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

by Steven Pressman

  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 w
as 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.

  Among the four children of Bernhard and Regina Linhard, only two—thirteen-year-old Franzi and six-year-old Peter—were the right ages to be considered for the Brith Sholom transport. Bernhard had once owned a thriving restaurant in Vienna but had lost the business after the Anschluss. Although he had relatives in New York, Bernhard had not been able to find any way to get his family safely out of Vienna. His spirit was crushed further in early April 1939 when four men forced their way into the family apartment at No. 24 Taborstrasse and ransacked the place for money and valuables. They made off with a few bags of cash—the family’s final supply of savings—that Bernhard had hidden away after losing the restaurant. On April 20—the day of Hitler’s birthday celebration and two days after Peter’s sixth birthday—Bernhard wrapped the cord of a Venetian blind around his neck and hung himself. A few days later his wife, Regina, stood in the long line outside the Kultusgemeinde, determined to send her two youngest children away to safety.

  Many of the parents did whatever they could to make sure their child would leave a positive impression on the visiting Americans. “My parents did not give me this feeling that I might not ever see them again because of the tragedies that were occurring in Europe,” said Paul Beller. “Instead my mother painted a very different picture. She said to me, ‘How would you like to visit some of your relatives in New York and have a little vacation in America?’ She presented it without any grimness or fear, even though in her own mind I’m sure she was thinking totally differently. So when I was interviewed, I presented a very positive picture. I made it sound like I wasn’t afraid of leaving on my own.”

  Other parents worried that their children might say something that would jeopardize their chances of being chosen. “I asked if I could take my littler sister with me,” said Henny Wenkart. “My parents were horrified to hear me say that, because they were afraid that would scotch the whole thing. But whoever was talking to me said, ‘No, we’re not taking any babies.’ ‘Oh, but I can take complete care of her, and she’s almost out of diapers,’ I said. But the answer was still no. I was leaving my parents and my sister in danger for their lives, and I was saving my own skin. I knew that, and I was just deeply ashamed of that. At the same time, of course, I knew my parents wanted me to go. If they didn’t want me to go, they wouldn’t have taken me there in the first place. They were trying to save me.”

  Despite the increasingly desperate conditions facing Jewish families in Vienna, the wrenching decision about whether or not to send a child away was not something that every parent could agree on. “I remember a discussion at home about whether or not I should leave,” said Kurt Admon. “My mother was very worried because, well, she was a Jewish mother and she had heard that children in America were sometimes kidnapped. This went back to the Lindbergh baby, which happened several years earlier. But she was still worried about that and wasn’t sure that she could send her son there without her supervision. My father was more practical. He was very sure by this time there was no way to stay and no minute to spare. He convinced her.”

  Klara Rattner’s mother had a different concern. “I was just getting over the measles, and my father told my mother, ‘You should have her go and see if she could be one of the fifty,’” remembered Klara. “But my mother said, ‘No, she’s still ill with the measles, and I can’t let her go.’ And my father said, ‘Yes you will because we may die here. But Klara is not going to die. She’s going to go and lead a life in America.”

  Gil and Bob were determined to pick children who they felt would best be able to withstand, both physically and emotionally, the long journey to America and the separation from their parents. They paid no attention to the financial status of the families and interviewed children of lawyers, merchants, grocers, and salesmen. Since none of the men were allowed to work by this time, the question of family financial backgrounds was hardly relevant in any case. After spending a few minutes with the parents, Gil turned directly to the boy or girl sitting at the desk in front of him. “Would you like to go to America?” he asked, speaking in English while Hedy translated. “Would you be willing to leave your mother and father for a while and go with us to America and wait for them there?” Eleanor said very little during the interviews. “We spent hours doing these interviews, without interruption,” she wrote. “I shook hands, smiled, and listened most attentively. All of the children were charming. All of the children were appealing. And all of the children stood in equal need of being rescued.”

  As she sat there during those longer, excruciating interviews, Eleanor felt her heart breaking at the painful realization that so many children would be left behind. To make matters worse, Gil was still unable to promise the parents that he would be able to take any of the children to the United States. No one in either the American embassy in Berlin or the consulate in Vienna had yet to guarantee that he would be given any visas for the children’s use. “There might be a transport of children to America,” was the best that Gil could tell the parents. “We still do not yet know for sure.”

  Gil and Eleanor did not go to the Kultusgemeinde on Monday, May 1. All throughout Vienna, the streets were filled with noisy May Day parades, which began early in the morning and continued throughout the day. They remained in their hotel room, reviewing interview notes, checking names off the list of families hoping to be chosen, preparing the paperwork that would soon be submitted to the American consulate. By late afternoon, they decided to take a break and venture out into the city.

  As they strolled through the streets during the May Day celebrations, Eleanor found herself fixated on the ubiquitous JUDEN VERBOTEN signs, which Gil had come to ignore. “They did something terrible to me inside,” she wrote. “Technically, we were exempt by virtue of being Americans. But everywhere we went, Hedy came, too. Perhaps she ha
d special permission, since she was an accepted official representing the Jewish community. I didn’t know.”

  Hedy Neufeld had no such permission to ignore the signs. That did not stop her from joining the Americans for dinner one evening at a Hungarian restaurant. “Won’t Hedy get into trouble if she is found here in the restaurant?” Eleanor whispered to Gil. “Yes,” he whispered back. “She defies all the rules, but she doesn’t give a damn.”

  “Do you think we are being wise?” asked Eleanor. “Aren’t we breaking the rules as well and asking for trouble?” Gil glanced around the room and then back at his wife. “I don’t know,” he told her. “And I don’t care.”

  CHAPTER 13

  We can delay and effectively stop … the number of immigrants into the United States.

  —BRECKINRIDGE LONG, ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF STATE

  VIENNA

  MAY 1939

  On a mild evening in early May, Gil and Eleanor took a short walk, passing by the familiar stores and cafés along Kärntnerstrasse. Eleanor had been looking forward to dinner at the Drei Husaren, tucked away at No. 4 Weihburggasse, which for the past few years had been regarded as one of Vienna’s finest restaurants. Its name came from the original owners—three former Hussar, or cavalry, officers who had opened the restaurant in 1933. Until 1938, the building that housed the restaurant had been owned by the Zwiebacks, a prominent Jewish family that also operated a fashionable department store on Kärtnerstrasse. All of the Zwiebacks’ businesses had been confiscated after the Anschluss, and the trio of gastronomic Hussars had turned the restaurant over to Otto Horcher, a flamboyant restaurateur from Berlin who specialized in catering to the social and culinary appetites of senior Nazi officials. His restaurant in Berlin was a particular favorite of Göring, Hitler’s devoted second-in-command. Not long after Göring helped to engineer the bloody Night of the Long Knives, during which scores of Hitler’s opponents and perceived enemies were murdered in the summer of 1934, the Nazi henchman hosted a dinner at Horcher’s restaurant to thank his loyal subordinates. A few years later, in 1937, Nazi officials Heinrich Himmler and Joachim von Ribbentrop wined and dined the Duke of Windsor at the restaurant. Astonishingly, Horcher himself never joined the Nazi Party, although he was a savvy businessman who understood the political and financial benefits of running dining establishments that were held in such high regard by the Nazi elite.