New film tells of kids saved from Shoah
HBO to air a full-length documentary, '50 Children: The Rescue Mission of Mr. and Mrs. Kraus,' about little-known couple who saved dozens of Jewish kids from Holocaust in 1939
Video courtesy of jn1.tv
One of the children selected to travel to the US and escape Nazi persecution said the memory of leaving her home and family as a 10-year-old girl never left her.
“I felt guilty about the fact that I knew I was going to leave and leave my parents and sister behind," says Henny Wenkart. "My first thought was to save my own life. I never got over that.”
The Krauses spirited children out of Nazi-controlled Austria by getting US officials to assign visa numbers to children likely to be killed. The film documents how hundreds of desperate families applied for a very few numbers, and details the culture shock that hit the children that were lucky enough to escape.
“There was some prejudice against refugees," Wenkart adds, "but it didn't matter because we had the whole group, maybe 100 people. And we made our entertainment, we got together every month and it was a community and it really didn't matter."
Some 50,000 Austrian Jews are known to have died in the Holocaust, but there is little data on how many of them were children.
