50 Children: One Ordinary American Couple's Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany (22 page)

On one of their last evenings in Vienna, Gil and Eleanor, along with Bob and Hedy, accepted Richard Friedmann’s invitation to supper at his home. He lived in a tiny one-room apartment in the basement of a four-story building that had been owned by his grandfather and confiscated from the family after the Anschluss. His guests arrived to find a veritable feast laid out in the cramped apartment, accompanied by wine, beer, nuts, and candies. “The whole setting was sweet and touching,” said Eleanor. She cast a knowing glance in Hedy’s direction, surmising that the young woman had somehow managed to lend a hand.

Friedmann talked late into the night about the difficult life he had been leading in Vienna since the Anschluss put an end to his work as a journalist and pushed him into helping thousands of other Jews get out of Vienna. “But what about you, Richard,” Eleanor asked him that evening. “Where will you go?”

“I have no interest in leaving Vienna until every other Jew has left,” the young man replied. “My hope is that I will be the last to go.” Gil and Eleanor had grown very fond of him and all that evening tried to talk him into coming to America. Gil offered to sponsor him if Richard wished to emigrate.

But Friedmann politely rebuffed Gil’s invitation. “I will not enter another land where there is any anti-Semitism,” he told Gil and Eleanor. “Austria is my home. And if I am forced to leave it, I will only leave for a piece of soil that I can truly call my own. We were betrayed here in Austria. We thought the soil belonged to us. Next time, I will have to make sure that it really will belong to me. And since I can no longer be an Austrian, I only wish to go where I can claim a bit of Jewish soil.” Palestine was the only place on earth he wished to live.
^*

On the morning of Saturday, May 20, Hedy Neufeld telephoned Gil and Eleanor at their hotel to let them know that the staff at the Kultusgemeinde had planned a farewell reception later that afternoon to which all of the children and parents had been invited.

Eleanor did not think she had enough emotional strength to carry her through yet another such gathering; it had been difficult enough to get through the meetings and interviews with the children and their parents. But Hedy had promised that the Americans would be there. One more day, Eleanor kept reminding herself. She only had to make it through one more day.

When they arrived at the Kultusgemeinde, a few of the children presented Eleanor with little flower bouquets. Some of the parents then stepped forward, offering words of grateful appreciation for taking their children to safety. The children quickly occupied themselves with games and songs, leaving the parents to stand around a long table, where they chatted awkwardly among themselves while keeping steady gazes on their children. Parents kept approaching Gil to shake his hand and thank him for what he had done. Eleanor noticed that Hedy and Bob sat together in a corner of the room, immersed in a quiet conversation. Eleanor made an effort to keep a smile on her face until she could do so no longer. “This entire party filled me with absolute misery,” she said. She finally excused herself from the room and walked into an adjoining office, where she burst into tears. “I was unable to control myself and was too ashamed to return. It seemed so peculiar to me that I should be the only one who broke down. My lack of bravery was certainly no match for the parents who were charming and gay and acted as if nothing untoward was happening.”

Before the party ended, the parents presented Eleanor with a gift. It was a delicately carved porcelain sculpture, set atop a wooden oval base and standing about eight inches high. The porcelain depicted two female figures, kneeling and facing each other. One of the figures was leaning toward the other, caressing the woman’s hand and gently kissing it. Along with the sculpture was a note card with a vintage ink-drawn sketch of Vienna. The message inside, from “the grateful children and parents,” was printed, in English, in an elegant script:

In memory of a Mother-Day

in hard times never to be forgotten
,

of the day on which you have taken upon

yourself with motherly love

the care for Jewish children
.

For the second time that day, Eleanor’s eyes filled with tears. It had completely escaped her attention that Mother’s Day had been celebrated in the United States the previous Sunday.

Gil and Eleanor had one more social engagement to attend that final Saturday in Vienna. They had been invited to tea at the home of Arthur Kuffler, whom Gil had first met shortly after he had arrived in the city. Kuffler had been one of Austria’s leading textile industrialists, heading a company that manufactured and traded cotton. Five years earlier, in February 1934, Kuffler had visited several cities in the United States as part of an Austrian trade mission that had been appointed by Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss. Three months later, Dollfuss was assassinated during a failed coup attempt by Austrian Nazis. Coincidentally, Kuffler and the other trade delegates had sailed to America on the SS
President Harding
.

Kuffler’s business career, of course, ended with the Anschluss, after which he joined an effort led by a Dutch businessman to help wealthy Jews emigrate from Austria. When Gil and Eleanor arrived at Kuffler’s home late in the afternoon, they were surprised to discover that he and his family were still living in a large apartment filled with splendid French furniture, Oriental rugs, tapestries, paintings, and other valuable objets d’art. Kuffler explained that he had been temporarily permitted to remain in the apartment until it was turned over to a high-ranking Nazi official. Eleanor thought of her own home and how much pride she took in it. As she looked around Kuffler’s apartment, Eleanor was filled with both sadness and rage at the indignities that her hosts were forced to endure.

Kuffler’s wife, Edith, carried in a pot of tea along with a tray that she had carefully arranged with small sandwiches and a few pastries. She quietly caught Eleanor’s attention and pointed to the jewelry that she was wearing. “It all comes from the five- and ten-cent store,” she whispered. “They took all my jewelry, and now I am wearing glass.”

Gil and Kuffler spent part of the evening in a conversation about the situation in Palestine. The British government only days earlier had issued its “White Paper,” which reinforced the limits on the number of Jews allowed into Palestine. Gil expressed the deep admiration he had for the young Viennese men he had met who were intent on settling there, legally or not. Eleanor was curious to hear Kuffler’s thoughts about Britain’s policy toward Palestine, which had flip-flopped over the years, stretching back to the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which the British government announced its support for a Jewish homeland. “It’s really very simple, Mrs. Kraus,” he replied. “England sold the horse twice. First it sold Palestine to the Jews and then it sold it back to the Arabs.”

Kuffler’s wife, who apparently had another agenda that evening, steered the conversation back to the plight of Jews still living in Vienna. She turned to Eleanor and asked if it would be possible to obtain an affidavit for herself, her mother, and her brother. Although her husband said he intended to remain in Austria, she was determined to leave. “Did you see the sandwiches? Did you see the pastries?” she told Eleanor. “I made them with my own hands. I could go to work for a caterer in America and support myself. All I need are affidavits to get myself, my mother, and my brother there.” It pained Eleanor to hear this proud and elegant woman beg. And while she replied vaguely that she would try to help, Eleanor knew there was little she could do.

At the end of the evening, Arthur Kuffler walked downstairs with Gil and Eleanor. Before saying good-bye, he asked them to ignore his wife’s pleas for affidavits. He was confident that he could easily obtain affidavits for himself and his family, which included two grown daughters. But he did not think that his wife’s mother or brother, given their ages, were likely candidates for immigration to America.
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Eleanor felt completely drained by the time she and Gil returned to their hotel that evening. As she got ready for bed, it dawned on her that their work in Vienna had come to an end. Every last bit of paperwork had been completed, reviewed, and then reviewed again. Everything was in order for the next day’s journey out of the city.

CHAPTER 18

Jews are not permitted to give the Nazi salute. If the parents raise their arms to wave, they will be arrested
.

—H
EDY
N
EUFELD

V
IENNA

M
AY
21, 1939

T
he sun was shining, and Gil and Eleanor had nothing to do on their final day in Vienna other than pack their luggage and settle their accounts with the hotel. The train to Berlin would not leave until that evening, and it felt strange to be dawdling over breakfast instead of rushing off to a meeting or an appointment.

As she finished her coffee in the hotel dining room, Eleanor was suddenly gripped with fear: What would happen if they got to Berlin with the children only to learn that the American embassy did not have any visas for them? “My God, don’t think about it!” Gil implored her. “We’re sure to get some visas. I’m afraid we won’t know exactly how many until we get there.”

Eleanor was hardly comforted. “Suppose there are only seven or eighteen or whatever other number,” she said. “What will we do then?” Gil threw up his hands, even as he tried to remain calm and patient. He told her that she and Bob would continue on to America with as many children as they could. He would return to Vienna with the rest of the children. But there was no point in even considering such a gloomy scenario, he implored his wife.

In the afternoon, the sky began to darken and rain threatened. Gil and Eleanor walked a few blocks from the Bristol to Vienna’s Kunstlerhaus, one of the city’s main art exhibition halls, which had been built in the 1860s by the Austrian Artists’ Society. Located next to the Musikverein, the home of the Vienna Philharmonic, the Kunstlerhaus, which had been designed to resemble a villa from the Italian Renaissance, was one of the earliest buildings constructed along the Ringstrasse. Gil wanted to visit an art exhibition that had opened two weeks earlier and that had originally been conceived by Joseph Goebbels. The exhibition was called Entartete Kunst (“Degenerate Art”) and consisted of hundreds of modernist artworks that had been banned by the Nazis as either un-German or influenced by “Jewish Bolshevist” ideology. The paintings and sculptures on display were among thousands of pieces of art that the Nazis had confiscated from museums and art collections throughout the Reich. The exhibition, which included works by prominent artists such as Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, Max Ernst, and Otto Dix, was aimed at singling out the “perverse Jewish spirit,” which the Nazis viewed as the sinister force behind the art. Hitler himself lavishly praised the exhibition at its opening in Munich, after which it traveled to nearly a dozen cities throughout Germany and Austria.

“I was profoundly shocked and deeply sickened by this display of German depravity,” wrote Eleanor. “The deliberate ugliness of obscenity mingled with the beautiful—the mediocre next to the fine, the ridiculous next to the sublime, all labeled ‘Jewish degenerate art.’” Surprisingly only a half-dozen or so among the more than one hundred artists whose works were shown were actually Jewish. But that was of no consequence to the Nazis, who were intent on ridiculing all artistic expressions that ran counter to their obsessive notion of pure German culture.

Gil and Eleanor returned to the Bristol late in the afternoon in order to finish packing and settle their bill, this time without any delays. Joined in the lobby by Bob Schless, the three Americans piled into a taxi for the short ride to the train station. Although a light rain began falling, the streets remained congested with crowds that had been enjoying the late spring Sunday. As the cab neared the station, Eleanor’s thoughts turned to her first day in the city, only a few weeks earlier. During that initial taxi ride from the station to the hotel, she could hardly have been prepared for the emotional and physical impact the city would have on her. Now, as she traveled in the opposite direction, she was eager, desperate even, to leave Vienna behind. She was tired of being afraid, but above all else she missed her children and the comfort and safety of her own home.

The overnight train to Berlin was not scheduled to leave until 9:20
P.M
., but almost every parent and child was waiting at the station three hours earlier. “We got to the train station early and saw that it was filled with storm troopers,” remembered Kurt Herman, who stood with his mother in the anxious silence. “I think my mother immediately thought that the Germans had changed their minds and that they were not going to let us go.”