50 Children: One Ordinary American Couple's Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, May 2014: If you missed the highly praised HBO documentary 50 Children, you can get the whole story from this excellent chronicle by journalist Steven Pressman, who also wrote, directed, and produced the film. Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus were typical members of an affluent, educated Jewish community in Philadelphia in the 1930s; Gilbert was a lawyer, and Eleanor a bit of a shopaholic. Worried about what they were hearing from Europe by 1939, the Krauses set out to travel to Austria and Germany to save Jewish children from the advancing Nazis; they were not particularly religious or political and this was not an easy task in an era plagued by anti-Semitism and isolationism. But through careful readings of the law, loopholes in the visa-granting system, and plain old bravery, the Krauses managed to bring more than four dozen children to safety in the United States. Pressman, the Krauses’ grandson-in-law, used Eleanor Kraus’s unpublished diaries as well as photographs, documents, and interviews to recreate a historical moment and a heroic act. Like Oskar Schindler and his list, the Krauses and their 50 children will now never be forgotten. --Sara Nelson