50 Children: One Ordinary American Couple's Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany (21 page)

On Sunday morning, Gil and Eleanor took another leisurely walk before making their way to the opulent Saint Gellert Hotel. Perched at the foot of Gellert Hill on the Buda side of the Danube, the art noveau-style hotel boasted one of the most beautiful spas—complete with a series of exquisitely decorated Roman-style thermal baths—in all of Europe. The Gellert spa also featured one of Europe’s unique novelties—a gigantic swimming pool that provided bathers with the illusion of frolicking in the ocean. “The water splashed about in enormous waves,” wrote Eleanor, who found the sight amazing. “There was some sort of machine that kept churning, and it was like swimming in an open surf.”

A reminder of the purpose for their trip to Europe hit them during the Monday-morning train ride back to Vienna. Although Gil knew that the German authorities did not allow anyone to bring foreign currency into Austria, he discovered that they still had a small number of American dollars with them, which had gone unspent during the weekend in Budapest. “As the train slowed down on the Hungarian side of the border,” wrote Eleanor, “Gil threw the money out of the window at a group of small children who were playing by the railroad.”

Back at the Hotel Bristol, Hedy Neufeld had left a message that required their immediate attention. One of the children who had been chosen for the trip to America—a sweet-faced, five-year-old boy named Heinrich Steinberger—had fallen ill and would need to be replaced. Gil and Bob realized they could not take the risk of traveling with a sick child, particularly since the children would be examined in Berlin for any health issues before they would be allowed to leave Germany.

Eleanor was crestfallen at the thought of having to leave the little boy behind. The notes from the interview at the Kultusgemeinde with Heinrich and his parents described him as a “nice boy, intelligent, healthy” and without any history of serious illnesses such as tuberculosis or trachoma. His father, Josef, had worked in an insurance company in Vienna, and his mother, Hilda, was a housewife. The family had a relative who lived in Detroit. But none of that mattered now. Eleanor could not bring herself to think what might happen to Heinrich in the future. Gil, while sharing his wife’s concern for the boy, confirmed they had no choice but to remove him from the group.

Gil and Bob went back over the list of those who had not been chosen for the journey to America. All of these children deserved to be selected; all of their parents lived in mortal fear of what might happen if they were not. Gil settled on Alfred Berg, a tall fourteen-year-old who was older than any of the other children in the group. But he was a logical choice because his younger sister, Charlotte, had been selected, and the group included six other sets of siblings.

But even as Gil attended to the arrangements for completing the paperwork and obtaining a passport for Alfred, new complications arose on the visa front. A State Department official in Washington drafted an internal memorandum on May 16 that appeared, at least on the face of it, to render it impossible to obtain the visas from the American consulate in Vienna. The memo, written by R. C. Alexander from the visa division, stated that “it would be illegal for the American consul general at Vienna to grant non-preference visas under the German quota so long as he has eligible preference applicants waiting for visas at his office.” (The children all fell into the nonpreference category, as opposed to those eligible for preference visas, including parents and other immediate relatives of current American citizens.) On the same day, Leland Morris, the consul general in Vienna, received a tersely worded confidential cable sent out under Secretary of State Hull’s signature. “Referring fifty non-preference German quota numbers assigned to you from Berlin for German children, such numbers should not be used in issuing non-preference visas if you have eligible . . . preference applicants waiting,” read the cable. The next day, the Vienna consulate confirmed that it would return all fifty visas to the embassy in Berlin.

The cables only confirmed what Gil had already learned in his frustrating conversations with Morris and other consulate officials in Vienna: if there was any hope of bringing the children to America, the visas would have to come directly from the American embassy in Berlin. Gil could only hope that Geist was sincere when he had promised to do his best on their behalf.

Although he had no way of knowing it at the time, the project was ruffling feathers back home in America as well. Cecilia Razovsky, the refugee advocate at German-Jewish Children’s Aid, happened to hear about Gil’s mission to Vienna from someone who had recently bumped into Louis Levine in Philadelphia. Fearing that Gil’s ploy to obtain visas would jeopardize her group’s own rescue efforts, Razovsky fired off a letter on May 15 to A. M. Warren, chief of the State Department’s visa division. “This plan, as carried out by Brith Sholom, is raising many inquiries in the minds of our officers and constituents,” Razovsky informed Warren. “We have many free homes waiting to receive the children whom we had selected for over a year and, because of the wait in the quota, our children have not been able to enter. To learn now that children are in the process of being admitted through some other means is, of course, very interesting to us.” In his matter-of-fact reply, Warren told Razovsky only that Brith Sholom had “informally” approached the State Department earlier in the year and that the department had neither approved nor sponsored the mission that Gil had proposed. Razovsky could hardly have been pleased with Warren’s decidedly indifferent response.

Several days later, another leading Jewish refugee advocate sounded a similar alarm bell about the Brith Sholom effort. “It seems to me quite hazardous to permit this venture to go through,” Jacob Kepecs, executive director of the Jewish Children’s Bureau of Chicago, wrote to Clarence Pickett, the Quaker official who was now leading the recently formed Non-Sectarian Committee for German Refugee Children. “The Brith Sholom lodge to my knowledge has no experience whatsoever in the foster care of children. Its program, if permitted to go through, would constitute a hazard to the children involved and might discredit any other undertaking on behalf of children.”

While Gil busily attended to the details of the upcoming journey back to America, Eleanor had a free afternoon to herself. She decided to get her hair done and walked to a hairdresser’s salon located along the Kärtnerstrasse, near the hotel. During her time in Vienna, she had noticed that people rarely spoke to either Gil or herself when they were out together. But things were different whenever she ventured out by herself. That afternoon at the hair salon was no exception. The other women were eager to speak with her, particularly once they realized that she came from the United States. “Why does the United States want to make war against Germany?” asked one of the women, with others quick to nod in agreement. “Why does America threaten Germany all the time?” another woman asked. “We cannot understand why America wishes to start a war.”

“My words of protest were wasted on them,” Eleanor later wrote. “No matter what I said, I was not able to change their opinion.” Although she made no reference to it in her account, it is unlikely that she would have happened to mention that she was Jewish.

Gil and Eleanor were invited to dinner that evening at the home of Emil Engel, who served as secretary of the Kultusgemeinde and who, with the approval of Adolf Eichmann, had been left in charge of the Jewish center when other community leaders had been arrested and imprisoned after the Gestapo raided the premises in the immediate aftermath of the Anschluss.

Up till that point, neither Gil nor Eleanor had been invited to anyone’s home in Vienna. Eleanor braced herself for the visit with Engel and his wife. She knew that most Jews throughout the city had long since been forced out of their homes. The Engels lived in an apartment with several rooms that had already been converted into separate flats for families to share. The kitchen was bare, the table and chairs moved into another small room that served as the dining room. The Engels had also invited Bob Schless and Hedy Neufeld. Eleanor, while dismayed by the condition of the Engels’ home, was delighted to see Richard Friedmann, who had guided them through their tense meeting with the Gestapo officer at the Rothschild Palace. Richard, it turned out, was the Engels’ nephew.

Eleanor struck up an animated conversation with the young man. “I was surprised at how orderly and agreeable everything was at Prinz Eugenstrasse the day we got the passports,” she told him. He responded with a hearty laugh, telling her that the Nazi officials had “put on one good show for you.” Indeed Richard had gone in advance to inform the Gestapo officials that the two Americans would be arriving later to request passports for the children. Upon hearing about the visit, one of the officials barked out orders over the loudspeaker that the Krauses were to be treated with respect and courtesy, Richard said.

But what about the guard who had angrily shouted at Gil for not shutting the door behind him after they all had been brought before the Gestapo officer in charge? That hardly seemed like respect and courtesy, Eleanor pointed out. Richard laughed again. Apparently the guard had been in the bathroom when the orders had been given. He was the only one acting naturally that morning.

Engel’s wife had prepared a delicious dinner of stewed chicken—no longer easy for a Jewish cook to come by—and the lively conversation around the bare kitchen table lasted well into the night. “We had a most enjoyable evening,” wrote Eleanor. “These were all such delightful people. Gil and I were terribly impressed that people living under such circumstances could be so carefree and gay even for one evening.” As the night wore on, Eleanor found herself thinking about her own dinner parties. Here in Vienna, the world had become such a foreboding place for people like Emil Engel and Richard Friedmann. The evening made her homesick for her children and the comfortable surroundings of her life in Philadelphia. Her heart broke for the cruelty that confronted every Jew who remained stuck in Vienna. She yearned more than ever to go home.

CHAPTER 17

I have no interest in leaving Vienna until every other Jew has left. My hope is that I will be the last to go
.

—R
ICHARD
F
RIEDMANN

V
IENNA

M
AY
18–20, 1939

O
nly a few days now remained before the departure from Vienna. Gil still had plenty of work ahead of him as he ironed out the endless details for transporting the group to Berlin and, from there, to the port in Hamburg.

“Gil and Hedy checked the children’s baggage lists,” wrote Eleanor. “They had to approve what apparel, trinkets, and toys the children would be able to take.” The Nazi authorities imposed harsh restrictions on the amount of money that emigrating Jews were allowed to take out of the country. Each child would be permitted to leave with the equivalent of about ten dollars. “My father thought that was an awful lot of money for a child,” recalled Henny Wenkart. When it came time to pack for his daughter’s impending exodus, Hermann Wenkart carefully counted out only the equivalent of $6.75; he could not imagine Henny needing any more than that.

Gil and Eleanor, meanwhile, were happy to learn that Hedy Neufeld and Marianne Weiss, another young woman from the Kultusgemeinde, had been given permission by the Gestapo to help look after the children all the way to Hamburg.

Nothing was left to chance as the departure date approached. “We spent hours making out baggage tags for each child,” wrote Eleanor. “It seemed there was no way we would ever be finished with the red tape and all of the paperwork.” Gil received a phone call from the United States Lines informing him that payment for the children’s boat passage, which had been arranged back in New York by Louis Levine, fell short by twenty-five dollars. The cruise line had also offered a complimentary first-class ticket to go along with the fifty third-class tickets that had been purchased for the children. Gil decided to give the free ticket to Bob Schless while paying for his and Eleanor’s own passage.

As Gil and Eleanor checked off the remaining items on their to-do list, they also faced the emotional ordeal of hearing from parents whose children would not be making the trip to America. “We were deluged by letters, visits to our hotel and telephone calls from parents whose children had not been selected,” wrote Eleanor. “We had always been most careful to refrain from arousing hopes for emigration among all these families. We could not blame these parents for persistence in trying their luck. They naturally enough did not believe we were restricted as to what we could do.” Even as the parents begged Gil and Eleanor to take their children, she was struck by how politely they did so. It was wrenching to explain that they simply could not take more children with them.

Amid the packing and preparations for leaving Vienna, Gil had been slipping off in the evenings, walking to the Kultusgemeinde after dinner and not returning to the Hotel Bristol until well after midnight. “Gil was quite mysterious about these trips, and I couldn’t imagine what it was he was doing there at night,” wrote Eleanor. Finally, on the eve of their departure from Vienna, Gil explained that he had been spending the evenings inside the Stadttempel—the ransacked synagogue adjoining the Kultusgemeinde—with men who were intent on smuggling Jews into British-controlled Palestine. “It was a wonderful thing to see these men with hope again, willing to risk everything, even their lives,” Gil told his wife. Eleanor had a very different reaction. “I was glad I hadn’t known about them, and I was very pleased to hear it was over,” she said. “I was afraid Gil would get into trouble.”