50 Children audiobook

Apologies to those who have been waiting for my review of this book. I’m not up for writing a thorough review, but I hope my impressions are useful to you, especially regarding deciding whether or not this book is for you.I found the account gripping and suspenseful, even though the reader knows from the very start pretty much what is going to happen.From previous reading, I knew most of what was going on during the period and yet the details told still managed to shock me at times – great examples including excerpts from the NY Times, State Dept. memos, and the memories of those involved with this rescue.I get more and more angry at the U.S. the more I learn. I get so exasperated with human beings. Luckily, this story is mostly about the bravery, heroism, and empathy expressed by some very good people.I was particularly grateful for the details given of what happened with everyone, and surprised that there were so many children that couldn’t be currently tracked re what happened to them. I hope they or their significant others see the plea at the end of the book, and come forward with information. I had to smile because so many of the personalities/behaviors of certain children left me not at all surprised by the adults they became. I was very touched to read about some of their post rescue lives and accomplishments.There is an exceptionally fine and informative Afterword by Paul A. Shapiro of the United States Holocaust Memorial MuseumThere is no gorgeous language but it is a well written straightforward account.The photos of the children, others involved, documents, the times & places of the era were so important to me, especially the family portraits of the children and their families.The last year I’ve had a reading dry spell, but this book was easy for me to read, and very enjoyable.(view spoiler)[ I was very surprised that so many of the parents and siblings got out and how so many of them also got out before the worst of the Holocaust, in 1939 and 1940. The relatively few exceptions were so heartbreaking, more so because of how many were able to escape the worst of the Holocaust. (hide spoiler)]

Truly amazing how little the "immigration" debate has changed from the 1930's to the present. Just change the ethnicity of whatever group some Americans want to keep outside our borders and this book is almost like reading about the city in CA that blocked buses filled with children.I don't really want to get into the immigration debate since my opinions on it would set some of my relatives hair on fire, but this is a well-researched book about at least trying to do the right thing. It also helps that one of the participants left behind a written narrative about the struggle.

This is a fascinating, true story of a well-to-do American Jewish couple, Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus, who work together with a doctor and a fraternal group named Brith Sholom to bring 50 Jewish children from Vienna, Austria to the U.S. in the months preceding the break-out of World War II. While Great Britain admitted 10,000 Jewish children to their country as part of the "Kindertransport" effort, only 1,000 or so came to America, and the Kraus group was the largest. Pressman--who also made a documentary movie about this topic--alternates between the Krauses efforts in the U.S., the children and their families in Vienna, and the virulent anti-Semitism and anti-immigration attitudes of many in Congress and the U.S. State Department. It's quite clear that the often-repeated idea that Americans would have done more if they had known more is false; Pressman quotes liberally from major American newspapers about the events occurring in Europe during the 1930s, and unfortunately the issues that confronted the Krauses and their friends have not changed that much in the last 80 years except for location.

I read this book several months ago and it still reverberates in me. The couple who made this rescue happen performed a near miraculous feat. All the pieces that fell into place to allow this to happen continued the miracle. This couple treated what they did as just what was necessary. At a time when the USA was refusing visas to Jews from Austria and Germany. They were able to save 50 children. At the same time they had many they had to turn away and that hurt is also demonstrated. Think about it, what strength of character and belief in doing what was right would lead a Jewish couple to go through Austria and Nazi Germany to save children. They had patrons for that number of children, families for many and they met with dozens of families. They knew they were asking the parents to give up their children when they would probably never see those children again.This book is a well written book based on the wife's unpublished memoir. Her emotions and feelings shine through the prose in many places. I would recommend this book to anyone having an interest in that time and place in history. The writing is easily read and is appropriate for teen and adults. I would recommend this book to everyone. I've already taken it out of the library a second time.

3.5 stars, rounding up. It is a really interesting story of how a wealthy Jewish couple in Philadelphia found a way to work within immigration law to select and transport 50 Jewish children from Vienna. All the details of the paperwork get a little dry and sometimes I felt like the couple came across a little privileged and spoiled but overall, I learned a lot. I think the biggest takeaway from it was that although I had read about the difficulty the Jewish people had escaping prior to the World War II fully erupting, I didn't realize that 1) they also had nowhere to go and 2) the United States was as anti-immigration then as it is now (although it kind of makes sense after the economic and employment woes recovering from the Depression). I was also kind of surprised at how much the American government and people clearly knew what was going on in Europe and that Jews were being persecuted and killed; I think I just always have had a vague understanding that no one really knew until after the war. But this was just an ordinary couple who chose to get involved after being disturbed at what was clearly printed in the newspaper. In hindsight, knowing how many millions of people were killed during the Holocaust, it is frustrating that our country didn't do more, and it makes me wonder if we'll look back on current world events in 50 years and feel the same regrets.

I learned so much about not only the early years of Hitler’s occupation in Austria, but the complete hopelessness the Jewish people had who lived in Vienna. I appreciated - despite how upsetting the information was - that the author included the indifference and outright opposition to rescuing Jewish children from Nazi Europe by the American government, public, and even Jewish leaders.The fact that the author is married to the subjects’s granddaughter provided a unique and informed insight. The only drawback was sometimes an over abundance of information not necessarily needed in the overall narrative.

I received an uncorrected proof copy of this book from HarperCollins. 50 Children tells the story of an ordinary American couple who, outraged by the events taking place in Europe in 1939, set out to make a difference. Gilbert and Eleanor Krauss managed to safely bring 50 Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Austria to America. Remarkably, although this represents the single largest group of unaccompanied refugee children allowed into the United States, little was known about this story until now. The author had access to Eleanor's personal account of the story since Eleanor and Gilbert are Pressman's wife's maternal grandparents. After determining to help in some way, Gil discovered in analyzing visa documentation that "the number of visas appeared to exceed the final number of immigrants" actually entering the United States (54). This made no sense, especially in light of the thousands of Jews desperately trying to leave Nazi-occupied countries only to be thwarted by the heavily regulated immigration system in other countries. In other words, although the Nazis were encouraging the Jews to leave, there was no where for them to go. The difference in the number of visas and the number of immigrants was explained by those who had applied to the wait list and later found passage to another country, leaving their visa to the United States unused. Gil sought to use these leftover visas to bring children to America. The first half of this book dealt largely with the Krauses navigating the complicated paperwork that would allow them to have permission to legally bring the children into the country. This section was relatively slow. Additionally, it seems as if the author had a hard time integrating the children's backgrounds into the story and only gives one disjointed chapter where several of the children's family backgrounds are quickly summarized; it's difficult to get personal simply because of the sheer number of children whose lives were affected by the Krauses mission. It's obvious how desperate the Austrian parents were if they were willing to send their children away with complete strangers to a foreign land, with the chance that they would never be reunited. Or as Eleanor said, "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" (145). The Krauss couple interviewed hundreds of children and made what must have been agonizing decisions about which children would be coming to America. Each parent was anxious that their child would be selected. For example, one mother told her daughter, "If you leave, your life will be saved, and then I will have a better chance of saving my own life" (119). Gil and Eleanor were literally selecting those who would survive. I was particularly moved to read that one child, five-year-old Heinrich Stenberger, who had been selected for the trip later had to be replaced after he fell ill. Tragically, Heinrich "was murdered at the Sobibor death camp three years later" (253). I was a little disturbed by how much luxury figured into this story. Eleanor and Gil traveled in style and spent time sight seeing and vacationing while abroad to retrieve the children. On the ship home, the children stayed in third class while Eleanor and Gil stayed in first class. On the other hand, I can hardly judge them for this, especially when considering that they are one of only a few Americans who made any attempt to assist Jews in Europe. "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 Germany, her allies and collaborators, were doing. [...] What distinguished [the Krauses] from others is simply that they chose not to close their eyes to what they were reading" (256). They risked their lives to help a large group of children. In fact, while Great Britain took in 10,000 children, the United States took in only about 1,000 - meaning the the Krauses were personally responsible for 1 of every twenty of those children that made it to the United States (258). Most of the children were placed with relatives or foster families until they were able to be reunited with their parents. Most lived the rest of their lives in the United States. It was amazing to see the accomplishments of many of them, including Henny Wenkart who holds a master's degree from Columbia and a doctorate from Harvard (248). However, Pressman was only able to account for 37 of the children; I'd love to know the fate of the rest of the group.

Such a tragic period of time and an almost unbelievable read. You will learn of an American Jewish couple who decide to help save Jewish children from horrible living conditions in Germany during the years Hitler was in charge. Could they do it with all the roadblocks thrown before them? An interesting read and a well-worth read.

These quotes tell it all . . . “How can one know the moment when the night has ended and dawn has come? . . . The moment when you know that the night has turned to day is when you see the face of a stranger and recognize him as your brother.”“Night and Day. . . . Failure or Compassion. . . . Impotence or Courage. . . . Death or Life. . . . These were the alternatives of the Holocaust. The choices people made in that frightening era made a difference, and it was often the difference between life and death.”“Despite the obstacles and unfavorable odds, Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus chose compassion and courage, and saved the lives of fifty children in mortal danger.”“Their story brought light to a darkened landscape, sheds light on what is possible, and serves as a powerful reminder that the noblest of human potentials lives on in each and every human being. What each person does can make a world of difference.”“50 Children challenges the most self-comforting and widespread myth of all. The assertion that ‘there was nothing we could do’ transcends all borders and languages.”“The Kraus rescue mission makes it crystal clear that there were things that America could have done to alleviate the suffering of Europe’s Jews. What the United States could not do was overcome the prejudices of the day to do what was possible.”“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 Germany, 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. Recent research and the opening of formerly classified American wartime archival documentation have also made it clear how much information American policymakers had regarding the mass killing of Jews that began after the outbreak of war in September 1939.”“Between 1933 and 1945, the United States admitted between 1,000 and 1,200 unaccompanied Jewish children—children traveling without their parents—into the country. The fifty children rescued by Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus accounted for the largest known single group to be admitted into America during the entirety of the Holocaust.”“And while the United States opened its doors to 200,000 European refugees—mostly Jews—during Hitler’s murderous reign, the sad fact remains that hundreds of thousands of additional lives lost in the ashes of the Holocaust might well have been saved had America been more generous. Among the victims of the Nazis’ Final Solution were one and a half million children.”“We—I and Mama—could not restrain our tears of joy, picturing your young group being photographed with the Statue of Liberty,” Hermann Roth wrote to his son Kurt less than two weeks after the children had arrived in the United States. “For the first time in my life, tears of joy. God has granted you such fortune, and granted us, the parents, to partake in it.”“Some of the older kids were certainly conscious of the fact that we had escaped Nazi Germany, where things weren’t so good for Jews,” said Kurt Herman. “And we knew that we were going on an adventure to a new country where we would have all these rights and freedoms. But we also understood, at least most of us did, that it was possible that we would not see our parents again.”

It's an extraordinary story, not least because it was on the initiative of one Jewish couple, Gil and Eleanor Kraus, who left a comfortable Philadelphia home to rescue 50 children from Nazi-held Vienna. To do so, they had to navigate US immigration barriers -- somehow he found 50 open visa slots under a stiff quota -- and then, in Berlin and Vienna, work through red tape at the Gestapo and in US diplomatic offices. This couple were themselves Jewish, and thus had to endure a considerable sense of menace during complex and delicate negotiations and interviews with the authorities, the children's parents, and the children themselves, of whom only 50 could go.The story, drawn from contemporary accounts and Eleanor Kraus' private memoir, is vivid enough, and the prose is fast-moving and concise, never dull. Indeed, even though the reader knows the outcome -- the book cover makes it obvious enough -- the story still raises doubt as to whether this quest will come off or not. And some of the twists are unexpected: for instance, the couple faced considerable opposition from the US State Department, which was enforcing immigration barriers raised by a xenophobic Congress, and even some opposition from the Jewish community in the US, who didn't want to risk trouble. We also learn that, while the German Jewish community had gone through gradually-escalating cruelty over the years, the Austrian Jewish community was hit with it all at once, when Germany seized Austria in 1938. The couple even has an unexpected encounter with Ribbentrop, the Nazi foreign minister.In all, a taut, intriguing, and ultimately inspiring story of what one couple could do despite opposition and obstruction, and it's a fresh account of the Holocaust period. Highest recommendation.