50 Children: One Ordinary American Couple's Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany (27 page)

In the end, the Cuban government admitted only twenty-eight passengers from the ship—twenty-two of whom already had valid U.S. visas. One additional passenger was evacuated to a hospital in Havana after attempting to commit suicide while the boat was docked in the harbor.

Three days after the
President Harding
docked in New York Harbor, the
St. Louis
set sail for a return voyage to Germany. Jewish relief organizations, led by the Joint Distribution Committee, persuaded four other European countries to issue entry visas for the passengers. Among those, 288 were allowed into Great Britain and 224 were admitted into France. Belgium took in 214, the Netherlands 181. For many, sadly, the reprieve proved to be temporary. Of the 937 passengers who first set out for Cuba, 254 lost their lives in the Holocaust—victims of roundups and deportations that came in the wake of the Nazi occupation of Belgium, Holland, and France.

On Monday, June 5, Gil wrote a lengthy letter to Emil Engel, the Jewish community leader in Vienna who had been instrumental in helping with the rescue mission. “No doubt you received my telegram from the ship, which notified you of our arrival in America,” said Gil, who wrote in English “since I am much better in expressing my earnest thanks and deep fondness for you in my own language, and I know you will understand each word.” After reporting that the children “are all happy and well,” Gil asked if Engel would notify the parents that their children were safe and that they had “behaved flawlessly” during the journey to America. “I would ask you to congratulate the parents for the selfless way in which they said farewell to their children.” Immediately after receiving Gil’s letter, Engel translated it into German and sent copies to all of the parents.

Two weeks later, Gil received a letter, in German, from the father of one of the boys from Vienna. Written just before he escaped to England’s Camp Kitchener, Sigmund Zulawski expressed “my deep gratitude for the fatherly care” that Gil had provided to his only child, Hugo. “It is a great comfort and great reassurance during this difficult time to know that my boy is in good care. My wife and I will never forget this, and we pray hourly to God for your well-being.”

Gil, meanwhile, made a point of writing another very important letter, now that the children had arrived in America. On June 8, five days after returning from Europe, Gil wrote once again to George Messersmith at the State Department. “It was my intention to come to Washington to personally thank you for your splendid cooperation and helpfulness in this project,” Gil wrote in the one-page letter typed on letterhead from the law offices of Kraus & Weyl. “But because of the rush of things and now being the father of fifty additional children, I have been unable to move from my desk.” Now that the rescue project had come to a successful close, “I frankly wish to say that if it were not for the cooperation, within legal limits, of the Department of State and the Foreign Service, our accomplishment could never have been possible.” Gil closed the letter with an invitation for Messersmith to visit the children in Collegeville.

“I know that you must feel a personal sense of satisfaction in having carried through your mission so successfully,” Messersmith told Gil in his reply. He added that he had already heard from Raymond Geist in Berlin “who tells me that he was very glad to be in a position to cooperate with you within the limits of our immigration laws and practice.” Messersmith also mentioned that Congressman Sacks “called me on the telephone the other day to express appreciation” and to invite him to visit the children. He politely declined. “You will appreciate that it is difficult for me for the present to make any plans which take me out of Washington,” he told Gil. The meticulous Messersmith sent copies of his correspondence with Gil to A. M. Warren, who headed the State Department’s visa division. “You will wish to put this with the appropriate file,” Messersmith noted in a cover memo. “I think Congressman Sacks and Mr. Kraus have carried through this project in a very commendable manner.”

As the days grew warmer, the fifty children from Vienna became accustomed to the comfortable surroundings of the country house in Collegeville. The Brith Sholom ladies’ auxiliary organized a clothing drive that in short order resulted in a steady stream of boxes brimming with dresses, trousers, shirts, swimming suits, and other apparel. “Within a week or so,” wrote Eleanor, “these children owned more good clothes than any other children in the country.”

They were also getting used to a variety of new foods, though some were decidedly more mysterious than others. Erwin Tepper was not the only child who was baffled one evening when, at the end of dinner, dessert arrived at the table. “It looked like some kind of jelly, which was bright red and with slices of banana inside of it,” Erwin remembered. “I don’t think I had eaten a banana more than two or three times in my life, so that was really a treat. But none of us knew what the red, wiggly stuff was, which we all very carefully scraped away. We thought it was some kind of preservative to protect the banana floating inside. Someone finally tasted the stuff and told us it was delicious.” And so it was that Erwin and the rest of the children came to be introduced to the odd American dessert called Jell-O.

Henny Wenkart had a puzzling—even a little frightening—experience one night. She watched from afar as some of the counselors, staff members of the adjoining Brith Sholom summer camp, threw each other around inside the camp’s recreation hall. “We had been told that America was a violent country,” recalled Henny, which seemed to explain the counselors’ rough-and-tumble antics. It wasn’t until later that she discovered that they were simply dancing the jitterbug.

Gil, who drove from Philadelphia to Collegeville every day during the children’s first week, quickly realized that no one was truly in charge. Although Brith Sholom officials had hired nurses, cooks, and others to care and provide for the children, no one had overall responsibility for running the house. On the following Sunday, Eleanor’s sister Sarah and her husband came for a visit. After Gil explained the somewhat chaotic situation, Sarah volunteered to take over. “She didn’t even go home for a change of clothing,” wrote Eleanor. “She stayed for two months and put the entire place in order. Her husband came every weekend. We never would have gotten through the summer without her help.”

The children’s English lessons, which had begun onboard the
Harding
, continued throughout the summer. On the weekends, the Sunday comics provided the children with a particularly enjoyable method for mastering their new language. “It was a great way to learn English,” said Erwin Tepper. “You had all of the words inside the balloons, and you could look at the pictures, which also helped to figure out some of those words. To this day, the funnies are the first thing I read on Sundays before reading the rest of the paper.”

Amid the lighthearted humor of Sunday comics and the mysteries of American baseball, at least some of the children continued to harbor dark fears that harkened back to their experiences in Vienna. Congressman Sacks visited the camp with his daughter, Myra, shortly after the children had arrived. She spotted one of the younger girls standing nearby on the sprawling lawn in front of the house. The young girl began walking toward Myra and her parents, then abruptly stopped at the edge of the lawn, a frightened look spreading across her face. Not long after the Anschluss, Jews were banned from Vienna’s public parks. Instinctively, she was afraid to step on the grass, even though she knew there was no longer any danger in doing so.

In between their English lessons and sports activities, the children were required to write letters to their parents or other relatives in Vienna. “It is very hot here,” one of the children, Robert Keller, wrote to his mother. “We are always busy. The food is wonderful. We are all healthy. I’ve already written to the grandparents. How are they? Every Sunday we go to the movies together with the American children. On the opposite side from us is the camp of Brith Sholom. There are lots of Jewish children. Today we will have a bonfire. A thousand kisses, Robi.”

The letters from Collegeville brought pure joy to the parents who remained trapped in Vienna. “Today is another beautiful day for me since I got mail from you,” Rosa Zinger wrote to her daughters Fritzi and Elizabeth. “You do not know, my darlings, what it means to get a few sentences from you. You give your mother great pleasure. Did you get the pictures of Mama and Papa? Please write us as often as you can so that we may have many letters from you. Greetings and kisses from your loving Mother.”

For some children, the letters only increased their homesickness by reminding them of the relatives and friends they had left behind. While the correspondence helped to keep them connected with their parents, it also underscored the uncertainty, at least in some cases, of whether the children and parents would see each other again. “Your letters are scribbled, but nevertheless we—I and Mama—could not restrain our tears of joy, picturing your young group being photographed with the Statue of Liberty,” Hermann Roth wrote to his son Kurt less than two weeks after the children had arrived in the United States. “For the first time in my life, tears of joy. God has granted you such fortune, and granted us, the parents, to partake in it.”

A week later, Hermann wrote again to his son, though this time with an added, and good-natured, parental admonition. “I must call to your attention again that in your letter, only the address on the envelope is legible. The letter itself is all scribbled, and you aren’t even a doctor yet. You must write neatly.”

The next letter, however, did not come from Vienna. Hermann Roth wrote it instead from a Nazi-operated work camp located outside of the city where he was now living. He had decided that it was too risky to remain in the city, where more and more Jewish men were being arrested and sent away to concentration camps. He felt that he was safer at the work camp, where the ability to perform hard physical labor seemed to provide an alternative to the risks of arrest. “I am well and have become more or less accustomed to the work, which is, of course, very strenuous. Maybe it’s even good for me,” Hermann wrote to his son on July 16. “How are you coming along with your English? I have my English books with me here but I study only on Sundays. On weekdays I am too tired.”

Throughout the summer, Kurt’s parents had been trying, without success, to obtain visas and exit documents for themselves and their younger child, Herbert. By the middle of August, Hermann had managed to book passage on a Holland Line ship that was scheduled to leave from Hamburg in late September and arrive in New York on October 3. But he had run into problems with his exit permits and now needed an extension on his passport. In an August 27 letter, he explained that affidavits from relatives in America also had to be renewed and that Kurt’s mother had been going to the American consulate to try and resolve additional snags that were delaying their departure from Vienna. “The consulate [officer] was very nice,” wrote Hermann, who was still living in the labor camp. “He played with Herberti, gave him candy and, at parting, said ‘God be with you,’ in reference to our situation, as you can understand.” Once again, he reminded his son to “Write diligently, be obedient and well behaved. It is not always to be regretted. How is your English coming along?”

Five days later, on September 1, German tanks rumbled into Poland. Two days after that, Britain and France declared war on Germany. The formal outbreak of World War II put an end to the Nazis’ policy of
Judenrein
in places like Vienna and Berlin. Instead of pressuring Jews to immigrate to other countries, a far deadlier formula for the Final Solution was about to take hold. Kurt Roth received no more letters from his father. On October 2, Hermann was deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he was assigned to a forced labor detail. He died there twenty-two days later. He was forty years old.

CHAPTER 23

While the number fifty is but a small drop among the hundreds of thousands of lives yet to be saved, still in all each life is worth a world unto itself
.

—G
IL
K
RAUS

S
UMMER
1939

A
TLANTIC
C
ITY
–P
HILADELPHIA
–N
EW
Y
ORK
C
ITY

S
hortly after 2:00
P.M.
on the afternoon of Sunday, June 11, 1939, Leon Sacks stepped to the dais in the chandeliered Ritz Gardens ballroom inside the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The Philadelphia congressman looked out across the lectern at the hundreds of men and women gathered for the opening session of the thirty-fourth annual convention of the International Order of Brith Sholom.