50 Children: One Ordinary American Couple's Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany (28 page)

“As I stand before this assemblage, proud of my being here, I know I am standing before a group of men and women, unselfish in their service to humanity and fearless in their endeavor to preserve American democracy,” said Sacks. “Here meets an organization whose humanitarian endeavors stand today as a beacon light to all whose hearts beat for the oppressed.” As a swell of applause rippled across the room, Sacks added, “May I take this opportunity of congratulating you for this noble work, especially in being the first to aid in bringing fifty living orphans to the shores of liberty and freedom.”

Sacks, of course, had played an important supporting part in the rescue mission. He had used his influence as a member of Congress to introduce Gil six months earlier to George Messersmith at the State Department. Once the plan was set in motion, Sacks kept in touch with Messersmith and other officials as part of the effort to secure as much cooperation as could be expected from an otherwise recalcitrant State Department. In his speech, however, the Philadelphia congressman reserved his most glowing words of praise for Gil’s role in the mission. “He has endeared himself to all of us and has become a most distinguished member of American Jewry,” said Sacks. “Going to a land filled with hatred, he carried hope to our brethren in the throes of despair, stretched out his hand and by his ability and courage was able to rescue those innocent souls from the depths of hell such as you and I could not realize ever existed.” Sacks then turned to Eleanor. He paid warm tribute to a woman “who left her own babies and went to this land of despair to salvage the lives of those whose only crime was that they were Jewish children.” Sacks also singled out Bob Schless—who was not in attendance—for leaving behind his medical practice “to aid Brith Sholom in its noble cause” and who, in doing so, became a “true healer in the suffering of humanity.”

Sacks was followed to the podium by Samuel Einhorn, a Philadelphia lawyer and Brith Sholom’s vice grand master. Einhorn reminded the audience that Gil’s father had led the campaign years earlier to save lives by building a sanitarium for tuberculosis patients. “It seems to me but fitting,” said Einhorn, “that all these years later, Solomon Kraus’s beloved son should sit down with others and think of saving lives, this time the lives of unfortunate children, this time the lives of those who all said could not be saved.” Eight days earlier, Einhorn had been among the contingent of Brith Sholom officials that had met the
President Harding
when it docked in New York. “In my twenty-five years of communal work, I know of nothing in my life that has given to us greater happiness, happiness beyond measure, than meeting and greeting those children as they came off the boat,” he said. “And the first individual that I saw, the first happy face that I saw—a face, however, that to me gave every evidence of having borne great grief, a face that showed every evidence of having been through great strain—was that of Gil Kraus.”

Einhorn looked up from his notes and out across the ballroom. “These children are children like yours,” he declared as ripples of applause began to spread around the room. “They were saved from that inferno in Germany by Gil Kraus.” The applause grew louder as Einhorn motioned for Gil to come to the podium.

The applause died down as Gil, impeccably dressed as always, took his place at the lectern. “The credit for whatever achievements were accomplished is yours,” he began. “My associates and myself were only the medium through which fifty souls were given the right to live and grow up into good American citizens.” For the next thirty minutes, Gil delivered a speech that painted a grimly realistic portrait of the crumbling conditions facing Jews inside Nazi Germany. “If you could see, as I have with my own eyes, the sad plight of our people in Middle Europe, then would you realize the immediate need of palliative relief until something of a permanent nature could be accomplished,” he said. “When fathers and mothers of small children are willing, and even plead for you to take their children from them out of the land of darkness into the light of liberty, you can well realize the dire necessity for relief. . . . While the number fifty is but a small drop among the hundreds of thousands of lives yet to be saved, still in all each life is worth a world unto itself, and each child shall be privileged to live and breathe in a land consecrated to freedom and liberty.”

The crowd in the ballroom jumped to their feet, the room echoing with the sounds of loud, sustained applause as Gil concluded: “May I convey to you the warm and sincere thanks of fifty little children who, with one voice, bow their heads in prayer and gratitude for their safe deliverance from the land of bondage.”

An unexpected visitor to the Brith Sholom convention followed Gil to the podium. Kurt Peiser had never attended a Brith Sholom convention even though he had worked for Jewish community groups for many years. Still, he was widely known to many Brith Sholom members because of his position as the executive director of Philadelphia’s Federation of Jewish Charities. But only a few in the room were aware that Peiser had been among the city’s Jewish leaders who had tried to talk Gil out of the rescue mission. He certainly had no intention of reminding anyone on this day of his earlier opposition. Instead he took to the podium to “pay my tribute to your grand master and to Mr. Kraus and his wife and to Doctor Schless for their accomplishment. It is truly an incentive to all those [other] organizations that are engaged in refugee work.” Peiser referred to the rescue of the fifty children as a “symbol” that hopefully would lead to “future accomplishments . . . that you have never dreamed of before.”

A few days before the Brith Sholom convention, the
Philadelphia Jewish Exponent
published an editorial about the successful rescue of the fifty children from Vienna. Under a headline that read “A ‘Now It Can Be Told’ Story,” the sharply worded piece began with an acknowledgment that the newspaper’s editors had known about the rescue plan for months but had kept quiet so as not to potentially jeopardize its success. Now that the children were safely lodged at Brith Sholom’s summer camp, “this intriguing story may—indeed should—be told.” The editorial cast a critical eye on other Jewish leaders and groups that had attempted for months to block the Brith Sholom project. “The question is asked,” the editorial concluded. “Why did German-Jewish Children’s Aid try to dissuade Brith Sholom? Was it merely a case of poor judgment or worse? An explanation is in order.”

Other newspaper articles, meanwhile, that reported on the arrival of the fifty children and their temporary custody at the Brith Sholom house in Collegeville served to further sharpen the original criticism other groups had leveled against the enterprise. On June 12, Jacob Kepecs, the Jewish children’s advocate from Chicago, sent another letter to Clarence Pickett, the Quaker official, which reiterated his earlier concerns. “To my knowledge, neither Mr. and Mrs. Kraus nor Brith Sholom have had any experience in the foster care of children,” Kepecs tartly noted. “Undoubtedly similar individuals and organizations will attempt the same thing. In my opinion, this is a risky procedure all around, and the welfare of the children is jeopardized.”

Two days later, Razovsky wrote again to A. M. Warren, the State Department’s head of the visa division, this time in direct response to the stinging editorial in the
Jewish Exponent
. “The effect of this editorial and the success of Brith Sholom’s plan,” she wrote, “is likely to start an avalanche of similar organizations.” To be sure, Razovsky had been working tirelessly since 1934 to bring Jewish refugees—adults and children—to the United States. But in the immediate aftermath of Gil’s triumph, Razovsky clearly feared that her own efforts had been eclipsed.

While the success of the Brith Sholom project captured the attention of others who likewise hoped to rescue European Jews, it also raised eyebrows in Washington, particularly among members of Congress who opposed any attempts to ease America’s immigration laws. “My attention has been called to a newspaper article which describes the arrival in the United States of fifty Jewish refugee children aboard the United States Liner
President Harding
en route to foster homes awaiting them in Philadelphia,” Senator Rufus Holman wrote to Secretary of State Cordell Hull on June 8. “I will be obliged if you will furnish me with a detailed statement of the manner in which these immigrants were admitted to the United States under existing immigration laws.” A conservative Republican from Oregon, Holman had recently joined several other senators in sponsoring legislation to reduce the immigration quotas by 90 percent. He was not happy to hear that fifty Jewish children had somehow managed to make their way into the country. In his two-page reply, Hull assured Holman that the children had properly received visas because their “turns on the waiting list had been reached in the regular order” and that they were all legally admissible under the immigration laws. Hull also told the senator that the children had been “selected abroad by representatives of the Brith Sholom Lodge of Philadelphia, which has undertaken to place the children in a home where they will be supported in the United States.”
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Within a few weeks of the children’s arrival, the earlier speculation over the details of Gil’s mission had given way to a series of critical—and largely inaccurate—conclusions about how he had carried it out. On the afternoon of June 27, leaders of the National Coordinating Committee, a coalition of organizations that had been working to bring Jewish refugees into America, met at the New York City home of Marion Kenworthy, a prominent New York psychiatrist and social worker who had become a passionate advocate for Jewish refugees. The discussion at Kenworthy’s Fifth Avenue apartment quickly turned into a critical investigation of the Brith Sholom project. Kenworthy mentioned that committee members had told Gil long before “there would be a great deal of damage done should he go to Europe and take a group of children. He said he was going to do this, and he was so annoyed at what he thought was an attempt to block him that he decided he would prove it could be done.”

Given Gil’s fierce streak of stubbornness, Kenworthy may well have been accurate, at least partly, in ascribing his original determination to fulfill the rescue mission despite the opposition of others. But she then veered off into a wholly imagined account of his actions, asserting that Gil had somehow managed to obtain fifty “preferential” visas for the children. Kenworthy also claimed another member of the National Coordinating Committee had heard that in advance of his own trip to Europe, Gil had “sent people abroad to search for children” and had obtained lists of Jewish children from orphanages in Vienna.

The committee’s leaders reconvened at Kenworthy’s apartment two days later, on June 29. Once again, the discussion turned to the still-vexing issue of how Gil had managed to bring a large group of children into the country at a time when other rescue efforts remained stalled. Committee members were perplexed in particular by Gil’s success in satisfying the Labor Department’s rigid affidavit requirements.

Throughout the summer of 1939, the rescue mission continued to receive scrutiny. “Just how the children were selected, just who selected them, and how it cleared with the consular service—all these things are part of a great mystery to folks in New York and Philadelphia,” Robert Balderston, from the American Friends Service Committee, wrote in a July 16 memo apprising other Quaker officials of ongoing refugee efforts. “Apparently the Kraus children shipment [sic], arranged outside the regular coordinating committee created quite a commotion, for it was done apparently to show up the regular Jewish organizations.” Balderston noted that Gil’s plan had been “severely criticized because the children [were] placed in a home or orphanage in Philadelphia and not in private homes as is the regular practice.”

Was it envy that prompted others to criticize what had clearly been a stunningly unique and successful rescue? Whatever their motivation, some of these same people now wondered if they might simply duplicate Gil’s strategy. In his letter accusing Brith Sholom of jeopardizing the rescued children’s welfare, Jacob Kepecs enthusiastically suggested that German-Jewish Children’s Aid and the American Friends Service Committee search for other unused visas that could be reserved for additional children. “I think it would be worth exploring the possibility of using unused quota numbers for children,” replied Clarence Pickett in a June 20 letter to Kepecs in Chicago. “However, at the present time I doubt very much whether there would be a single unused quota number.”

The historical record, unfortunately, is silent on whether anyone from these groups ever spoke again with Gil about his rescue mission. But there is no doubt that he, along with Eleanor, forever remained convinced that he had done the right thing despite—or perhaps because of—the strenuous efforts to stand in his way.

In his stirring speech at the Brith Sholom convention, Gil spared no words in describing the sad fate of children left behind in Nazi Germany. “Little children—like the children that we brought to America—are not permitted to go to school. But worse than that, they’re not permitted to play with other children on the streets. They are not permitted to be seen in public beyond a certain small distance from their homes,” he told the audience. “These same children, these very children who are now in Collegeville, have—every one of them—suffered the same fate at the hands of the Nazi government. But at least these children now have a home and a roof over their head and a beautiful park to play in. And so temporarily—and everyone now lives only temporarily in Germany—they are better off than the children who are still there, who are not in their homes, and whose families have been chased out of their homes.

“And so, my friends, coming out of that fiendish existence, you have brought fifty souls to America,” said Gil. “You have brought fifty children out of that inferno of hate and into America.”

CHAPTER 24