50 Children: One Ordinary American Couple's Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany (31 page)

Oswald was arrested again in 1971, this time in London, after authorities accused him of unlawfully possessing a New York City police detective’s badge and papers falsely identifying him as a foreign diplomat. Over the next several years, he had several more scrapes with the law, culminating in an incident in which he presented himself as a CIA operative who was allegedly involved in the release of American hostages held in Iran. His final hoax, which resulted in a prison sentence in Austria, involved his attempt to sell fabricated documents claiming that the British spy service MI6 was behind the 1997 car crash deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed. Oswald later moved to South Carolina, where he died in 2013.

F
RIEDRICH
(F
RED
) L
IFSCHUTZ
lived with his grandmother and aunt in the Bronx, New York, after spending the summer in Collegeville. To avoid arrest in Vienna, his father, Morris, tried to escape to Switzerland but was caught at the border and sent back to Vienna. Unable to obtain a visa for America, he returned to Podhajce, the town in Poland where he was born and where other relatives were still living. Just as Fred’s mother, Bertha, was about to join him, Morris warned her not to come after hearing that the town was no longer safe for Jews. Bertha obtained a visa for America soon after and was reunited with her son in January 1940. Morris remained in Podhajce, which the Germans occupied in June 1941. He was killed two months later, though Fred and his mother did not learn of his death for several years. Fred attended City College of New York and has worked for years as a sales representative for various toy companies. He and his wife have two daughters and four grandchildren and live on Long Island, New York.

P
ETER
L
INHARD
, whose father committed suicide in Vienna shortly before the children’s departure, lived for several months with a foster family in New York. His mother, Regina, obtained a visa and came to America in November 1939. After living in Brooklyn, the family later moved to Philadelphia, where Peter spent much of his time in the city’s pool halls. Following his discharge from the U.S. Army in 1955, he worked in a number of jobs before settling on a career as a semiprofessional pool player—and self-described compulsive gambler—who went by the nickname of “Peter Rabbit.” He died in Philadelphia in 2005.

K
LARA
R
ATTNER
(K
AY
L
EE
)
lived in New York with a great-uncle and great-aunt while waiting for her parents to obtain their own visas for America. Her father, Jakob, was among the thousands of Jewish men from Nazi Germany who found temporary refuge at Camp Kitchener, a former British Army base. Her mother, Esther, also left Vienna for England, where she worked as a domestic servant in a Jewish household. After the family was reunited in May 1940, they moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where another uncle was living. Klara graduated with a teaching credential from the University of California at Berkeley. She and her husband, who owned a commercial refrigeration business, raised three children and had four grandchildren. She has lived for many years in Atherton, California.

K
URT
R
OSENBERG
lived with cousins in Brooklyn and was reunited with his parents, Simon and Regina, who succeeded in escaping from Vienna in time to celebrate their son’s bar mitzvah in December 1939. Kurt later attended City College of New York and had a long career in the retail business, starting out as a shoe salesman and winding up in executive management positions for companies in Los Angeles and San Diego. He and his wife had three children and four grandchildren. Kurt passed away in 2007.

K
URT
R
OTH
(A
DMON
)
lived briefly with a foster family in Albany, New York, before moving to another family on Long Island. After his father died at Buchenwald in October 1939, his mother obtained visas for herself and her younger son Herbert. She arrived in the United States, by way of Italy, in March 1940. After starting college in New York City, Kurt moved to the newly created state of Israel in 1948 where he joined a kibbutz and changed his last name from Roth to Admon (a name similar to the Hebrew word for
rot
—German for “red”). He later studied economics, specializing in kibbutz-related management issues.

During the 1980s, Kurt took a family trip to Vienna, where he went in search of his father’s gravesite. “The Jewish part of the cemetery there had not yet been reconstructed. A lot of the gravestones were broken and thrown all around,” he recalled. A woman who worked at the cemetery provided him with the precise location of his father’s burial site. “You can destroy the graveyard. And you can kill everyone,” he said. “But these people were very good at keeping order.” Kurt has six children and eleven grandchildren and lives in Netanya, Israel.

....

E
LLA
S
PIEGLER
(G
OLDSTEIN
)
lived in Hagerstown, Maryland, and later Newark, New Jersey, after leaving the Brith Sholom camp. Her parents escaped from Vienna to England in 1939, and her father served in the British army during World War II. Ella was reunited with her parents after they immigrated to the United States in 1948. She spent most of the rest of her life with her husband in West Orange, New Jersey, where she worked as an office secretary and raised two children. At the time of her death in 2004, she had four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

R
OBERT
S
PIES
lived with distant relatives in the Bronx and later moved to Brooklyn after his parents obtained visas and arrived in the United States in April 1940. He earned a degree in mechanical engineering from Cooper Union, after which he got married, moved to California, and enrolled in graduate school at the University of Southern California. After many years as a mechanical engineer, Robert obtained a law degree in 1975 and went into private law practice. He lives in Los Angeles.

K
URT
S
TEINBRECHER
lived with relatives in the Bronx for a couple of years after his arrival in the United States. He later learned that his parents escaped from Germany to Russia before making their way to Vancouver and then Seattle. Kurt remained with his relatives in New York until shortly after his bar mitzvah in 1941, after which he joined his parents in Seattle. He attended the University of Washington, where he obtained undergraduate degrees in zoology and pharmacy. He served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War although he was deployed to Europe rather than to Asia. He later earned a Ph.D. in pharmaceutical chemistry and worked for many years in the Seattle office of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. He has one son and continues to live in Seattle.

E
RIKA
T
AMAR
was the youngest of the fifty children, a week away from turning five when she arrived in the United States along with her older brother, Heinz. After living briefly with a foster family in Houston, Erika and Heinz were reunited with their parents, Julius and Pauline, who arrived in the United States in the fall of 1939 and settled in New York City. Erika later attended New York University, where she studied creative writing and film. After college, she worked as a production assistant and casting director for the daytime soap opera
Search for Tomorrow
. Years later, after she married and raised three children, Erika enjoyed a successful writing career as the author of several best-selling young adult novels. Her second novel,
Good-bye, Glamour Girl
, featured a young Jewish refugee from Vienna determined to abandon her European heritage in favor of becoming an all-American glamour queen along the lines of Rita Hayworth. Erika has lived for many years in New York City.

H
EINZ
(H
ENRY
) T
AMAR
studied biology at New York University and later earned a Ph.D. in sensory physiology at Florida State University. He was a university professor for many years, and remains an emeritus professor of protozoology at Indiana State University, following his retirement from active teaching in 1998.

E
RWIN
T
EPPER
lived with an aunt and uncle in the Bronx after his summer in Collegeville. His parents, who had originally escaped to England from Vienna, obtained visas for the United States shortly before America entered the war in 1941. After being reunited with their son, the Teppers moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut. Coincidentally, Robert Braun’s Viennese cousin was Erwin’s doctor while he was growing up. “I remember going over to the doctor’s office with my mother or father, and there was a young woman there who would occasionally help out. I knew she was a foreigner because she had a slight accent, and I thought it might’ve been the doctor’s daughter.” In fact, the young woman was Robert’s sister, Hanni, though Erwin did not recognize her or realize until much later that she was one of the rescued children. He earned a degree in zoology at Yale University in 1953 and obtained a medical degree six years later at the University of Basel in Switzerland. After spending two years in the army, he practiced radiation oncology for many years at Monmouth Medical Center in New Jersey. Erwin has three children, two grandchildren, and five step-grandchildren, and continues to live in New Jersey.

K
ITTY
W
EISS
(P
ENNER
)
and
I
NGE
W
EISS
(M
ICHAELS)
, were reunited with their parents in August 1939 and raised in New York City. Kitty attended Brooklyn College and transferred to Barnard College, where she studied art history. She has spent the past several decades both as an artist and art teacher. Kitty has two children and four grandchildren and lives in Maine. Inge, who had one daughter, passed away in 2002.

H
ELGA
W
EISZ
(M
ILBERG
)
was reunited with her father, Emil, who obtained a visa and arrived in the United States in 1940. They moved to Detroit, where Emil worked as a caretaker in a Jewish cemetery. He was not able to obtain a visa for his wife, Rosa, who remained in Vienna. Years later Helga learned that her mother had been among a group of one thousand Vienna Jews deported by the Nazis in June 1942. The train was originally destined for the Izbica concentration camp but was diverted at the last minute to Sobibor, an extermination camp in Poland. Other than fifty-one men who were diverted to a forced-labor camp, everyone else was killed immediately upon arrival. Rosa was on the same train as Heinrich Steinberger, the young boy who had to forfeit his spot on Gil and Eleanor’s list when he fell ill.

Helga became a teacher and lived for many years in Tucson, Arizona. She and her husband had three children, four grandchildren, and one great-grandchild. She passed away in 2012.

H
ENNY
W
ENKART
’s parents arrived in America on September 1, 1939, the same day that Germany invaded Poland. The family lived with relatives in Brooklyn and later moved to Baltimore before eventually settling in Providence, Rhode Island. Henny attended Pembroke College, the women’s branch of then all-male Brown University. She later obtained a master’s degree in journalism at Columbia University and a doctorate in philosophy from Harvard University. Henny has published several books of poetry and founded the Jewish Women’s Poetry Workshop. She and her husband raised three children and have five grandchildren. She lives in New York City.

F
RITZI
Z
INGER
(N
OZIK
)
and
E
LIZABETH
Z
INGER
(D
AVIS
)
remained with relatives in Utica, New York, and were reunited with their parents, Benjamin and Rosa, who arrived in the United States in January 1940 on a ship that sailed from Trieste, Italy. Fritzi later went to college and became a registered nurse. She had three children and five grandchildren. Elizabeth attended college and worked in public relations, including a position at the American Federation for the Blind, where she met Helen Keller. She and her husband had two children, three grandchildren, and two step-grandchildren. Fritzi and Elizabeth live together in southern Florida.

H
UGO
Z
ULAWSKI
lived with a cousin in Brooklyn and was reunited with his parents, who obtained visas for the United States about a year after he arrived. In the summer of 1944, Hugo was inducted into the U.S. Army, where he was assigned to the intelligence corps and deployed to Munich. He later attended City College of New York, where he received a degree in civil engineering. During his career he worked on various construction projects in the New York area, including the building of the Long Island Expressway. He and his wife had three children and four grandchildren. Hugo passed away in 2003.