50 Children: One Ordinary American Couple's Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany (18 page)

As Hart spoke, Eleanor felt her face flush with anger. She knew that the man who provided the affidavit had a daughter who had recently gotten married. She was fairly sure that the life insurance loan had probably been taken out either to help pay for the wedding or for a new house for his daughter. Gil likewise had borrowed money from his life insurance policy two years earlier to help pay off the mortgage on their beach house. Eleanor glared at Hart, who had instantly been transformed in her mind from a polite young man to an “arrogant pip squeak with a Boston accent.” She never imagined for a moment that her affidavits, which she had labored over so carefully, would come under such scornful scrutiny.

Hart was not through with his critique, telling Eleanor that he had come to the conclusion that all of the affidavits were “technically deficient.” Although they had all been stamped by a notary, the State Department had recently changed its rules and now required a certified public accountant’s seal. Eleanor could hardly contain herself. “Really sir,” she said, her voice shrill with anger. “Do you really believe I could not have found a CPA to approve these papers if I had known that you required such a signature? Surely, it would have been just as easy for me to get an accountant to sign these papers as it was for me to have them stamped by a notary public.”

Eleanor felt completely dispirited as she gathered up her bundle of papers and stalked out of the American consulate that afternoon. Later that evening, as she told Gil about the meeting, she wondered if Hart might have been under orders to make things as difficult as possible. While a few officials like Messersmith in Washington and Geist in Berlin were genuinely devoted to doing what they could to help the victims of Nazi persecution, many others went out of their way to thwart Jewish refugees’ efforts to come to America. “We can delay and effectively stop for a temporary period of indefinite length the number of immigrants into the United States,” Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long later wrote in a secret internal department memo. “We could do this by simply advising our consuls to put every obstacle in the way and to require additional evidence and to resort to various administrative devices, which would postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of the visas.”

On the same day that Eleanor met with Hart, Gil had also encountered a potential setback, in the form of a telephone call from Theodore Hohenthal, one of the American vice consuls in Vienna. Hohenthal informed Gil that not only were no visas expected to become available, but also that no one in the Vienna consulate even knew about the plan to set aside unused visas for the children. “I had never seen Gil so blue and downcast as he was that evening,” wrote Eleanor. “He kept saying everything looked terrible and that everything was too mixed up to even straighten out.”

Gil and Eleanor returned to the consulate early the next morning for a meeting with Hohenthal. Gil’s main objective was to straighten out Parker Hart’s problems with Eleanor’s affidavits. But Hohenthal was not prepared to discuss the affidavits. Instead he turned the discussion back to the rescue plan itself and reminded Gil that nothing would happen until he could find out more about the possibility of using any of the “dead” visas. Otherwise he said the consulate would not have any new visas until July. Gil’s rising frustration was exacerbated by the fact that Consul General Leland Morris, who might have been able to sort out these problems, had been away from the office for almost a week.

Over the next few days, Gil and Eleanor continued their work at the Kultusgemeinde without telling anyone about the potential roadblocks raised at the consulate. They had by now interviewed more than 150 families and were close to narrowing down their selection of the fifty children. Each evening, however, they left the building on Seitenstettengasse weighed down by the knowledge that every child left behind might well never have another opportunity to escape.

On May 4, Raymond Geist cabled a two-page letter to George Messersmith in Washington. “You will remember Mr. Gilbert Kraus, who came to see me with regard to a project of taking fifty children to the United States,” the letter began. Geist then mentioned that he had informed the Gestapo about the plan so that there would be no mystery surrounding Gil’s presence in Vienna.

The letter detailed the bureaucratic complexities that stood in the way of setting aside the fifty visas that Gil would need for the children. “I pointed out that he had arrived in this country to carry out his project at an unfortunate time from a technical point of view with respect to the handling of the [immigration] quota,” Geist wrote. He told Messersmith that the German quota had “technically been exhausted” at the end of April, leaving no new visas available for either May or June. But Geist also seemed intent on finding a bureaucratic loophole that might still allow Gil to obtain the necessary visas. He advised Messersmith that the precise formula for distributing visas under the German quota had worked out in such a way that several dozen “leftover visas” might be assigned to American consulate offices scattered throughout Nazi Germany. “In view of the pains he had taken to come over here to arrange for the emigration of 50 children,” wrote Geist, referring to Gil, “I was prepared to reserve 50 [visas] for the use of these children during the month of May.”

Two days after Geist sent his letter to Washington, Leland Morris, who had returned to Vienna, notified Geist by cable that he had informed Gil that the consulate already had a large backlog of pending visa applications, “thus making it impossible to consider the children before July.” Morris had also urged Gil to return to Berlin to see if the visas might be obtained there rather than in Vienna. “I have informed him that I know nothing of the situation at your office,” Morris wrote to Geist on May 6, “but have suggested the above procedure as offering the only possible solution for the children to obtain visas before July. I have told him, of course, that I am not sure that your office can do any better for them than we can.”

Gil and Eleanor hurriedly made travel plans for Berlin. Realizing that time was running out, Gil booked a compartment on the train that left Vienna at nine o’clock that same night. “We had a terrible train trip to Berlin,” wrote Eleanor. “We were in the last compartment in the last car. We played ‘crack the whip’ all the way there. It was impossible for us to sleep.”

CHAPTER 14

I peered at the people on the street. I had never seen so many self-satisfied faces in my life. Here was the “superior” race
.

—E
LEANOR
K
RAUS

B
ERLIN

M
AY
7–8, 1939

T
he overnight train from Vienna pulled into Berlin’s Anhalter Bahnhof early on the morning of Sunday, May 7. The cavernous train station, which had once been the largest in all of Europe and featured a separate entrance and reception area for visiting royalty, counted six different platforms from which trains departed or arrived every few minutes to and from Prague, Vienna, Rome, and Athens. In their haste to get to Berlin, Gil and Eleanor failed to realize that the American embassy would be closed on a Sunday, which meant they had a full twenty-four hours ahead of them before they would be able to see Raymond Geist.

Gil was no stranger to the city, but this was Eleanor’s first time in the German capital. As the morning mist gave way to bright sunshine, the couple decided to spend the day on a sightseeing excursion around the city. Once they had checked into their hotel, Gil suggested that they begin their tour of the city with a brisk walk around the Pariser Platz, the city’s grandest square, which was named in 1814 in celebration of Napoleon’s defeat and the conquest of Paris by the Prussian and Austrian armies. The square had been laid out in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate and also marked the western end of the tree-lined Unter den Linden avenue, the main route for torch-lit Nazi parades and pageants ever since Hitler had come to power. While Eleanor marveled at the magnificence of the Brandenburg Gate and other buildings surrounding the sprawling plaza, Gil pointed out the American embassy, which stood only steps away from the Gate’s rectangular-shaped pillars. The State Department had purchased the nineteenth-century Blücher Palace in 1930 for use as both the ambassador’s residence and as a centralized location for the American diplomatic and consular offices that were then scattered across the city. The building, however, was never used as a residence, and a fire in 1931 had gutted it, rendering it temporarily inoperable as an embassy. When U.S. Ambassador William Dodd arrived in Berlin in 1933, he objected to the embassy’s location on the Pariser Platz, citing the plaza’s frequent use as a site for Nazi rallies and marches. But the State Department stuck to its plans, and the embassy staff moved into the Blücher Palace in early 1939, two years after Dodd left his post and only a few months before Gil and Eleanor’s visit.

As a woman who loved the finer things in life, Eleanor normally would have been dazzled by the jewelry stores and silver shops that lined Unter den Linden. A few blocks away, on Leipzigerstrasse, she likewise would have been entranced by a string of boutique stores that sold gorgeous bronzes, beautiful silks, hand-tooled leather goods, Dresden china, and other exquisite merchandise. But as they continued their walk around the city, she ignored the store windows and stared instead at the faces of the people she passed on the street. “I’ve never seen so many self-satisfied faces in my life,” Eleanor remarked to Gil. After passing a young, blond, blue-eyed woman who was pushing a baby stroller, Eleanor wondered to herself what the young mother might be thinking. “I stared at her as hard as I could,” she wrote later. “She looked arrogant, smug, superior—as if listening to secret voices.” Gil and Eleanor stopped for lunch at a large restaurant that overflowed with families who were out enjoying a beautiful spring Sunday afternoon. But something was amiss. “I noticed the silence, the peculiar silence, at each and every table,” said Eleanor. “There was no laughter, no smiling, no conversation, no affection. We stayed about an hour, eating our lunch in this strange, silent restaurant.”

Later that afternoon, Gil and Eleanor climbed aboard a tourist bus that took them around the city, with an English-speaking guide who pointed out sights along the way. They stopped in front of one particular building, which the guide proudly declared one of Berlin’s newest and tallest skyscrapers. “It is true in America that the Empire State Building is much taller,” he told the passengers. “But they do not use the top floors, for it is impractical.” Eleanor stared blankly at the building in front of her. She thought it was about as impressive as the Walt Whitman Hotel in Camden, New Jersey, which topped out at a mere eight stories.

As the day wore on, the enjoyment of sightseeing gave way to a gnawing anxiety about what the next day would bring. Back at their hotel, Gil confided that he was worried that Geist would have little, if any, time to see them. “We’d better go out and do something to get our minds off this or we’ll go nuts sitting here all evening,” he told his wife. They decided to take in an after-dinner show at the Metropol Theater, which was known for its splashy Ziegfeld-style revues and light operettas. With its crystal chandeliers and plush red velvet stalls, the theater impressed Eleanor, who was always ready for an entertaining night on the town. But she stiffened after discovering that at least half of the audience was filled with German officers and their wives—the men imposing in their black-and-gray uniforms and high-peaked hats, the woman elaborately dressed and heavily jeweled. Sensing his wife’s discomfort, Gil urged her to ignore the patrons and focus on what was happening onstage. The two managed to enjoy themselves despite their surroundings.

Gil had suggested that Eleanor look her best for their meeting with Geist, and so she had packed a couple of her finest outfits. Gil, for his part, had brought along his “poker suit”—a dark gray woolen suit that always seemed to bring him luck when he wore it on poker nights with his buddies in Philadelphia. On Monday morning, as they left the hotel for their meeting, Eleanor carefully adjusted her handsome red hat with the green parakeet.

At the embassy, a smiling Geist warmly greeted Gil and Eleanor promptly at 10:00
A.M.
and ushered them into his office. Geist complimented Eleanor on her hat and, explaining that he had been away from home for such a long time, innocently wondered how much a woman would have to pay for such a hat. Eleanor laughed a little nervously, and then offered a reply with some tactful diplomacy of her own. “I’d be ashamed to tell you, particularly with my husband present,” she said.

After exchanging a few more pleasantries, Gil reminded Geist why they had come to Berlin. Geist listened patiently as Gil explained that, while the fifty children had now been chosen, it seemed unlikely that the consulate in Vienna would be able to provide any visas for them. Geist assured Gil he would do what he could to help. “If there are visas available, I will agree that they should be allotted to you,” he said. While Geist could not promise that any unused visas would materialize, he encouraged Gil and Eleanor to proceed as if the children would be able to make the trip to America.