By: Steven Pressman
Hennepin County Library hardcover 260 pages plus acknowledgements, notes, and index
Published: 2014
Genre: non-fiction, WWII history
I was curious about the true story behind our August book club title The Brunswick. It was fascinating to see how Callie Murray took a true event and wove it into such a wonderful story (The Brunswick).
This was hard for me to read, though. What happened in the 1930s and 40s still horrifies me. I love that Pressman is married to the granddaughter (Liz Perle) of Gilbert and Eleanor and it was Eleanor's accounting of what they experienced that led to this book. Fascinating.
In early 1939, the Jewish Americans Krauses pushed to go into Nazi Germany to get fifty children out with unused US visas. It was daring and unprecedented, but they were successful.
Page 5: Coincidentally three prominent Philadelphia Quakers - . . . - had traveled on their own to Berlin only a few weeks earlier in an effort to help Jews get out of Germany. Quaker groups in the United States, organized under the banner of the American Friends Service Committee, had become active in a variety of Jewish rescue efforts ever since Hitler had come to power in 1933.
I love this! I have such "quaint" notions of Quakers, but they were clearly acting out in faith, trying to save victims of Nazi Aryanism. Very cool that there were people actively trying to help.
Page 16: But the Jewish spirit of social service and tikkun olam - the Hebrew phrase meaning "healing the world" - remained an integral part of life for the city's Jewish community leaders, including Solomon Kraus.
Solomon was Gilbert's dad. There was a lot of interesting historical info in this section. To have a phrase meaning "healing the world" is pretty neat.
Page 54: By the end of World War I, America had ceased to be a nation that warmly invited immigrants from around the world. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, a virulent xenophobia pervaded the United States, and the once-idealized sympathy for those millions of "huddled masses yearning to breathe free" had long since vanished into thin air.
This change saddens me. It makes me even sadder that one hundred years later, the MAGA mentality cares even less about those who are disenfranchised and "foreign." I'm so glad that Jesus taught and modeled a different mentality! Lay down your life. Take care of others.Serve selflessly.
Page 78: As conditions in Nazi Germany deteriorated, Razovsky and others grew more frustrated than ever with the rigid limits imposed by American immigration policies.
Cecila Razovsky was a Jewish American social worker and activist for immigrants in the U.S. (per Wikipedia). She was doing the same thing that the Krauses were - trying to rescue children from Nazi Germany, but she had been at it longer than them. If only . . . how many lives could have been saved if we had relaxed our quotas a bit?
Page 126: "My parents did not give me this feeling that I might not ever see them again because of the tragedies that were occurring in Europe," said Paul Beller. "Instead my mother painted a very different picture. She said to me, 'How would you like to visit some of your relatives in New York and have a little vacation in America?' She presented it without any grimness or fear, even though in her own mind I'm sure she was thinking totally differently. So when I was interviewed, I presented a very positive picture. I made it sound like I wasn't afraid of leaving on my own."
As a parent, I can't imagine how much courage it took for parents to do this. To know that they might never see their child again, but wanting them to survive, to live a full life. It breaks my heart.
Page 148: "Every bit of me was sick at this terrible piece of man's inhumanity to man," she wrote. Eleanor was painfully conscious of her role in the tragic circumstances that led parents to willingly offer up their children. "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," she wrote.
Her willingness to go through with this, even though she was frightened for her own safety and saddened by the reality of what these parents were doing, made her an absolutely heroic figure. At so many points, she just wanted to be home with her own children, safe from the Nazis.
Page 177: "The parents stood in completely orderly and quiet fashion. Their eyes were fixed on the faces of their children," she wrote. "Their mouths were smiling. But their eyes were red and strained. No one waved. It was the most heartbreaking show of dignity and bravery I had ever witnessed."
Eleanor finds out that the parents are not waving back to their children because "Jews were not allowed to give the Nazi salute. The parents risked being arrested if they raised their arms to wave good-bye." The cruelties and degradation of Jewish people . . . seems to have had no bounds in this era.
Page 187: The name on her German passport was listed as Charlotte Sara Berg. But Sara was not her middle name. In an effort to easily identify Jews, one of Hitler's edicts required Jewish females to list Sara as a middle name if their first names were not recognizably Jewish. Males were required to use Israel as their middle name.
This explanation came up after Cyrus Follmer, an American vice consul, asked the little girl if she could write her name. She replied, "Ja," then burst into tears, asking if she had to write "Sara." This makes me so sad.
Page 193: . . . Eleanor was far less impressed with the Harding itself, which she dismissed as "old, small and hideous." She and Gil had long since become accustomed to considerably higher standards of luxury and comfort when it came to travel.
It was a little frustrating to me that Eleanor was so fashion / culture / wealth focused (in some ways), yet if someone were reading my private notes, they might take away an impression of me that I'd prefer not to give. She was courageous to embark upon this mission to save fifty children. She was also just a little hoity-toity for me.
Page 207: One by one, each of the children bit into the chocolates, which brought at least some of them to tears. "Viennese chocolate was so good," Wenkart remembered fondly. "And the Whitman's chocolates were really awful!"
This took me by surprise initially, but it also made me laugh. I think I've read too many stories of starving children treating a Hershey bar as the Holy Grail. But in 1939, these children were used to a very different quality of chocolate than their new American friends realized.
Page 211: 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.
This made me think of Long Way Home by Lynn Austin! (A book club title that deals with this topic that we read in October 2022.) How awful to have a visa to get into Cuba, traveling across the ocean, then having Cuba say no. . . and the United States refuse to accept you . . . and Canada . . . and having to travel back across the ocean to Europe. Oh, we can be so selfish and hard-hearted.
Page 214: 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. . . . "To this day, the funnies are the first thing I read on Sundays before reading the rest of the paper."
This is from one of the children, Erwin Tepper, in an interview. I agree with him! If I have a Sunday paper, the comics are first.
Page 251 (Afterword): Those who stood silently by were also complicit in their way, giving full reign to the perpetrators, facilitating genocide, and proving that to be a "bystander" in the presence of evil is not a neutral act.
I think about this a lot. I wasn't alive during this era in history. But the ICE detention centers and treatment of immigrants in our country right now distresses me. What am I doing about it? I don't want to be a silent bystander, complicit in what is being done to human beings in the name of MAGA.
Page 256 (Afterword): In the United States, the most common myth, embraced to explain America's failure to act more compassionately toward refugees and more forcefully in the face of mass murder, is that we did not know what Nazi German, her allies and collaborators, were doing. But the Krauses were not intelligence agents privy to classified information. They were reading the newspapers after Kristallnacht and learning of the brutality with which Jews were being treated in Vienna and across Germany. What distinguished them from others is simply that they chose not to close their eyes to what they were reading. In 1938-1939 information regarding Germany's treatment of Jews was publicly available to all Americans.
I've always heard that "Americans just didn't know what was going on." My parents aren't here any more to ask. In 1939, my mom was eleven / twelve years old and my dad was twelve / thirteen. I kind of hope they were just kids being kids and didn't know. But my grandparents? My maternal grandparents were of German ancestry. They were a wee bit persecuted in Minnesota during WWII. I wish I'd talked with my mom about this more and had recorded her stories.
The photograph section in the middle (and the photos at the start of each chapter) were wonderful. I was especially moved by the picture of Heinrich Steinberger. He's the five year old boy who was taken off the list of fifty children when he got ill. He died three years later at the Sobibor death camp. He was such a cute little boy. This book made me incredibly sad, but it was worthwhile. History unlearned repeats itself.
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