’s birthplace,” she wrote, “and my introduction to Nazi Germany.”

CHAPTER 12

If you leave, your life will be saved, and then I will have a better chance of saving my own life
.

—R
OSA
W
EISZ

V
IENNA

L
ATE
A
PRIL
1939

T
he Orient Express chugged slowly into Vienna’s Westbahnhof on a bright sunny day in late April, and with a final blast of its whistle, came to a stop. Eleanor glanced out the window across the platform at what appeared to be a sea of brown-coated storm troopers. While Gil flagged down a porter to help with Eleanor’s luggage, she carefully stepped off the train and instantly broke into a broad smile at the familiar sight of Bob Schless, who had come to the station to meet them.

He had brought along Hedy Neufeld, who warmly greeted Eleanor with a beautiful bouquet of spring flowers. “I liked her at once,” wrote Eleanor. “She had wonderful red hair, a face full of freckles and beautiful brown eyes. She stood tall and erect. Her English was perfect. She was gay and animated, and she spoke quickly and with much humor.”

In the taxi from the train station to the Hotel Bristol, Eleanor leaned forward in the backseat and stared out the window as the others pointed out the various sights of the city. Scattered among the beautiful parks, Gothic churches, and grand monuments were the grim reminders of a city that had fallen under Nazi rule. The taxi drove past the Hotel Metropole, which had been closed to the public not long before and turned over to the Gestapo. The secret police now used the building as its headquarters and as a detention center for Jews and others who were routinely brought in for interrogation and torture. Kurt Schuschnigg, who had been deposed as Austria’s chancellor during the Anschluss, had been held in solitary confinement in this building.

Along the magnificent boulevard that made up part of the city’s Ringstrasse—the ring road—the taxi passed the Imperial Hotel, where Hitler preferred to stay during his visits. A few blocks away stood the imposing Vienna Opera House, the magnificent neo-Renaissance structure that had provided the city with sublime music and culture since 1869. At the turn of the century, Gustav Mahler served for ten illustrious years as director of the opera. By 1939 the city’s embrace of Nazi ideology consigned Mahler, who came from a Jewish family (though he later converted to Catholicism), to a ridiculed category of “degenerate” artists whose work was banned by the Nazis.

The seven-story Hotel Bristol stood directly across the street. One of the city’s finest hotels since its opening in 1892, the Bristol more recently had served as a clandestine trysting spot for England’s abdicated King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, the American “woman I love.” Eleanor was delighted with the beautiful accommodations that Gil had arranged—a spacious double bedroom with a private bath. Tall French doors opened onto a balcony that looked out over the double row of leafy linden trees that lined the Ringstrasse.

As she unpacked, Gil told her to keep her most important belongings readily at hand. “This room is searched every day,” he warned his wife. “We suspect it is the chambermaid, since things are usually much neater when we return than when we left.” Since coming to Vienna, Gil had made a habit of leaving his papers and other documents on the desk, in plain view: “We conceal nothing. We put nothing away. This makes it easier for all of us, since we know they are searching our papers.” Eleanor was both shocked and confused by her husband’s apparent indifference to this invasion of privacy. “It doesn’t matter, since we are doing nothing in secret,” he explained to her. “The Gestapo knows exactly what we’re doing, where we go, where we spend our time.” Eleanor thought back to Gil’s assurances that they would be safe in Vienna. As she finished unpacking, the idea of someone randomly sifting through her things every day hardly made her feel very safe at all.

As dinnertime approached, Eleanor wondered if they might first stop at the hotel bar for a drink. Instead Gil brought out a bottle of Scotch and poured a glass for each of them. “We don’t go to the bars,” he told her. “There are too many Germans, even at the hotel.”

That evening, they went to dinner with Bob Schless and Hedy Neufeld in the main dining room of the hotel. A painted sign—familiar by now to Gil but alarming to Eleanor—was posted on one of the heavy wood-paneled doors that led into the room—
JUDEN VERBOTEN
. A large oil painting of Hitler hung at the far end of the dining room. Only a few tables were occupied, and everyone seemed to be eating in complete silence. Eleanor felt as if everyone in the room was staring at the four of them as they were shown to their table. “The waiter came to take our order, and our food arrived. The four of us talked very quietly. Soon, we too lapsed into silence.” Halfway through the meal, two storm troopers appeared at the door where the “Jews Forbidden” sign was posted. Eleanor froze, but Gil quickly leaned over and whispered to her to remain calm.

“This is routine, and it happens everywhere,” Gil said under his breath. “They will leave in a few minutes. Go ahead and eat your dinner.” Eleanor tried to concentrate on the food in front of her. But her appetite was gone. She managed to swallow only a few spoonfuls of soup and then waited for the coffee to arrive. She felt too unnerved to eat or drink anything else.

After dinner, Gil and Eleanor retreated back into their room. They stayed up late, going through papers and reviewing the next day’s busy schedule at the Kultusgemeinde. Once they turned out the lights, Gil fell asleep immediately. Eleanor lay awake, finding it difficult to relax in this strange, menacing environment. She eventually drifted off, only to be awakened in the middle of the night by a loud, rumbling noise that sounded unlike anything she had ever heard before.

“I opened the French door and stood looking out over the balcony. Soldiers were marching by. It looked like there were thousands of them,” she wrote. “Then came the heavier sounds of machines as they went by. Machines I had never seen before. Machines with mounted guns, heavy tanks, one after the other.” She wondered if she should wake Gil, and then began to think that maybe war had broken out that very night. Yet again, her mind raced back to the words of George Messersmith’s aide. If war broke out while she and Gil were in Europe, there were no guarantees that they would be protected, despite their status as American citizens. Gil, meanwhile, slept soundly, even as the soldiers continued to noisily trudge down the ring road directly in front of the Bristol, accompanied by the din of military materiel. Eleanor did not fall back asleep until dawn.

She felt Gil gently nudging her awake at seven-thirty. She wondered if the predawn parade of soldiers and machinery had appeared only in her dreams. But Gil explained that the soldiers regularly marched late at night and calmly suggested that Eleanor would get used to it, as he already had. After breakfast in the hotel dining room, Eleanor marveled at how quiet and peaceful things were this morning along the boulevard. The sun was shining, and a gentle, warm breeze stirred the air. There was no evidence at all of the previous night’s rumblings.

Gil and Bob preferred to walk each morning from the hotel to the Kultusgemeinde, since it was only about a half-hour’s brisk stroll. But Gil was eager to arrive a little earlier that morning so that Eleanor could meet everyone and get acclimated. Driving in the taxi with Gil and Bob, Eleanor thought that Vienna looked a little bit like Philadelphia, at least when it came to the crowds of people on the street making their way to work in the morning. Whenever the cab slowed down, however, she was jarringly reminded that she was somewhere entirely different. Every shop window featured the same formal likeness of Adolf Hitler. Nazi banners, with their thick black swastikas, hung from every streetlamp and telephone pole. Stopped at a crowded intersection, waiting for a white-capped traffic policeman to wave the cars through, she caught sight of Brown Shirts keeping steely-eyed watch on all four street corners. Eleanor wondered what they were looking for.

As they neared their destination, the streets became narrower. The buildings in this part of the city were older and shabbier. The shops were smaller and much less chic than the ones near the Bristol. Eleanor noticed a printer’s shop, a bakery, a tobacco store. She wondered how many of these businesses had once been owned by Jews.

Before entering the Kultusgemeinde, Gil pointed to the adjoining building on Seitenstettengasse and mentioned to Eleanor that, behind its nondescript facade, was Vienna’s only remaining synagogue. The mobs that had firebombed and destroyed every other synagogue during Kristallnacht nearly six months earlier had spared the Stadttempel—the City Synagogue—but only because of a historical quirk. Dating back to 1825, the synagogue on Seitenstettengasse had been built behind an exterior facade of houses and apartments in compliance with an edict by Emperor Joseph II that permitted only Catholic churches to be directly visible on public streets. While Brown Shirts and other thugs had been given carte blanche by the Vienna police to ransack the interior of the Stadttempel, they were prevented from burning the synagogue to the ground in order to spare the attached building block.

The offices of the Kultusgemeinde were reached through a drab entrance hall with well-worn stone floors and an open stairwell that led to a warren of offices on the second floor. Hedy was waiting at one of the desks. “The families and children are here,” she told the three visiting Americans. “Lots of them have shown up.”

She led them toward the back of the building and into a small office that had been set aside for their use when Gil first arrived a few weeks earlier. There were two desks in the room, one set aside for Gil and the other for Bob. Hedy took a seat next to Gil. Eleanor settled into a chair off to the side of Bob’s desk. Gil began arranging a pile of papers that had been sent over from the American consulate—more lists of Jewish families that had been waiting for visas in the wake of the Anschluss. He glanced down at the neatly typed list of names.
Bermann, Bloch, Blumenstein, Braun, Bruckenstein
. Every family on the list in front of him had at least one child the parents were hoping to send to America.
Dressler, Duschner, Eisen, Feldmann, Freuthal
. The list of names went on for several pages.
Gluck, Goldner, Gottesdiener, Griensteidl, Halote
.

Gil stared at the papers without saying a word and then looked up at Hedy. “I am ready,” he told her. She rose from her chair and walked out of the small office. A few moments later, she came back in, this time accompanied by a woman and her young daughter.

Much earlier that morning, Rosa Weisz had awakened her daughter Helga, prepared a quick breakfast, and made sure that Helga was scrubbed clean from head to toe. Their apartment on Krongasse was more than two and a half kilometers from the Kultusgemeinde. In better times, Rosa and Helga would have taken a tram around the ring road and then walked the few remaining blocks to Seittenstettengasse. But Rosa told Helga they would walk all the way this morning. As a Jew, she did not want to risk being caught riding on the tram.

A few days earlier, Helga had pleaded with her mother to remain in Vienna. Helga’s father was still imprisoned in Dachau, with no word as to when or if he might be released. “I don’t want to go. I would rather die with you than go without you,” Helga had cried to her mother. But Rosa was keenly aware of what most, if not all, Jewish parents had long since come to realize about the prospects they and their families faced as long as they remained inside Nazi Germany. She looked into her daughter’s glistening eyes and, fighting back tears of her own, told her, “If you leave, your life will be saved, and then I will have a better chance of saving my own life.”

At the Kultusgemeinde, Rosa and Helga quietly took their place in the long line of parents and children that had begun to form early that morning. “I’ll never forget standing there in that line with my mother. There were all these other people who threw stones and tomatoes at us and called us all kinds of names,” remembered Helga. “Once we finally got inside the building, we had to climb up this long stairwell. But the railing had come off, so you had to be careful, with the crowding and everything, that you wouldn’t end up falling down.”

As each set of parents and children came in for their interview, Gil, impeccably dressed as usual, sat stiff and upright at his little desk, always keeping the pile of papers arranged neatly in front of him: school records, health records, family questionnaires, fathers’ occupations, relatives in America. Gil wanted to know as much as he possibly could about each child whose parents hoped to send him or her far across the ocean. During the interviews, Hedy Neufeld or Bob Schless asked most of the questions, since they both spoke German. But Gil, who spoke and understood a little bit of the language, sometimes asked a question or two. “He had a map of Europe with him and he asked me to point out where Paris was and where Berlin was,” recalled Robert Braun.