Read Online 50 Children: One Ordinary American Couple's Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany by Steven Pressman - Free Book Online

and it all looked quite hopeless. Of course, there were rumors going around that you could buy a visa to get to Cuba or to Shanghai or places like that. But my parents were not wealthy. We were strictly lower middle class, and my father by then had lost what little business he had. I don’t think they had any hope of being able to leave.”
    Families without relatives in the United States also tried anything they could to find ways, despite overwhelming odds, of somehow getting to America. “My mother was so desperate that she went to the telephone company and picked out some telephone directories from the United States,” said Kurt Herman. “She looked up our last name, copied down all the addresses, and got an interpreter to write letters in English to see if they would sponsor us. Of course, that didn’t work. But that’s how desperate she was.”
    The Nazis were now enforcing their policy of Judenrein even more aggressively. Men who had been arrested and sent off to concentration camps in the days and weeks following Kristallnacht would often be released only if they could obtain exit visas. They were typically given only a couple of weeks to leave the country, and faced being arrested and sent back to the concentration camps if they were unable to do so.
    In the wake of Emil Weisz’s arrest and imprisonment in Dachau, Helga and her mother, Rosa, had been forced out of their spacious apartment and were now living, with two other families, in a cramped three-room apartment in Leopoldstadt. Helga’s aunt and uncle, along with their two children, occupied one room. Helga and her mother—Helga’s sister had recently escaped to Palestine—lived in a second room. Yet another family was crammed together in a third room. Rosa Weisz spent her days in a frantic effort to find out what had happened to her husband and whether she might be able to obtain a visa that would allow the family to leave Vienna. For Helga, the viciousness of Kristallnacht continued on the day that she, along with her other Jewish classmates, were thrown out of their school. “You can’t come to school because you’re a dirty Jew,” one of her classmates told her. As Helga—who had once fantasized about singing like Shirley Temple—stood crying in the hallway of the school, waiting for her mother to take her home, a sympathetic teacher came over to her, lifted up her chin, and said, “I’m very sorry this is happening to you. This is not right.”
    The day after the Kristallnacht riots, eleven-year-old Kurt Roth was also sent home from school, even though he attended a private Jewish school that, for the moment at least, was still permitted to operate. The school’s principal, frightened by the likelihood that the school would be singled out for attack by Nazi thugs, instructed the students to go home without explaining why. But rather than dismiss all the students at once, the principal filtered them out a few at a time so that the neighboring streets would not suddenly be filled with Jewish children who would be easy targets for the anti-Semitic mobs still rampaging through the streets of Vienna. “I began walking home, but I didn’t get home,” said Roth. “There was a synagogue near our house on one of the main streets in our district. I walked by there, and I saw this huge crowd around the synagogue. I had no idea what was going on, and I kept pushing myself into the crowd to see what was happening.” A few moments later, he found himself in front of the temple’s smoldering ruins. “I left the crowd and walked home, but I still had no idea what was going on. It wasn’t until I got home that I learned what was happening out there in the streets. I also found out later that one of my uncles had been arrested during that first night of Kristallnacht.”
    A few weeks later, a young couple showed up at the Roths’ apartment, brandishing an official notice declaring that the apartment now belonged to them. The Roths moved into a