50 Children: One Ordinary American Couple's Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany (39 page)
Authors: Steven Pressman
Tags: #NF-WWII
Weyl, Charles, 20–21
Weyl, Edward, 20
Weyl, Ollie, 20
“White Paper” on Palestine, 170
Wiener Prater (park), 29
Wiesel, Elie, 259
Wiley, John, 104
Wilkinson, James, 56
Wilson, Hugh, 89, 89n
Wise, Stephen, 70
World War I, Vienna during, 32–33
World War II, declaration of, 216
Yarnall, Robert, 5
Yiddish music, 189
Zentralstelle fur Jüdische Auswanderung (Central Bureau for Jewish Emigration), 40–41, 144
Zinger, Benjamin, 248
Zinger, Elizabeth (Lisl)
about, 30
after the rescue mission, 248–49
anti-Semitism in education, 41
on Kristallnacht, 48–49
letters to parents, 215
placement with relatives, 227–28
Zinger, Fritzi
about, 30
after the rescue mission, 248–49
on Kristallnacht, 48–49
letters to parents, 215
placement with relatives, 227–28
Zinger, Rosa, 215, 248
Zionist Organization of America, 17
Zulawski, Hugo, 211–12, 233, 249
Zulawski, Sigmund, 211–12, 233
Zwiebacks’ businesses, confiscation of 131–132
AUTHOR PHOTO BY © LIZ PERLE
STEVEN PRESSMAN
worked as a journalist for more than thirty years, writing and editing for newspapers, magazines, and other publications in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. He is the author of a previous nonfiction book,
Outrageous Betrayal: The Dark Journey of Werner Erhard from est to Exile
(St. Martin’s Press, 1993). He is the writer, director and producer of the HBO documentary film
50 Children:
The Rescue Mission of Mr. and Mrs. Kraus
. He and his wife, Liz Perle, have two children and live in San Francisco.
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Outrageous Betrayal
FRONT COVER PHOTOGRAPH
COURTESY OF ROBERT BRAUN
PASSPORT PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY
OF THE UNITED STATES
HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM
BACK COVER PHOTOGRAPH
COURTESY OF THE KRAUS FAMILY
50
CHILDREN
. Copyright © 2014 by Steven Pressman. Afterword copyright © by Paul A. Shapiro. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-223747-7
EPub Edition May 2014 ISBN 9780062237491
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*
Despite Messersmith’s strenuous objections, President Roosevelt announced on November 18, 1938, that visitors’ visas for 12,000 to 15,000 German Jews would be extended for at least six months. “It could be a cruel and inhumane thing to compel them to leave here,” Roosevelt said at a press conference. “I cannot, in any decent humanity, throw them out.” Several weeks later, Roosevelt’s immigration commissioner estimated that the actual number of Jewish refugees in this category was fewer than 5,000.
*
Kuhn, who had become an American citizen in 1933, was convicted in 1939 of embezzling more than $14,000 from the German American Bund. He was later arrested during the war as a foreign enemy agent and his citizenship was revoked in 1943. After the war ended, Kuhn was deported to Germany, where he died in 1951.
*
Hugh Wilson never returned to Germany, and the United States did not send another ambassador there until 1955.
*
Julius Seligsohn’s wife and children obtained exit papers to the Netherlands in 1938. He chose to remain in Berlin in order to help other Jews who were still living in the city. He was eventually arrested by the Gestapo in 1940 and deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he died in 1942.
*
Hammond was later accused by State Department officials of favoritism and carrying on an illicit relationship with a visa applicant in Vienna named Lilly Stein, whom Hammond met in Vienna in May 1939. He later claimed that she loaned him money and gave him a gold watch for safekeeping. Shortly thereafter Stein received a visa and immigrated to the United States. Hammond saw her again in New York in March 1940, though he later said he did so only to return both the money and the watch. Although Hammond denied any impropriety, the State Department in 1941 asked him to resign from the Foreign Service.
*
The Nazis eventually seized hundreds of artworks from the Rothschilds, including scores of paintings that were personally chosen by Hitler to be displayed in a grand museum that he envisioned for Linz, his boyhood home in Austria.
*
Richard Friedmann never made it to Palestine. From Vienna, he moved to Prague, where he continued to help Jews obtain passports and other emigration documents. In February 1942, he was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto and, two years later, was sent to Auschwitz. He was killed there in June 1944 at the age of thirty-five.
*
Kuffler, along with his wife and daughters, immigrated later that year to South America. It is not known what happened to Mrs. Kuffler’s mother and brother.
*
In the spring of 1940, Heinrich Stahl tried to leave Germany and move to Belgium, where his children lived, but the Gestapo did not allow him to emigrate. In June 1942, Stahl and his wife, along with fifty other officials from Berlin’s Jewish Community, were deported to Theresienstadt, the ghetto-concentration camp established by the Nazis in what was then Czechoslovakia. He died there in November 1942.
*
In addition to his position against immigration, Holman held strong anti-Semitic views. In 1941, he spoke glowingly of Adolf Hitler from the floor of the Senate: “At least Hitler has broken the control of the international bankers and traders over the rewards for the labor of the common people of Germany.”
*
See Mordecai Paldiel,
The Righteous Among the Nations: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust
(New York, HarperCollins Publishers, 2007).
*
See the monographic study on this topic by Bob Moore,
Survivors: Jewish Self-Help and Rescue in Nazi-Occupied Western Europe
(Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010).
*
Elie Wiesel,
Night
(New York, Hill and Wang, 1960), p.111.
