50 Children: One Ordinary American Couple's Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany (30 page)

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-three. “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.

B
OB
S
CHLESS
,
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.

L
OUIS
L
EVINE
, B
RITH
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.

L
EON
S
ACKS
,
THE
Philadelphia congressman who assisted in the Brith Sholom rescue mission, left Congress in 1943 to enlist in the U.S. Army Air Force. After the war, he became active in veterans affairs and was twice elected as a national judge advocate for the Jewish War Veterans organization. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Sacks as chief counsel for the U.S. Customs Office. He died in March 1972 at the age of sixty-nine.

G
EORGE
M
ESSERSMITH
LEFT
his position as assistant secretary of state after President Roosevelt appointed him U.S. ambassador to Cuba in 1940. The following year he was chosen as ambassador to Mexico, where he served until 1946. President Harry Truman that year selected Messersmith to be ambassador to Argentina, where he remained until he retired from the Foreign Service the following year. Messersmith died in Mexico in January 1960 at the age of seventy-six.

The Fifty Children

W
hile researching this book and a related documentary film, I was able to account, one way or another, for thirty-seven out of the fifty children rescued by Gil and Eleanor Kraus. Among that group, nineteen were living as of the summer of 2013, and eighteen were deceased. I was unable to find any information about the remaining thirteen. To help in the ongoing effort to account for all fifty children, I would welcome hearing from any of these remaining men and women or their relatives.

The following are brief updated sketches of the children for whom I was able to account, following their arrival in the United States in June 1939. They are listed according to their original given and family names in Vienna. Names that appear in parentheses reflect Americanized given names and married names.

P
AUL
B
ELLER
LIVED
with the Amram family in Feasterville, Pennsylvania, for about a year. His mother, Mina, obtained a visa for the United States, arrived in February 1940, and settled in New York City. His father, Leo, waited out the war in a British detention facility in Mauritius, where he had been sent after being caught trying to enter Palestine illegally. After the war, he was allowed to immigrate to the United States, sailing on a freighter that arrived in Baltimore in July 1946. Paul attended City College of New York and later obtained a master’s degree in public administration from New York University. He spent two years in the U.S. Army, after which he began a forty-year career with the federal government, most of it working for the national Medicare office in Maryland. He and his wife, Glenda, have three children, seven grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. They live in New Jersey.

A
LFRED
(F
REDDY
) B
ERG
and his younger sister, Charlotte, lived with distant relatives in Jersey City, New Jersey, until they were reunited with their parents in December 1939 and moved to Brooklyn, New York. Freddy entered the navy toward the end of World War II and was deployed to Okinawa, Japan, where he served until the war came to a close in August 1945. He later studied business and worked for many years as a stockbroker. He and his wife, Marianne, had two children and three grandchildren and lived for many years in New Jersey. He died in 2013.

C
HARLOTTE
B
ERG
(H
OFFMAN
)
remained in Brooklyn with her parents until getting married. She and her husband raised two children and lived for many years on Long Island, New York, and in Boca Raton, Florida. Charlotte passed away in 1999.

R
OBERT
B
RAUN
and his older sister, Johanna (always known as Hanni), lived with Gil and Eleanor and their children in Philadelphia for two years. During that time, Robert and Hanni attended Friends Select, the Quaker school in Philadelphia where the Krauses’ daughter, Ellen, was enrolled. “Once a month or so, Mr. Kraus would give all of us a whole handful of nickels, and we’d take them to the Automat where we could eat anything we wanted,” Robert recalled. “I thought that was just the biggest thrill in the world, picking out your own food, even if it meant having nothing but cake or pie. It was great.”

In 1941, Robert and Hanni went to live with a cousin, another Viennese emigré, in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Their parents, Max and Karoline, survived the war in Vienna thanks to Karoline’s official Nazi certificate that, based on her ancestors’ birth and marriage records, identified her as an Aryan, even though she had converted to Judaism at the time of her marriage. The couple obtained visas for the United States and arrived on Christmas Day 1947.

Robert studied dentistry and served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War. He later became an orthodontist in Fairfield, Connecticut. One of his patients was Gil and Eleanor’s granddaughter Liz Perle, who grew up in nearby Rowayton. Robert and his wife, Nancy, raised six children, have six grandchildren, and continue to live in Fairfield.

J
OHANNA
B
RAUN
(G
ITLIN
)
studied at the University of Connecticut School of Pharmacy, where she met and married her husband. They moved to Bridgeport, where they owned a pharmacy and worked side by side for nearly thirty years. They had three daughters and seven grandchildren. Johanna died in 1997.

I
NGE
B
RAUNWASSER
(S
TEINBERGER
)
lived with a great-uncle and great-aunt in Texas until she was reunited with her parents, Simon and Elsa, who arrived in the United States in December 1939. After getting married, she moved to Cincinnati, where she worked for many years as a teaching assistant. In 1995, she was reunited after fifty-six years with Helga Weisz, her bunk mate aboard the SS
Harding
, during a Brith Sholom anniversary celebration near Philadelphia. Inge and her husband had two children and six grandchildren. She died in 2003.

F
RITZ
(F
RED
) H
ABER
lived for a year with a foster family in Philadelphia and, after being reunited with his parents, moved to the Washington Heights section of New York City. He later enrolled at UCLA. After working for several summers as a hotel waiter in New York’s Catskill Mountains, Fred and his older brother Henry (who escaped from Vienna to London only days after Fred left for the United States) bought a hotel in Fleischmanns, a resort town popular with European refugees. Fred and his brother also started an office supply business that grew into a national company with offices in Los Angeles, New York, Las Vegas, and Miami. Fred has two sons and three grandchildren, and lives in Riverdale, New York.

G
ERDA
H
ALOTE
(S
TEIN
)
lived with her grandmother and other relatives in New York City until she was reunited with her parents in 1941. She grew up in Queens, where she became the first female member of her high school’s chess club—by beating the club president. She later studied economics at Brooklyn College and attended graduate school at New York University. After living briefly in Israel, Gerda and her Israeli husband returned to the United States and settled in Los Angeles, where she worked for many years as an accountant. She and her husband have three daughters and six grandchildren and live in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles.

K
URT
H
ERMAN
and another rescued child, Julius Wald, lived together with a foster family in Allentown, Pennsylvania, after their summer in Collegeville. Kurt’s father, Heinrich, left Vienna in May 1939 with nearly one hundred other Jewish passengers aboard a French steamship, the
Flandre
, which sailed for Cuba around the time of the SS
St. Louis
. After being turned away in Havana, the
Flandre
returned to France, where Heinrich was sent to a displaced persons camp. Kurt’s mother, Martha, obtained a visa and sailed to America on a ship that left from Genoa, Italy, in October 1939. Heinrich spent a year in the refugee camp and then obtained a visa for the United States, where he was reunited with his wife and son in April 1940. The family lived in Allentown.

Kurt received a business degree from Pennsylvania State University, after which he served for three years in the U.S. Coast Guard. He worked for many years as the chief financial officer of the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia during which he learned about Brith Sholom’s role in the children’s rescue. After becoming a member of the group, he was elected president of its Kraus-Pearlstein Lodge—which was named partly in honor of Gil’s father, Solomon. Kurt and his wife have three daughters and eight grandchildren and live just outside of Philadelphia.

R
OBERT
K
ELLER
was reunited with his parents, Viktor and Amalia, and his older brother about two years after his arrival in the United States. The family lived in Trenton, New Jersey. An accomplished musician, Robert entered the U.S. Army toward the end of World War II; he was sent to the Pacific where he performed in jazz bands that entertained in officers’ clubs. He later studied at Champlain College in Illinois and the University of Denver before obtaining a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Pennsylvania. He became the associate director of microbiology and immunology at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago and also served as the dean of the School of Allied Health Sciences operated in conjunction with the University of Chicago. He and his wife had one child. Robert passed away in 1982.

....

O
SWALD
L
E
W
INTER
, the mischievous little boy who tossed the children’s suitcase keys into the ocean, lived with a foster family until he was reunited with his parents, who both obtained visas for America and settled in Brooklyn, New York. At the age of twenty, Oswald was arrested for illegally wearing a Marine Corps uniform—a federal offense—in an attempt to hitch a free ride on a Coast Guard plane. After graduating from college, he earned some acclaim as a published poet and taught literature for a few years at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York.