Read Online 50 Children: One Ordinary American Couple's Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany by Steven Pressman - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Steven Pressman
Tags: NF-WWII
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small apartment on the same street, just a couple of blocks away. The front of the building had been occupied by a store, whose Jewish owner had already been evicted. The Gestapo had stored the owner’s belongings in one of the apartment’s rooms, locking the door leading into the room and pasting a paper seal across the door. Kurt’s mother leaned a small dining table against the door to prevent anyone in the family from accidentally tearing the Gestapo’s official seal. “I sat at that table during every meal,” Kurt recalled years later, “filled with terror from thinking what would happen if I broke the seal.”
CHAPTER 6
The members of Brith Sholom are extremely eager to bring fifty refugee children from Germany to the United States. They are ready to provide a home and education for them .
—G IL’S LETTER TO A SSISTANT S ECRETARY OF S TATE G EORGE M ESSERSMITH
P HILADELPHIA –W ASHINGTON , D.C .
F EBRUARY 1939
G il had spent the past several hours scrutinizing a thick stack of documents he had spread across the leather-top mahogany desk that dominated his office on the tenth floor of Albert Greenfield’s Bankers Securities Building. Despite his aptitude for figures, Gil was confused by what seemed to be an inexplicable discrepancy in the jumble of numbers before him.
As he continued to dig through the papers detailing the government’s immigration quotas and the actual numbers of visas that had been issued to fill them, Gil could not reconcile the number of would-be immigrants from Germany and Austria with those who ultimately had arrived here. Unless he was missing something, the number of visas that had been issued did not match up with the number of immigrants who arrived under the quota.
Assuming that Gil was deciphering the figures correctly, the number of visas appeared to exceed the final number of immigrants. Given how difficult it was to obtain a visa, he could not understand why any would have gone unused, particularly when tens of thousands—perhaps hundreds of thousands—of Jews living inside Nazi Germany and Austria were so desperate to leave. Something was not right.
After agreeing to take on the rescue project, Gil had immediately embarked on a crash course in America’s heavily regulated immigration system. In an attempt to curtail the waves of immigrants flooding into the United States, Congress in 1924 had established the quota system that fixed the number of immigrants allowed in from every foreign country. 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. The noble words of Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus” sonnet remained engraved on the bronze plaque affixed to the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, but increasingly restrictive laws designed to keep most would-be immigrants at a distance all but silenced Lazarus’s plea to send the world’s “homeless, tempest-tost” into the embrace of that “mighty woman with a torch.”
Once he had completed yet another review of the latest figures from Germany, Gil was now absolutely certain that the total number of visas issued exceeded the number of people who had actually entered the United States. Why would that be? he kept asking himself. He simply could not understand why any of those visas—those golden tickets to freedom—would go unused.
Prior to Hitler’s takeover of Austria, the United States had maintained separate annual immigration quotas for Germany (25,957) and Austria (1,413). Once Austria lost its status as an independent nation, the quotas for the two countries were combined into an overall annual quota of 27,370. Based on the formula under which visas were distributed among several American consulates in Germany and
CHAPTER 6
The members of Brith Sholom are extremely eager to bring fifty refugee children from Germany to the United States. They are ready to provide a home and education for them .
—G IL’S LETTER TO A SSISTANT S ECRETARY OF S TATE G EORGE M ESSERSMITH
P HILADELPHIA –W ASHINGTON , D.C .
F EBRUARY 1939
G il had spent the past several hours scrutinizing a thick stack of documents he had spread across the leather-top mahogany desk that dominated his office on the tenth floor of Albert Greenfield’s Bankers Securities Building. Despite his aptitude for figures, Gil was confused by what seemed to be an inexplicable discrepancy in the jumble of numbers before him.
As he continued to dig through the papers detailing the government’s immigration quotas and the actual numbers of visas that had been issued to fill them, Gil could not reconcile the number of would-be immigrants from Germany and Austria with those who ultimately had arrived here. Unless he was missing something, the number of visas that had been issued did not match up with the number of immigrants who arrived under the quota.
Assuming that Gil was deciphering the figures correctly, the number of visas appeared to exceed the final number of immigrants. Given how difficult it was to obtain a visa, he could not understand why any would have gone unused, particularly when tens of thousands—perhaps hundreds of thousands—of Jews living inside Nazi Germany and Austria were so desperate to leave. Something was not right.
After agreeing to take on the rescue project, Gil had immediately embarked on a crash course in America’s heavily regulated immigration system. In an attempt to curtail the waves of immigrants flooding into the United States, Congress in 1924 had established the quota system that fixed the number of immigrants allowed in from every foreign country. 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. The noble words of Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus” sonnet remained engraved on the bronze plaque affixed to the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, but increasingly restrictive laws designed to keep most would-be immigrants at a distance all but silenced Lazarus’s plea to send the world’s “homeless, tempest-tost” into the embrace of that “mighty woman with a torch.”
Once he had completed yet another review of the latest figures from Germany, Gil was now absolutely certain that the total number of visas issued exceeded the number of people who had actually entered the United States. Why would that be? he kept asking himself. He simply could not understand why any of those visas—those golden tickets to freedom—would go unused.
Prior to Hitler’s takeover of Austria, the United States had maintained separate annual immigration quotas for Germany (25,957) and Austria (1,413). Once Austria lost its status as an independent nation, the quotas for the two countries were combined into an overall annual quota of 27,370. Based on the formula under which visas were distributed among several American consulates in Germany and
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