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

by Steven Pressman

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

  Look at these children. It makes me wish we could bring thousands of them over.

  —LOUIS LEVINE

  COLLEGEVILLE, PENNSYLVANIA

  AUGUST–SEPTEMBER 1939

  As the end of summer approached, Gil and Eleanor turned their attention to finding suitable homes for every one of the children. Although many of them had relatives living in the United States, not all of them had the financial or practical means to take on the responsibility of caring for an extra family member or two. “Wherever the relatives were in a position financially and were interested in having a child, this request was granted,” said Eleanor. “Some of the people from Brith Sholom wanted foster children, and where this could be done, their requests were granted.”

  Irma Langberg and Ella Spiegler were the first two children to leave Collegeville. Their bittersweet departure the first week in August was noted in a mimeographed camp newsletter written in German by a couple of the children and translated into English by Brith Sholom volunteers. “Not only will we deeply miss them, it is much more,” the newsletter reported. “We know that Irma and Ella [are] the first of us 50 children to leave the home and go into that America which we only know through our storybooks. Irma and Ella, do not cry about leaving us! You are entering into a life for which hundreds of thousands over there [in Germany] will envy you.”

  Throughout August, Gil spent hours interviewing relatives of the children as well as others who had volunteered to become foster parents. Gil and Eleanor sometimes received letters out of the blue from perfect strangers who had read about the children and hoped to adopt one. “Can we please have a little girl with blue eyes and yellow hair?” one couple wrote. Another woman, seeking to adopt a child, enclosed a photograph of her husband because she wanted the child “to look as much like him as possible.”

  But Gil refused to allow any of the children to be legally adopted. He had made a solemn promise to the parents in Vienna that their children would be cared for and looked after but only until such time as the parents themselves might be reunited with their children. He had no way of knowing, of course, how many parents would ultimately obtain their own visas. As Europe edged ever closer to war throughout the summer, the waiting list for American visas continued to grow as Jews who remained trapped in Nazi Germany sensed that time was running out. On the other hand, the fact that their children were already in the United States in some cases strengthened the parents’ visa applications.

  “All during that summer at the Brith Sholom camp, I remember thinking that pretty soon my parents would be with me, that I’d be reunited with them, and that’s sort of as far as it went,” recalled Helga Weisz. Her father, Emil, wrote that he was confident he would soon be joining her in the United States. But Helga’s Hungarian-born mother, Rosa, had no immediate prospects for obtaining her own visa. By summer’s end, Helga was sent to live with a foster couple in New York. She shared tearful good-byes with Inge Braunwasser, who had become her closest friend during their time together at the Brith Sholom camp. “I remember Inge crying, and I was comforting her, and I gave her a letter and a picture of me, and she gave me something of hers.” The two would not see each other again for nearly fifty years.

  Although Helga’s foster parents, a childless couple, no doubt had the best of intentions, they turned out to be shockingly insensitive to what the young girl had experienced in Vienna. “Whenever I tried to tell them what had happened to my family in Europe, they told me that I was making up stories and that I should just forget about those times,” said Helga. “They also said that if my parents were punished, it’s probably because they did something bad against the government. They told me I shouldn’t talk about it anymore and that I should concentrate on becoming an American.”

  All summer long, Henny Wenkart stubbornly proclaimed that she would not go live with a foster family. In fact, her parents and younger sister succeeded in coming to the United States in early August. But with no immediate prospects of making any sort of living, Hermann Wenkart knew he was in no position to adequately provide for the entire family. “My father came to see me at the camp,” recalled Henny. “He said, ‘We’re going to be very poor, and I have been told that you could live for a while in the home of another lawyer. And it would ease my mind to know that at least you were living a normal life.’”

  Fritzi and Elizabeth Zinger, unlike some of the other children, had relatives who were both willing and able to take care of the two girls. Toward the end of the summer, an aunt and uncle drove down from Utica, New York, to pick up nine-year-old Fritzi and six-year-old Elizabeth. “We combed our hair and washed our faces, and we came into this room to meet our relatives,” Fritzi remembered. “My aunt cried out, ‘Oh my goodness, they’re blackies!’ What she meant was that we had black eyes and black hair. I guess she expected two girls from Vienna to have blue eyes and blond hair.” They soon settled into their new home in upstate New York with the relatives they knew as Uncle Max and Aunt Birdie. Elizabeth remembered that her uncle would tell them before bed each evening, “Now remember, I’m Papa and that’s Mama. That is what you must call us now.” After the lights in the room had darkened, Elizabeth would hear a soft, comforting voice just as she was drifting off to sleep. “Er ist nicht dein Papa. Sie ist nicht deine Mama.” It was Fritzi telling her younger sister, “He is not your father. She is not your mother.” Uncle Max and Aunt Birdie were a wonderful couple who treated the Zinger sisters as if they were their own children. “But it was my sister who reminded me all of the time that we still had a mother and father,” said Elizabeth. “I was always so grateful to her for that.”

  Some of Gil and Eleanor’s closest friends offered to take in a child or two. Throughout the summer, Paul Beller assumed that he would be sent to live with an uncle in New York City. Instead, Philip and Emily Amram drove to Collegeville in late August and asked Paul if he would like to come live with them for a while. Philip was a well-heeled lawyer who traveled in the same Philadelphia professional and social circles as Gil. Eleanor and Emily also happened to be distantly related through marriage. At the time, Philip was leading the life of a gentleman farmer, having recently moved his family—which included a son, David, and a daughter, Marianne—to rural Feasterville, which was not too far from Collegeville. Coincidentally, the Amrams also employed a full-time nanny from Vienna who, of course, spoke fluent German.

  By the end of the summer, Paul had taken to life on the farm, riding the Amrams’ big-wheeled tractor, eating loads of fresh vegetables, and enjoying hayrides and the other benefits of rural living. His father, Leo, had succeeded by then in getting out of Vienna, only to be detained by British authorities after trying to sneak by ship into Palestine. He and others on the intercepted ship were sent to a British detention camp on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. Paul’s mother, Mina, remained in Vienna, which became even more dangerous for Jews once the war began in September. “She would send me postcards that
said everything was fine,” Paul recollected. “In reality, though, she was in tremendous danger all the time.”

  In mid-August, a reporter for the New York Journal-American visited the Brith Sholom house and described the joyous atmosphere in an article headlined “Little Refugees Proving Good As Americans.” The reporter was accompanied during the visit by Louis Levine, who smiled broadly as several children gathered around a flagpole and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner,” one of the songs they had struggled so hard to learn while crossing the Atlantic Ocean. “Look at these children,” said Levine. “It makes me wish we could bring thousands of them over. You can’t doubt, seeing them here so willing to stay and learn our ways, that every one of them will develop into honest-to-goodness Americans.” One of the boys, twelve-year-old Herbert Vogel, came up to the reporter and proudly showed off his slightly misshapen and discolored nose. “Already I am a real American,” he bragged. “See my nose? It was broken by a baseball bat.”

  By the end of August, most of the children had left Collegeville. “We were worried because people would come out on weekends to look at the children, and more and more of the kids would disappear,” remembered Robert Braun. As Labor Day approached, he and his older sister, Johanna, were the only ones left. “My God, nobody wants us!” Robert cried to his sister. “What’s going to happen to us?”

  He did not discover until many years later that his fate, together with his sister’s, had never been in doubt. Gil and Eleanor had decided—perhaps while they were still in Vienna—that Robert and Johanna would live with them and their children, Steven and Ellen.

  By early September all fifty children were in their new homes and ready to begin their new lives. A few fortunate ones had already been reunited with their parents. Most of the others lived in hope—fleeting or otherwise—of seeing their mothers and fathers before too long.

  In Europe, a war that would result in the deaths of millions had just begun. For fifty Jewish children, the nightmares that had robbed them of their innocent childhoods had come to an end. The Brith Sholom house in Collegeville once again stood silent and empty.

  Epilogue

  In June 1940—one year after the children arrived in America—the members of Brith Sholom gathered again at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Atlantic City for the group’s annual convention. Once again, Louis Levine delivered a detailed “grand master’s message” that focused on the ongoing threat to European Jewry. The war had been going on for more than nine months, and Adolf Hitler’s relentless persecution inside the Third Reich now also imperiled millions more in Poland, Hungary, and elsewhere. The Final Solution had not yet been set into motion, but the blueprints for killing centers and death camps were not far off.

  Levine, in his speech, continued to sound the call to come to the aid of Jewish refugees. “We of Brith Sholom have done our utmost to cooperate with all agencies in the effort to make available havens for refugees,” he declared. “We have also endeavored to help refugees who have found their way to these shores. We have contributed large sums of money to other agencies devoted to this purpose. Above all, we in Brith Sholom are proud of the achievement we have accomplished. With your help, we brought last year to these shores fifty German-Jewish children. Who can forget the thrill we all experienced when we saw these little ones safe on our shores?”

  Levine also noted that Brith Sholom had so far helped to bring thirty-one parents of the children into the United States. “We are also endeavoring to bring over the parents of the remaining children so that at least this part of the work will be completed.” In his conclusion, he expressed the hope that Brith Sholom would soon embark on a new project to bring yet more children into the United States.

  But there would be no more Brith Sholom rescue missions. The Kindertransport that had brought ten thousand children to England during 1938 and 1939 had come to an end with the outbreak of war. In the summer of 1940, Congressman Richard Hennings of Missouri introduced a bill allowing U.S. ships to evacuate British children endangered by the war and bring them to the United States, where they would be admitted outside of the normal immigration quotas. The so-called Mercy Ship bill swiftly sailed through Congress and was signed by President Roosevelt in August 1940. Although it turned out to be largely superfluous—British officials were not keen on risking children’s lives at sea while a war was on—the bill’s passage nonetheless stood in stark contrast with the ill-fated Wagner-Rogers measure to admit Jewish children from Germany. Shortly before Congress approved the Mercy Ship bill, a Gallup poll found that nearly two-thirds of the American public was in favor of allowing British refugee children to remain in the United States until the war was over.

  Between 1933 and 1945, the United States admitted between 1,000 and 1,200 “unaccompanied” Jewish children—children traveling without their parents—into the country. The fifty children rescued by Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus accounted for the largest known single group to be admitted into America during the entirety of the Holocaust. And while the United States opened its doors to 200,000 European refugees—mostly Jews—during Hitler’s murderous reign, the sad fact remains that hundreds of thousands of additional lives lost in the ashes of the Holocaust might well have been saved had America been more generous.

  Among the victims of the Nazis’ Final Solution were one and a half million children.

  AFTER THE BRITH Sholom rescue mission was completed, Gil returned to his law practice in Philadelphia. From time to time, he and Eleanor corresponded with some of the children and their families. “It was nice to hear from you and your family, and Mrs. Kraus joins me in wishing you all a very happy New Year,” Gil wrote in September 1941, during the Jewish high holidays, to Hugo Zulawski, who had gone to live with relatives in Brooklyn after his summer in Collegeville. Hugo’s parents, who had made their way from Vienna to England, obtained visas for America earlier that spring. “It is nice to know that you are together with your family and have your own home. You are very fortunate indeed, as so many of our children have not yet been reunited with their parents.” The letter was signed “Uncle Gilbert.”

  Eleanor immersed herself in other wartime work shortly after the United States entered the war in December 1941. On April 9, 1942, the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin published an article about a group of local women who had volunteered for the army’s “Interceptor Service”—helping to monitor possible air raids by enemy planes. Eleanor was a “filterer”—someone who would track authorized flights in the area and alert army authorities to any irregularities. “Mrs. Kraus is a good filterer,” the newspaper reported, “though men are supposed to be better filterers—more imaginative and resourceful than women. Mrs. K. should really be called an analyst.” The reporter also noted that Eleanor only a week earlier had boarded up the family’s New Jersey beach house after spending weekends and summers there for the past fourteen years. “She can’t go now because she has pledged every other day to the army,” the newspaper reported.

  During the war, Gil closed down his practice and became vice president and general counsel of the Philadelphia Record. The feisty, liberal-voiced daily newspaper, which had begun publication in 1870, had been bought in 1928 by J. David Stern, a maverick publisher who was also closely connected to Albert Greenfield, Gil’s former brother-in-law and client. By the time the newspaper went out of business in 1947, Gil was no longer interested in practicing law. Instead he inexplicably decided to take up farming. He and Eleanor—who was decidedly not thrilled about becoming a farmer’s wife—moved to nearby rural Bucks County, where Gil bred Guernsey cows at his Sugar Bottom Farm. Sometime in the 1950s, he gave up on farming and returned to practicing law, this time in suburban Doylestown. By the early 1960s, Gil had become active in local Democratic Party politics and had founded the Doylestown Legal Aid Society. He also served as president of the Bucks County Mental Health Society.

  Gil and Eleanor by this time had four grandchildren. Their daughter, Ellen, died in 1964, a victim of cancer at the age of thirty-thre
e. “One of the great tragedies for my grandparents is that they could save fifty kids but were unable to save their own daughter,” noted their granddaughter Liz Perle. “I think it broke a part of them. Even though they were able to look back and know they had kept fifty children from certain death, in the end they couldn’t keep my mother—their own daughter—from one.”

  As the years passed, Gil and Eleanor moved back to Philadelphia and into an elegant apartment across the street from Rittenhouse Square. Gil died in August 1975 at the age of seventy-seven. Eleanor remained for a time in Philadelphia and later moved to Westchester County, New York, closer to her son, Steven, his wife, Suzanne, and their three children, Peter, Ginger, and Dan. Eleanor died in April 1989 at the age of eighty-five. Steven Kraus died in 2012.

  BOB SCHLESS, WITHIN weeks of arriving in America with the fifty children, sailed back to Europe and returned to Vienna, where he and Hedy Neufeld were married in July 1939. The couple returned to the United States aboard the SS Washington—the same ship that had brought Eleanor to Europe in April—arriving in New York on August 3, 1939. Bob resumed his career in pediatric medicine and, after the war, brought Hedy’s mother and sister to the United States. After he retired, Bob and Hedy moved to Berne, Switzerland, where he died in June 1972 at the age of seventy-seven. Hedy soon after returned to Philadelphia, where she lived for the rest of her life. She died in February 1989 at the age of seventy-four.

  LOUIS LEVINE, BRITH Sholom’s grand master during the 1939 rescue mission, continued to work for a variety of Jewish causes during and after World War II. He served as chairman of the American Committee for the Relief and Rehabilitation of Jewish War-Orphaned Children and also led the Jewish Council of Russian Relief. For two years beginning in 1946, he was a member of a World Jewish Congress committee that provided relief to children who had survived the Holocaust. Levine also served for twenty years as a member of the board of trustees of Yeshiva University in New York City. He died in February 1958 at the age of sixty-nine.