50 Children: One Ordinary American Couple's Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany (17 page)

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 had 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
.

—B
RECKINRIDGE
L
ONG
,
ASSISTANT
SECRETARY OF STATE

V
IENNA

M
AY
1939

O
n 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.

Much to the Krauses’ surprise, the Drei Husaren was nearly empty that night. Undeterred by the deserted dining room, the tuxedoed maître d’ politely escorted Gil and Eleanor to a small table in the center of the restaurant. When the waiter came by and offered menus to the couple, Eleanor asked if there were any vegetables that evening. During her time in Vienna, she had noticed an almost complete absence of fresh fruit and vegetables in many of the restaurants. The waiter quietly replied that the kitchen had none to offer that evening. A few minutes later, he returned to the table carrying a small bowl of white radishes and placed them in front of Eleanor. “These have just arrived from a nearby garden,” he told her.

Over coffee at the end of the meal, Eleanor teasingly questioned Gil about all of the wonderful things he had always told her about Vienna. She knew that her husband had so many fond memories from his earlier visit and had often gleefully described the city’s stylish women and sophisticated sense of romance and culture. “Where are the beautiful women?” Eleanor wondered out loud. “Where is all the gaiety and romance? I’ve looked in vain on the streets, in the hotels, and in the few public places we’ve gone to.” Looking around the vacant restaurant, Gil was painfully aware that, all these years later, he had returned to a vanished world.

Later that evening, Gil and Eleanor received an unexpected visit at their hotel from Ogden Hammond Jr., a vice consul at the American consulate who had assumed his duties in Vienna only two months earlier. It fell to Hammond to evaluate the affidavits that Eleanor had brought with her from Philadelphia. Hammond, whom Eleanor found “very good-looking, bright, most entertaining and polished,” was the son of a onetime U.S. ambassador to Spain; his mother had perished when a German U-boat had sunk the
Lusitania
, the British ocean liner attacked off the coast of Ireland during World War I.

To Hammond’s obvious delight, Gil produced a bottle of brandy and poured drinks all around. “After his third or fourth brandy, Mr. Hammond really got going,” wrote Eleanor. “He spoke very freely. He named names.” Hammond reserved much of his invective for Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer who had been sent to Vienna the previous summer to rid the city—along with the rest of Austria—of its Jews. Although Eichmann had already moved on from Vienna by the time of Gil and Eleanor’s arrival, he left in place a system of filtering out Jews that had proven to be highly successful. “Perhaps this is why the Gestapo is permitting you to go ahead with your project,” said Hammond. “The idea is to get rid of the Jews as fast as possible. Germany has no interest as to what country they are going to as long as they get out.”

As the bottle of brandy slowly emptied, Hammond stepped up his vitriolic attacks on the Nazis. “He called them by every rotten name he could think of,” wrote Eleanor. As Hammond continued his alcohol-fueled diatribe, Eleanor’s thoughts turned to Gil’s earlier warning about the Gestapo monitoring their every move in Vienna. She began to fear that this conversation would get back to the Nazi authorities. “This was the first time we had heard such scathing denunciation by anyone,” she wrote. “This was the first time we were in the presence of what I considered to be very dangerous talk.” Hammond did not leave Gil and Eleanor’s hotel room until well past midnight. “I was glad to see him go. I went to bed praying that there were no microphones hidden in our bedroom.” Although Gil, as usual, slept soundly that night, Eleanor tossed and turned, fully expecting a violent knock on the door. The knock never came. But all through breakfast the next morning, Eleanor nervously sipped at her coffee, certain that the Gestapo was coming for them at any moment. Gil, characteristically, did not seem concerned in the slightest.
^*

Later that day, Eleanor had an appointment at the consulate with Parker Hart, another young Foreign Service officer who had been assisting Hammond with the thousands of visa applications that had been pouring in. The moment she produced her neatly organized pile of affidavits, Eleanor knew she was in for a frustrating afternoon. It seemed, she later wrote, as if Hart was “looking for fly dirt in black pepper,” determined to spot problems in the affidavits that she had collected in Philadelphia. He started with an affidavit from a close friend of Gil’s father who had worked for years in a real estate office in Philadelphia. Eleanor knew the man well and also knew that he had a steady job and was willing to provide financial support for one of the children. But Hart brusquely dismissed the affidavit as insufficient. Eleanor demanded to know why. Here was a man who had borrowed ten thousand dollars from his life insurance company, he replied. A man like that was not a sound financial risk. The last thing any man in the United States did was to borrow against his life insurance policy.