50 Children: One Ordinary American Couple's Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany (23 page)

“It was the first time in my life that I ever rode in a car,” recalled Robert Braun, who came to the station with his parents and his older sister Johanna, who had also been selected for the trip. “My parents engaged a taxi to bring us to the station because they didn’t want to be seen walking the streets with suitcases. It wasn’t safe.” Helga Weisz clutched her soft brown teddy bear tightly to her chest as her mother and father—Emil Weisz had been released from Dachau shortly before his daughter’s departure from Vienna—escorted her onto the platform, where everyone gathered in the long, tense hour or so before the children were allowed to board the train. “It was a very rainy night,” remembered Helga. “The train was there, along with all of the soldiers with their guns, wearing brown shirts, black shirts, brown boots, black boots. There were German shepherds and dobermans and rottweilers. I mostly remember the darkness.” That morning Helga had asked her mother to pack some of her favorite roast chicken for the train ride to Berlin. “I don’t know where they got the money for it, but they managed. She packed it into a little sort of lunch box, along with some candy and a piece of fruit.”

At last the children were allowed onto the train. Helga’s mother and father gave her one last kiss good-bye. “My mother said to me, ‘Be a good girl and listen to your foster parents and make sure you get a good education. Before you know it, we’ll be there, and we’ll all be reunited, and I’ll see you in America.
^’
” Helga had no way of knowing that she would never see her mother again.

Hedy Neufeld, meanwhile, was becoming agitated as she paced up and down the platform, keeping a watchful eye over the children but also monitoring the parents as well. She warned them they could not wave to their children as the train departed. When Eleanor demanded to know why, Hedy quietly explained that Jews were not allowed to give the Nazi salute. The parents risked being arrested if they raised their arms to wave good-bye.

They stood along the platform, staring in silence at their children through the train’s glass windowpanes. Before boarding themselves, Gil, Eleanor, and Bob slowly made their way down the line of parents, shaking hands, solemnly promising to look after their children, attempting to offer words of hope and consolation. Hedy and Marianne, the other young woman from the Kultusgemeinde, were already on board and doing their best to comfort several of the younger boys and girls who had begun to cry.

“I was also in tears by that time,” remembered Henny Wenkart. “It seemed as if the train was never going to leave, and we were all inside looking out the window and waving to our parents. I could still see my father’s hat. He was standing on his tiptoes in order to see me. But my mother was shorter, so I didn’t even see her while we were waiting.”

Officials at the Kultusgemeinde had managed to arrange for all of the children to sit together in one train car. “I remember the smell of the locomotive so vividly,” said Robert Braun. “All fifty children were in one car, and we were told that the doors would be locked until we got off in Berlin. On the platform, before getting on the train, there was a great deal of crying and wailing. But my sister, Johanna, and I did not cry because our parents had maintained a very cheerful attitude. They just kept telling us about this wonderful life we would have in America.”

Finally the train sounded a piercing whistle as it slowly edged its way out of the station. Eleanor, surrounded by several of the children, peered out the window as the platform gradually receded from view. “The parents stood in completely orderly and quiet fashion. Their eyes were fixed on the faces of their children,” she wrote. “Their mouths were smiling. But their eyes were red and strained. No one waved. It was the most heartbreaking show of dignity and bravery I had ever witnessed.”

Gil, Eleanor, and Bob had booked sleeping compartments for themselves for the trip to Berlin. After finding their compartments, they rejoined the children. They made an effort to keep the mood as light as possible. “On the whole we were all very cheerful at the start,” wrote Eleanor. “We turned it into a picnic.” Helga Weisz was eager to eat her mother’s roast chicken, and most of the other children hungrily began tucking into the suppers their parents had packed. Once they had eaten, however, many of the younger children began to cry as the night grew dark and the train traveled farther away from Vienna. The hard wooden benches in the train car were useless when it came to sleeping. Hedy and Marianne tried to console the younger ones who were becoming increasingly upset about leaving their parents. “It was really most unfortunate that our traveling had to be done at night,” wrote Eleanor. “We had been told, however, that we would not have the right to engage sleepers [for the children], and it was thought that the children would be subjected to jeering if they traveled during the daytime. We realized that nothing could have been more uncomfortable or worse than the conditions we had. But we were stuck with them.”

By two in the morning, all of the children, miraculously, finally managed to fall asleep. Their adult guardians—Gil, Eleanor, Bob, Hedy, and Marianne—remained in the car with them for a while, reviewing the next day’s arrangements. But everyone was exhausted, both physically and emotionally. Gil suggested that Eleanor and Hedy get some sleep. He, along with Bob and Marianne, would remain with the children through the night.

Eleanor, reluctantly, made her way back to the compartment. But she was unable to sleep. “I could not get the picture of the parents standing on the platform out of my mind,” she wrote. “Their eyes haunted me. I prayed that God might comfort each parent who had returned home to watch an empty bed.” Her thoughts kept returning to the agonizing possibility of having to bring the children back to Vienna if Raymond Geist did not come through with the visas. “Would this all turn into one big fiasco?” Eleanor wrote. “Would we have to bring them back the next day? I cursed the Germans for their ways. And then I cried and cried for the parents.”

As the first gray streaks of dawn filtered through the window of her compartment, Eleanor groggily returned to the children’s car. She was surprised to find that all was calm. The younger children were still sleeping, and some of the older ones were sitting quietly, studying the passing scenery through the small windows. Nearly an hour before the train arrived in Berlin, the adults scampered around the car, gathering together the children’s belongings, lining up their suitcases, and making sure everything was in perfect order for their arrival. The train pulled into the Anhalter Bahnhof at 7:52
A.M.
on the dot.

CHAPTER 19

Mr. Kraus was yelling at the SS officer, who was yelling back at him in German. I thought the officer was going to shoot him right there
.

—R
OBERT
B
RAUN

B
ERLIN

M
AY
22–23, 1939

H
einrich Stahl, the president of Berlin’s rapidly dwindling Jewish community, was waiting at the station to greet the travelers from Vienna. Once a prominent insurance executive in Germany, Stahl had been presiding over the city’s imperiled Jewish population since Hitler took power in 1933. Joining him on the platform was Julius Seligsohn, the Jewish leader with whom Gil had met during his earlier visits to Berlin. Several other men and women from the Hilfsverein—Berlin’s Jewish aid group—stood alongside the two Jewish leaders, ready to help shepherd the tired and hungry children as everyone made their way off the train. The Anhalter Bahnof, as always, was filled with storm troopers, many of whom gazed sternly at the arriving passengers. Eleanor this time brushed dismissively past them as she stepped off the train and onto the platform.

Once the children had been gathered together and their luggage and other belongings accounted for, Hedy and Marianne, assisted by the attendants from the Hilfsverein, shepherded them into several vehicles for the short ride to the nearby community building where they would be staying. The building had been set up as a dormitory, and as Gil had arranged, a hot breakfast was waiting to be served. Gil drove separately with Stahl, who—presumably because of his position in the Jewish community—appeared to own one of the few remaining private automobiles still allowed to Jews. At the age of seventy-one, Stahl was a proud man who had lived his entire life in Berlin. But he had long since devoted himself to doing everything he could to urge Jews to leave Germany. “To those . . . who have not yet decided to emigrate, I say there is no future for the Jews in this country,” he declared nearly ten months before Kristallnacht.
^*

Eleanor and Bob gathered their own luggage into a taxi, asking the driver to take them directly to their hotel. Gil had booked rooms at the splendid Hotel Adlon, only a stone’s throw away from the American Embassy. As the taxi wended its way through the morning traffic, “I cleaned myself up as best I could, putting on some powder and lipstick and combing my hair,” wrote Eleanor. She also donned her red hat, adjusting it carefully as the taxi approached Unter den Linden near the hotel.

A few moments later, the driver turned around and announced to his passengers that he could not go any farther, even though the hotel was still several hundred yards ahead. The street was blocked off for a parade, he said, speaking in German. Eleanor, though she did not understand what the driver was saying, could see for herself that the street, which spilled into the Pariser Platz, was blockaded. Bob asked the driver the cause of all the commotion. He explained that Galeazzo Ciano, Italy’s foreign minister—who also was Mussolini’s son-in-law—had just arrived in Berlin. He was there to sign a new military alliance between Italy and Germany, an agreement that would come to be known as the Stahlpakt—the Pact of Steel. With a beaming smile, the taxi driver announced that this would be a day of great celebration all throughout the city.

Indeed, Ciano had arrived in Berlin the day before and had been treated by his German host and counterpart, Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, to a lavish motorcade from the train station to the Adlon, where he was staying. “The route over which Count Ciano passed to the Hotel Adlon was a swirling mass of color,” reported a
New York Times
correspondent on the scene. “Bands every hundred yards provided martial music as the automobile cortege proceeded along the festively decorated streets. Massed formations of military and party organizations drawn up along the route presented arms and the large crowd lustily cheered as Ciano and von Ribbentrop drove past.”

The enormous crowds had gathered again the following morning to continue their celebration. Later in the day, Ciano and Ribbentrop, along with Hitler himself, would formally ratify the Stahlpakt in an elaborate ceremony at the German foreign ministry, which was located not very far from the hotel. Inside the stalled taxi, Bob Schless abandoned his gentle, easy-going demeanor, and—speaking in fluent German—barked out orders to the driver. “We are staying at the Adlon! We certainly cannot get out here with all of our baggage. You will have to pull up in front of the hotel!”

It was a tone of voice that Eleanor had come to recognize during her stay in Nazi Germany. “I had discovered by this time that a German will always take orders if they are shouted with an air of authority,” she later wrote. Bob’s strategy worked like a charm. The taxi driver carefully steered the car back out into the blockaded boulevard and, moments later, pulled up directly in front of the hotel. “After we stopped,” said Eleanor, “the driver turned to us and said, ‘Pardon me, sir. Pardon me, madam. I did not realize you were part of the Italian party.’ ” The two Americans quickly got out of the taxi without saying another word.

Two rows of uniformed German guards stood between the taxi and the entrance to the hotel. Eleanor glanced nervously at Bob. “Walk right into the hotel,” he said. “Don’t look back. Don’t wait for me. Don’t do anything else. Just keep walking.” Eleanor looked straight ahead as she walked along the plush red carpet that led up a few steps and into the hotel lobby, which was filled with dozens of men in German and Italian military uniforms. A loud chorus of “
Sieg Heils!
” echoed throughout the lobby as she made her way to the front desk. Her legs were trembling as the clerk brought out the hotel registry. “I glanced over to my left,” wrote Eleanor. “Count Ciano and von Ribbentrop were in conversation at the foot of the stairs. I looked around and noticed about fifty Italian officers in black uniforms. I must admit they were the handsomest collection of men I’d ever seen.”

Bob joined her at the front desk and, in the officious tone that had worked magic with the taxi driver, instructed the clerk to send a bellboy for their luggage. Eleanor suddenly found it difficult to focus on the hotel registration form the clerk had asked her to complete. Her nerves were at a breaking point. “I was stumped when it came to the question of my husband’s birthday,” she said. “I could hardly remember my own.”