Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus were an American couple known for rescuing 50 Jewish children prior to the beginning of World War II. [1]
Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus were an American couple known for rescuing 50 Jewish children prior to the beginning of World War II. [1]
Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus lived in the Fitler Square neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. [1] [2] Gilbert, educated at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, was an attorney, partner of a law firm, and president of Philadelphia Records. He founded the Doyleston Legal Aid Society, was president of the Bucks County Mental Health Society, and a member of Eagleville Hospital. He also bred Guernsey cows. [3]
They sent their children to a Quaker school. Eleanor wrote about the mission that they undertook, but it was not published during her lifetime. [1] Gilbert died in 1975 and Eleanor died in 1989. [1]
After Austria was annexed to Nazi Germany through the Anschluss in 1938, conditions became difficult for Jews and they lost their rights. Many people wanted to immigrate to the United States, but immigration policy was very restrictive due to the Depression and anti-Semitism. [4] [lower-alpha 1] Since 1934, there were Jewish groups who tried, but failed in bringing Jewish children to the United States. They knew three Philadelphian Quaker men who went to Berlin in December 1938 on a rescue mission, but were unsuccessful. [2]
Gilbert developed a relationship with Assistant Secretary of State George S. Messersmith, who had served as general counsel in Berlin (1930–1934) and then in Vienna (1934–1937), to focus his efforts in Vienna to rescue the children. Gilbert thought, though, that the best effort would be to work through Berlin first to have visas that were issued but unused due to death, travel to other countries, or arrest released for the children. [7] After meeting with Louis Levine, who originally proposed the idea, and Kraus, Messersmith issued a memo to the American embassy consul general Raymond H. Geist and the State Department officials in charge of visas about the plan. [8]
Eleanor took on fundraising and finding families who would take in the children. B’rith Sholom held fundraisers for the rescue mission. They raised $150,000 [7] and obtained 54 signed affidavits from families who said that they would support the children. [8]
With the support of B'rith Sholom, they went to Nazi-occupied Austria and rescued children between the ages of five and fourteen in Vienna before the outbreak of World War II, which required them to work with Jewish leaders in their community who opposed the effort and American immigration policy that made the effort difficult. [1] [4] Gilbert set sail for Europe in early April 1939, and although Eleanor had been warned by the State Department not to travel to Europe, she traveled there after Gilbert wired her from Vienna that he needed her help. [7] Traveling with them was a German-speaking Jewish pediatrician, Dr. Robert Schless. In Vienna, they met with individuals in the Nazi bureaucracy and at embassies. [1] [4]
To take a child from its mother seemed to be the lowest thing a human being could do. Yet it was as if we had drawn up in a lifeboat in a most turbulent sea. Every parent we met seemed to say: 'Here. Yes. Freely. Gladly. Take my child to a safer shore.'
Eleanor Kraus [6]
Hundreds of parents and children showed up to apply to have the children selected for the rescue. The children selected, 25 girls and 25 boys, were the ones considered most resilient to be separated from their families, whom they might not see again. [7] The Krauses traveled by train from Vienna. When the children said goodbye to their families at the railroad station they were told they could not wave goodbye, as it might be considered as the Nazi salute and could result in their arrest. [7] In Berlin, the group received 50 visas from Geist. [7] They met with the Gestapo to obtain the passports for the children. [8] [9] They then traveled to Hamburg, where they set sail for New York aboard the S.S. President Harding [7] and arrived on June 3, 1939. [10]
The children were first brought to B'rith Sholom's summer camp in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, which had a 25-bedroom house. [2] They then went to live with relatives who lived in the United States or foster families. The Krauses wanted to make another mission, but after the war began they were unable to make another rescue. [1] Related documents and photographs were donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. [8]
Their story was made into the documentary 50 Children: The Rescue Mission of Mr. and Mrs. Kraus - the movie (2013) by Steven Pressman, the husband of their granddaughter Liz Perle. It premiered on Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. According to Pressman, they were "the single largest group of [Jewish] children" that were brought to the United States during the Holocaust in one group. [1]
In honor of Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus, the Kraus Family Foundation and the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) announced on April 30, 2019, on the eve of Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), the formation of the Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus Initiative for Immigrant and Refugee Justice. The foundation’s cofounders, Peter (the grandson of Gilbert and Eleanor), and his wife, Jill Kraus, funded the program with a multi-year gift to the URJ of more than one million dollars to galvanize people to action around the immigration and refugee crisis in the United States. [11]
“What Jill and I are trying to say with regard to this gift,” Peter Kraus stated in an interview, “is the power of everyday individuals. The more we everyday individuals commit to being part of the immigration process, the more successful our country will be in finding an answer to the trauma that is being visited upon refugees.” [12]
During World War II, some individuals and groups helped Jews and others escape the Holocaust conducted by Nazi Germany.
The Kindertransport was an organised rescue effort of children from Nazi-controlled territory that took place in 1938–1939 during the nine months prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. The United Kingdom took in nearly 10,000 children, most of them Jewish, from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Free City of Danzig. The children were placed in British foster homes, hostels, schools, and farms. Often they were the only members of their families who survived the Holocaust. The programme was supported, publicised, and encouraged by the British government, which waived the visa immigration requirements that were not within the ability of the British Jewish community to fulfil. The British government placed no numerical limit on the programme; it was the start of the Second World War that brought it to an end, by which time about 10,000 kindertransport children had been brought to the country.
Aliyah Bet was the code name given to illegal immigration by Jews, most of whom were refugees escaping from Nazi Germany, and later Holocaust survivors, to Mandatory Palestine between 1920 and 1948, in violation of the restrictions laid out in the British White Paper of 1939, which dramatically increased between 1939 and 1948. With the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948, Jewish displaced persons and refugees from Europe began streaming into the new sovereign state.
Sir Nicholas George Winton was a British stockbroker and humanitarian who helped to rescue Jewish children who were at risk of being murdered by Nazi Germany. Born to German-Jewish parents who had emigrated to Britain at the beginning of the 20th century, Winton assisted in the rescue of 669 children, most of them Jewish, from Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II. On a brief visit to Czechoslovakia, he helped compile a list of children needing rescue and, returning to Britain, he worked to fulfill the legal requirements of bringing the children to Britain and finding homes and sponsors for them. This operation was later known as the Czech Kindertransport.
Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport is a 2000 documentary film about the British rescue operation known as the Kindertransport, which saved the lives of over 10,000 Jewish and other children from Nazi Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Danzig by transporting them via train, boat, and plane to Great Britain. These children, or Kinder in German, were taken into foster homes and hostels in Britain, expecting eventually to be reunited with their parents. The majority of them never saw their families again. Written and directed by Mark Jonathan Harris, produced by Deborah Oppenheimer, narrated by Judi Dench, and made with the cooperation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, it utilized rare and extensive footage, photographs, and artifacts, and is told in the words of the child survivors, rescuers, parents, and foster parents.
In the decades since the Holocaust, some national governments, international bodies and world leaders have been criticized for their failure to take appropriate action to save the millions of European Jews, Roma, and other victims of the Holocaust. Critics say that such intervention, particularly by the Allied governments, might have saved substantial numbers of people and could have been accomplished without the diversion of significant resources from the war effort.
Steven Pressman is an American documentary filmmaker, journalist, author of two books, and director/producer of the documentary film 50 Children: The Rescue Mission of Mr. and Mrs. Kraus.
The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941–1945 is a 1984 nonfiction book by David S. Wyman, former Josiah DuBois professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Wyman was the chairman of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies. The Abandonment of the Jews has been well received by most historians, and has won numerous prizes and widespread recognition, including a National Jewish Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Award, the Present Tense Literary Award, the Stuart Bernath Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the Theodore Saloutos Award of the Immigration History Society, and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award."
Holocaust survivors are people who survived the Holocaust, defined as the persecution and attempted annihilation of the Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies before and during World War II in Europe and North Africa. There is no universally accepted definition of the term, and it has been applied variously to Jews who survived the war in German-occupied Europe or other Axis territories, as well as to those who fled to Allied and neutral countries before or during the war. In some cases, non-Jews who also experienced collective persecution under the Nazi regime are considered Holocaust survivors as well. The definition has evolved over time.
Wilfrid Berthold Jacob Israel was an Anglo-German businessman and philanthropist, born into a wealthy Anglo-German Jewish family, who was active in the rescue of Jews from Nazi Germany, and who played a significant role in the Kindertransport.
The One Thousand Children (OTC) is a designation, created in 2000, which is used to refer to the approximately 1,400 Jewish children who were rescued from Nazi Germany and other Nazi-occupied or threatened European countries, and who were taken directly to the United States during the period 1934–1945. The phrase "One Thousand Children" only refers to those children who came unaccompanied and left their parents behind back in Europe. In nearly all cases, their parents were not able to escape with their children, because they could not get the necessary visas among other reasons. Later, nearly all these parents were murdered by the Nazis.
During the Holocaust, children were especially vulnerable to death under the Nazi regime. An estimated 1.5 million children, nearly all Jewish, were murdered during the Holocaust, either directly by or as a direct consequence of Nazi actions.
After Adolf Hitler came into power in 1933 and enacted policies that would culminate in the Holocaust, Jews began to escape German-occupied Europe and the United Kingdom was one of the destinations. Some came on transit visas, which meant that they stayed in Britain temporarily, while waiting to be accepted by another country. Others entered the country by having obtained employment or a guarantor, or via Kindertransport. There were about 70,000 Jewish refugees who were accepted into Britain by the start of World War II on 1 September 1939, and an additional 10,000 people who made it to Britain during the war.
John Stanley Grauel was a Methodist minister and American Christian Zionist leader. He was a crew member of the Aliyah Bet ship Exodus1947 and a secret Haganah operative. Grauel is credited with being the key individual who persuaded the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine to recommend for the Partition Resolution of November 1947, creating the State of Israel. In a speech to the Jewish Agency, Golda Meir, referred to his testimony as the first appeal by a “priest, a perfectly worthy gentile, a priori, no Jewish witness was to be believed.”
50 Children: The Rescue Mission of Mr. and Mrs. Kraus, also known as To Save a Life, is a 2013 documentary film written, produced, and directed by Steven Pressman. It was first shown on HBO in April 2013.
After Adolf Hitler came into power in 1933, Jews began to escape German-occupied Europe.
Bertha Lilian Bracey (1893–1989) was an English Quaker teacher and aid worker who organised relief and sanctuary for Europeans affected by the turmoil before, during and after the Second World War. These included many Jewish children threatened by the Holocaust and rescued in the operation known as the Kindertransport. In 2010, she was recognised as a British Hero of the Holocaust.
Raymond Herman Geist was the American Consul and First Secretary of the United States embassy in Berlin from 1929 to 1939. Geist has been recognized as Diplomat Savior by the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation, which advocates for the recognition of Holocaust rescuers. However, one academic researcher has asserted that Geist largely acted to block the granting of visas to Jewish immigrants between 1933 and 1939, in line with the policy adopted by U.S. Foreign Service Officers in Germany at the time. A 2019 book about Geist found that "Geist was doing what he could to liberalize America's scandalously tight visa regime for Jewish refugees, help as many German Jews as possible."
The United States Committee for the Care of European Children (USCOM) was a quasi-governmental American body established in June 1940, with the intent to try to save mainly Jewish refugee children who came from Continental Europe, and to evacuate them to the United States, however, most of the children were British refugees from the blitz. Since the U.S. was neutral until Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, USCOM was still able to operate in Vichy France from its founding in June 1940, until the Nazi occupation of Vichy France in November 1942.
A neutral state, the United States entered the war on the Allied side in December 1941. The American government first became aware of the Holocaust in German-occupied Europe in 1942 and 1943. Following a report on the failure to assist the Jewish people by the Department of State, the War Refugee Board was created in 1944 to assist refugees from the Nazis. As one of the most powerful Allied states, the United States played a major role in the military defeat of Nazi Germany and the subsequent Nuremberg trials. The Holocaust saw increased awareness in the 1970s that instilled its prominence in the collective memory of the American people continuing to the present day. The United States has been criticized for taking insufficient action in response to the Jewish refugee crisis in the 1930s and the Holocaust during World War II.
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