“To take a child from its mother seemed to be the lowest thing a human being could do,” one journal entry went, describing the moment when the Krauses met with parents in Austria. “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.’
Introduction
I first saw this documentary in 2016 when I attended AIPAC’s annual conference in Washington D.C. The documentary tells the story of Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus, a Jewish couple from Philadelphia, who traveled in Nazi Germany in 1939. They saved 50 Jewish children in Vienna from likely death in the Holocaust by finding them new homes in Philadelphia
Main Story
This documentary focuses on an ordinary couple, Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus, who showed incredible ingenuity and courage to travel to Berlin and Vienna in the Spring of 1939 to save 50 Jewish children. They found a loophole in America’s very restrictive immigration laws to get passports for children. The Kraus’s were hampered by an American bureaucracy that was apathetic to their humanitarian efforts. Sadly, Franklin Roosevelt did not put a priority on saving Jewish lives. Instead, FDR focused on building up American armaments, helping Great Britain, and removing the restrictions of America’s isolationist policies.
Anti-Semitism was so strong in the United States that even some Jews tried to dissuade the Krauses for fear of riling up this sentiment.
Alan Alda provides the film’s narration.
