'Neither Gil nor Eleanor Kraus themselves ever talked publicly ... about what they had done in the spring of 1939' says Steven Pressman about the Kraus's rescue of 50 Jewish children. 
 
 In the spring of 1939, well-regarded Philadelphia attorney Gilbert Kraus and his fashionable wife, Eleanor, were jolted out of their comfortable upper-middle-class existence by an urgent request to travel to Nazi-controlled Germany and Austria to rescue 50 Jewish children. Many would have walked away from this daunting challenge, but the Krauses did not. Journalist Steven Pressman tells their sobering and inspiring story in 50 Children: One Ordinary American Couple’s Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany. 
 
 Pressman recently discussed the Krauses and their story with Monitor books editor Marjorie Kehe via e-mail. 
 
 Q: Why has this dramatic story not received more attention over the decades? 
 
 Neither Gil nor Eleanor Kraus themselves ever talked publicly (or, for that matter, even with their own family or friends) about what they had done in the spring of 1939. Once they had brought the 50 children into the United States, they both put this episode behind them. After I began interviewing some of the rescued children (who are now well into their 80s), I realized that many of them did not know too many of the details of the rescue mission. 
 
 So for all these decades, there really wasn’t anyone around who was able to tell the full story. Fortunately, my wife – who is one of Gil and Eleanor’s four grandchildren – had kept a copy of her grandmother’s private memoir, which is what allowed me to finally bring this story to light. 
 
 
 
 Q: How closely does your book track Eleanor’s memoir? 
 
 Eleanor's memoir provided me with a fairly detailed blueprint for telling the story of the rescue mission. It certainly would have been difficult, if not impossible, to fully recount the Krauses' own actions without the memoir. 
 
 But the book also tells a much broader story about the political and social conditions that existed in the United States during the 1930s, which form an essential backdrop against which the children's rescue mission took place. The book also focuses a great deal on the families and backgrounds of many of the rescued children, all of whom came from Vienna. 
 
 The private memoir definitely gave me the opportunity to tell much of the story in Eleanor's distinctive voice. But there are also so many other dimensions to this story that extend well beyond her own personal account. 
 
 Q: Why didn’t more people follow the example of Gil and Eleanor? 
 
 Gil and Eleanor encountered enormous obstacles and challenges in their effort to rescue the children and bring them to safety in the United States. Not only did they have to deal with America's rigid immigration laws and opposition here at home, they also made the difficult decision, as Jews, to travel into Nazi Germany in order to choose the children and escort them back to America. 
 
 And this was a couple with two young children of their own back home in Philadelphia. From that perspective, I guess it's not too hard to understand why so few others might have even thought to do what the Krauses did. 
 
 Now, there were certainly other groups – the Quakers come to mind, for example – that tried very hard to help bring Jewish refugees into this country in the years following Hitler's rise to power. But everyone ran into the same obstacles. I think Gil was just determined to succeed when others had come up short. 
 
 Q: The Krauses were US citizens, but they were also Jews. Were they in danger in Nazi-controlled territory? 
 
 Gil and Eleanor definitely took some risks in traveling into Germany and Austria. The Nazis by this time had proven they were very capable of arresting or roughing up anyone they didn't like. 
 
 On the other hand, this was also a period when the Nazis were pressuring Jews to leave the Reich (though only after they'd been stripped of all their property, money and the rest of their possessions). So to that extent, the Gestapo and other Nazi officials, in a perverse way, were willing to let folks like Gil and Eleanor take the children away. 
 
 In fact, there's a very dramatic moment when Gil tells a Gestapo officer, "We have come to take fifty Jewish children with us to America." The Gestapo officer, who already knows that the Krauses themselves are American Jews, finally agrees to issue the passports allowing the children to leave Vienna. 
 
 Q: I was surprised to see, in the epilogue, that many of the children’s parents eventually got out of Austria as well. Were they given preference because their children were already out? 
 
 The fact that the children were already in America did not guarantee visas for their parents. But it definitely helped, mostly because the parents (all of whom were already on waiting lists for visas) now only needed visas for themselves instead of their whole families. 
 
 So to that extent, the Krauses’ actions absolutely made it easier for many of the parents to be reunited with their children. 
 
 Q: The Krauses rarely spoke of this later in life. Did they understand how heroic they had been? 
 
 It’s so hard to speculate about what the Krauses themselves thought about this episode later on because they really and truly had put it all behind them. Gil focused on lots of other things in the years to come, including his role as the founder of a legal aid society in Doylestown, Pa., where he practiced law for a while. 
 
 But it’s inconceivable to me that, in their private moments at least, Gil and Eleanor would not have fully grasped the true significance of their selfless actions. At least, that’s what I would hope. ||||| A Jewish couple sat in their elegant dining room and charted a daring mission that, nearly 75 years later, sounds like a far-fetched movie plot. Gilbert Kraus was a handsome business lawyer who favored pinstriped suits and wingtip shoes. His beautiful wife, Eleanor, loved to shop for fancy hats and host sumptuous dinner parties in their well-appointed home near Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square. But in early 1939 they were determined to do something about the mounting atrocities against Jews in Nazi Germany. 
 
 In April of that year, they sailed on separate ships across the Atlantic Ocean, bound for Nazi Germany and determined to rescue 50 Jewish children from Vienna and bring them to safety to the United States. 
 
 Courtesy: HBO 
 
 Most Americans at the time wanted nothing to do with the growing threat of war in Europe and had little interest in permitting Jewish refugees into the country. The Wagner-Rogers bill, which would have provided emergency visas to thousands of imperiled children, languished in Congress and never came to a vote. Some Jewish leaders even tried to talk Gilbert and Eleanor out of going ahead with their rescue mission, in part due to fears of stirring up even more anti-Semitism, which was already running rampant in the United States. 
 
 But the Krauses defied both public opinion and the efforts to derail their rescue plan. They cunningly found a way to get around America's harsh immigration quotas and ultimately brought back the single largest group of children who were allowed to enter during the Holocaust. Afterward, Gilbert and Eleanor quietly resumed their lives and their stunning mission disappeared from memory. (Full disclosure: The Krauses were my wife's grandparents, which is how I first became aware of their actions.) 
 
 Sadly, the children who were saved represented a drop in the ocean when compared with the 1.5 million children who perished during the Holocaust. But as we mark the annual observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day, it's essential to reflect on the unknown actions of people like the Krauses while also honoring the memory of the millions who did not survive Adolf Hitler's mad pursuit of the Final Solution. 
 
 Courtesy: HBO 
 
 While making a documentary film about the Kraus' mission, I often pondered the soul-searching question of what I might have done had I been in their shoes. Would I have had the courage to carry out such a risky and dangerous mission? Would I have been willing to leave behind my own children, knowing there was a chance they might wind up as orphans if things went horribly wrong? Could I have found the moral strength to confront officials from my own government who were either hostile or indifferent to saving innocent lives in Europe? And let's be honest, how many American Jews in 1939 would have voluntarily journeyed into the heart of Nazi Germany, particularly if there was only a slim chance of succeeding in such a quixotic endeavor? 
 
 Beyond the dramatic story of Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus lies a powerful message that remains as relevant today as it was several decades ago: That ordinary people can carry out extraordinary and selfless acts. The world continues to be filled with human tragedy and suffering. And yet only a few choose to assume the role of heroes in the face of danger and adversity. The stories of those who make that choice often serve to inspire the rest of us. Whether or not we then act on that inspiration is the challenge that we all face. 
 
 What might have happened if a thousand more people acted like the Krauses in the late 1930s? What might happen tomorrow if a thousand people decide that they, too, can rise to the challenge of becoming unlikely heroes? 
 
 Today, we pause for a few moments to cherish the blessed memory of the victims of the Holocaust. Those innocent men, women and children will be further honored if their tragic fate inspires new acts of unexpected heroism in the years ahead. ||||| Click photo to enlarge « 
 
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 "Steven Pressman never met Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus, but he's devoted the last few years to telling their story, first in an HBO documentary, and now in his new book. "50 Children: One Ordinary American Couple's Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany" (Harper, $26.99, 265 pages), recounts the Krauses' often harrowing quest to rescue Jewish children on the eve of World War II. 
 
 It's an astonishing story of bravery and tenacity. The couple, working in connection with the national Jewish fraternal organization Brith Sholom, traveled to Germany and Austria in 1939, encountering enormous resistance -- much of it from their own government -- to bring the children safely to America. 
 
 The Krauses, nonreligious Jews living in Philadelphia, certainly knew the risks. Gilbert, a lawyer from a philanthropic family, and Eleanor, the mother of two small children, arrived in Vienna to find the streets filled with posters of Hitler and signs warning "Juden Verboten." Undaunted, they made their way through bureaucratic tangles, interviews with hundreds of families -- far more than they could possibly assist -- and unforeseen delays, finally obtaining visas for 50 children, whom they brought to America and housed in a summer camp in Collegeville, Penn. All eventually were placed with American families or reunited with their own. In some cases, their immigration paved the way for parents and siblings. 
 
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 Pressman, a longtime journalist who lives in San Francisco with his wife, writer Liz Perle, and their two children, has a family connection to the story: Eleanor Kraus was Perle's maternal grandmother. 
 
 Still, he says he was unaware of the story until 2001, when Perle handed him a folder full of neatly typewritten pages on onionskin paper. It was Eleanor's account of the rescue mission. 
 
 For Pressman, it was an "aha" moment. "I started reading it, and I thought I was reading fiction," the author says. "I just couldn't believe I'd never heard of this story." Aside from a few of Perle's family members, he says few others had, either. 
 
 Pressman, who has spent much of his career covering legal affairs for various publications in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, began searching for the surviving children and their relatives. Drawing on Eleanor's account, documentation at the U.S. State Department and archives in Vienna, Jerusalem, and the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., he developed the story as an hourlong documentary, also titled "50 Children," which premiered on HBO in 2013. Yet even as he finished that project, he decided to tell the story in book form. 
 
 Pressman acknowledges that he started both projects with trepidation. "When I first started digging into this story, a lot of people had a very cynical response," he says. "There's this notion -- 'another Holocaust story?' " But he says he's always thought of "50 Children" as an essentially American story: "Obviously, the Krauses had to go to Nazi Germany to get the children. But the tougher challenge was figuring how to get them into the U.S." 
 
 The book does a fine job of detailing what Pressman calls the "profoundly hostile social and political environment" surrounding the Krauses' efforts. By 1939, the United States and other countries had tightened restrictions on immigration; public opinion polls from the time, he notes, showed that anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic sentiment were "off the charts." Even as Britain was receiving 10,000 Jewish children via Kindertransport, the United States allowed only about 1,100 -- including the 50 children rescued by the Krauses. 
 
 "50 Children" also describes the Krauses in meticulous detail. Gilbert was determined, methodical; Eleanor, tender but just as resolute. Her writing about the children -- she was heartsick at the thought of separating them from their families -- yields a particularly moving account. 
 
 Although her diary supplied a wealth of detail, Pressman says he often wished he could have spoken with Eleanor and Gilbert. 
 
 "I would have asked him how he kept going," the author says. "And I would have asked her how she felt packing for Germany, with two children at home." 
 
 Today, Pressman says the project was enormously rewarding -- particularly for the connections he made with some of the "children," who, by the time he met them, were elderly adults, nearly 70 years after the fact. 
 
 In all, he was able to account for 40 of the children, about half of them still living. Of the 18 he made contact with, most knew little about the couple who had rescued them. 
 
 The other 10, he says, remain a mystery. "I spent countless hours searching," Pressman says. "They've simply left no trace. It's frustrating -- I had this personal goal of learning the fates of all 50. To a certain extent, I'm still doing that. Every once in a while, I go back to that list and type in the name to see what comes up. At some point, I'll probably have to let it go."
– They're a little like the American version of Oskar Schindler, but most probably haven't heard of Eleanor and Gilbert Kraus. Steven Pressman is out to change that with a new book called 50 Children: One Ordinary American Couple’s Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany, reports the Christian Science Monitor. (Pressman also made a documentary that aired on HBO.) The short version is that the Krauses lived in Philadelphia in 1939 and grew increasingly alarmed about reports of atrocities against Jews emerging from Europe. But unlike most, they decided to do something about it. They sailed overseas, entered Nazi Germany despite the danger to Jews like themselves, and managed to secure the release of 50 Jewish children whose families wanted desperately for them to make it to the US. They escorted the kids back to America—having to overcome friction in their own country over immigration worries and anti-Semitism—and put them up in a summer camp in Collegeville, Pa., notes a review of the book at the San Jose Mercury News. All were either placed in American homes or eventually reunited with their own families. The reason the story is so unknown? Afterward, the Krauses never spoke of what they did, says Pressman. He found out only because his wife happens to be their granddaughter, and she obtained Eleanor Kraus' journal. He wrote about them previously at the Huffington Post, wondering, "What might have happened if a thousand more people acted like the Krauses in the late 1930s?"