Two in-laws confront Hitler

On the other hand, three years ago an iconic coach and educator named Joe Paterno responded to news of a serial child molester in his domain with little more than bewilderment.

So — when your moment of truth comes, how will you respond? Will you rise to the occasion or beg off on the ground that the enormity of the challenge was beyond your grasp?

Two books published this year (one of them, I’m embarrassed to say, by me) portray diametrically opposite responses to the gravest crisis of the 20th century by two men who coincidentally happened to be brothers-in-law.

Toppling the establishment

Albert M. Greenfield (1887-1967), the subject of my book The Outsider, was surely one of the most remarkable Americans of the 20th century — a Russian Jewish immigrant who rose from Philadelphia office boy to head of an immense business empire that encompassed real estate, hotels, major department stores from New York to New Orleans, banks, finance companies, newspapers, and transportation companies. Greenfield fancied himself — for the most part correctly — a man of unique brilliance, energy, and guts who relished impossible challenges and huge risks. His downtown high-rise buildings — many of which, like the Ben Franklin Hotel and the Philadelphia Building (BSR’s home office) still stand today — changed Philadelphia’s face and soul. He formed an alliance between Jews and Catholics that toppled Philadelphia’s ruling WASP establishment. In the ’50s, Greenfield was instrumental in transforming Society Hill from a slum into a unique upper-middle-class urban enclave that became the envy of other cities across the U.S. He played a critical role in the elections of Presidents Herbert Hoover and Harry Truman as well as in the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

Greenfield’s life demonstrated the extent to which a single individual, even of humble foreign birth, can make a difference in his community and his nation — with one notable exception.

Ex-wife’s plea

When Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, Greenfield was one of the first and most forceful to sound the alarm. Yet when Germany launched World War II in 1939 — in effect confirming Greenfield’s grim warnings of the previous six years — Greenfield uncharacteristically faded into the background. Confronted with an existential threat to his nation as well as to his people, this master organizer, this seemingly inexhaustible font of energy, this Jewish community leader who prided himself on his vision and his patriotism somehow assumed the role of passive spectator.

When European Jews desperate to escape Hitler’s clutches turned to him for help, Greenfield made haphazard efforts to respond. But the thought of creating an agency to address these mounting requests in some systematic fashion, or referring them to some other appropriate agency, seems not to have occurred to Greenfield.

In 1938, when his ex-wife Edna urged him to take the lead in rescuing Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, Greenfield, who in most circumstances cheerfully accommodated Edna’s requests, in this case declined. “I have gone my limit to help the victims of the Nazis,” he replied, adding that there was “nothing additional that I can undertake to do.”

Obscure lawyer, fancy lady

By contrast, consider how one mid-level lieutenant in Greenfield’s empire, his ex-brother-in-law, Gilbert Kraus (1898-1975), responded to Hitler. Until 1939, Kraus was an obscure Philadelphia lawyer, content to toil quietly in the shadow of his famous relative. Kraus’s law practice, based in Greenfield’s headquarters building, spent most of its time handling lease negotiations, small property disputes, simple bankruptcies, and other tedious legal matters for Greenfield’s real estate company. Kraus’s beautiful wife Eleanor was a society woman whose life revolved happily around fine clothes, jewelry, elegant dinner parties, and evenings at the Academy of Music. Nothing in the Krauses’ humdrum personal profiles suggested potential undercover agents capable of infiltrating the Third Reich.

Nevertheless, when the grand master of Kraus’s Jewish fraternal organization asked him to devise a plan to rescue Jewish children trapped inside Hitler’s domain, Kraus agreed. When he broached the project to his wife and asked her to accompany him, at first Eleanor reacted predictably — “No one in his right mind would go into Nazi Germany right now” — but within a day she too had embraced the idea. “To think of being able to help even a handful of children,” she wrote in her diary, “is a beautiful thought.”

Journey to Vienna

At that time, U.S. immigration and labor laws made it virtually impossible to bring unaccompanied children into the country. But working through contacts in what was then a blatantly anti-Semitic U.S. State Department, Gil Kraus resourcefully secured 50 unused American visas, and Eleanor recruited 50 of their Philadelphia friends and acquaintances to serve as sponsors — one for each child they hoped to bring back to the U.S. That spring of 1939, the Krauses traveled with a pediatrician to Austria — recently annexed into Hitler’s Third Reich — where they interviewed some 600 Viennese Jewish children to assess which ones were best suited to endure emigration to America and separation from their parents for an extended period. In June of 1939, the chosen 50 — the so-called “B’rith Sholom children,” named for the service organization that sponsored their exodus — arrived in New York with the Krauses aboard the liner President Harding.

Throughout the entire Holocaust period, in which some 1.5 million children perished, fewer than 1,200 unaccompanied children were allowed into the U.S. The 50 children saved by the Krauses turned out to be the largest single group of unaccompanied children brought to America.

One survivor

Thereafter, the Krauses never discussed their adventure in any detail. But Eleanor, it turns out, had compiled a richly detailed account of some 170 typewritten pages. That manuscript, which journalist Steven Pressman discovered while courting the Krauses’ granddaughter, provides the basis for the remarkable story that Pressman relates in 50 Children.

The Krauses, Pressman writes, “never set out to be heroes. They were ordinary people who did something extraordinary.” I would add: Precisely because the Krauses were “ordinary,” they seized the opportunity to do something extraordinary. The extraordinary Albert Greenfield, on the other hand, was so accustomed to initiating any given situation (his role models were Benjamin Franklin, Napoleon, J.P. Morgan, and John Wanamaker) that he was ill-equipped to react to a situation not of his making, in this case, the Holocaust. Given enough time, life finds a way to even out the scales.

When Pressman spoke about his book last month at Temple Beth Zion-Beth Israel in Philadelphia, his audience included one of those B’rith Sholom children rescued by the Krauses: Kurt Herman, now a feisty 84-year-old retired chief financial officer of Sylvan Pools as well as Philadelphia’s Jewish Federation. Herman was accompanied by his wife, as well as one of his three daughters and four of his eight grandchildren. To me, the presence of those three generations sent a profound message: The Krauses didn’t merely rescue children in 1939; they rescued the future. An extraordinary feat indeed.