50 Children: One Ordinary American Couple's Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany by Steven Pressman Page B

that Gil “must scrap this idea at once. Nothing good could come of it [and] only danger and fiasco was in store for him.” Peiser pleaded with Gil to abandon the rescue mission. “Surely, you would not want to subject your wife to this danger and embarrassment,” he said. “If you continue with this plan, we will be obliged to take all necessary steps to prevent it.”
    Gil listened politely, but he had no intention of backing down. “He was perfectly willing to risk failure, discouragement or embarrassment,” wrote Eleanor. “He knew the chances of failure were much better than those for success. But he didn’t see why, if he were willing to go to Germany on this mission, he should be prevented from doing so.”
    While fears of an anti-Semitic backlash certainly had a role in this opposition, professional jealousy almost certainly also played a part. Why should Brith Sholom—a group that had never before been involved in refugee work—now get credit for saving children when other organizations—including some that had been trying for years to bring in refugees—had met with little success in their own efforts?
    Throughout late February and early March, the pressure mounted. “This line of talk continued everywhere Gil went—at lunch and in his club,” wrote Eleanor. “One would think we were trying to do something illegal or wicked, even degrading, and we grew more and more confused. It seemed like such a decent, desirable thing to be doing.”
    As Eleanor knew better than anyone, her husband was not a man easily swayed or discouraged. But even he began to wonder if he was doing the right thing. “I don’t know what to do or where to go for advice,” he told Eleanor one evening in March. “I don’t know whether we should abandon this thing or not.” Eleanor’s spirits fell even as she continued to ask the couple’s friends and acquaintances if they would be willing to sponsor the children and submit personal affidavits. “I began to feel as though I was doing all this for nothing,” she wrote.
    Gil realized that he needed a fresh perspective. He needed to talk with someone who could offer sound, impartial advice on whether or not to proceed. He reached for the telephone and called Rufus Jones. A retired philosophy professor at nearby Haverford College, Jones was one of the country’s most prominent Quakers. Gil, of course, also knew that Jones had led the Quaker delegation that had gone to Germany in December in the unsuccessful effort to convince Nazi officials to ease some of the burdens on Jews trying to leave the Reich.
    Jones, who grew up in a long-established Quaker family in Maine, was one of the founders, in 1917, of the American Friends Service Committee, the well-respected group originally formed to help civilian victims during World War I. All during the 1930s, the group had been doing whatever it could to help refugees escape from Nazi Germany. Several weeks before Kristallnacht, Clarence Pickett—another leading Quaker official immersed in rescue efforts—had traveled to Europe and met with Raymond Geist at the American embassy in Berlin. “We saw Mr. Geist, the American consul general, who certainly had one tale of woe,” Pickett wrote in his private journal in September 1938. “The preceding Saturday 3,000 people had applied for visas to America. He was simply deluged with people who had heart-rending tales of woe . . . The large consular office was swarmed with people when we were there and that, [Geist] said, was a comparatively quiet day.”
    Jones, who had taught at Haverford for more than forty years, continued to live in a comfortable stone house on the campus since his retirement in 1934. He readily agreed to see Gil and Eleanor, inviting the couple to his home the following afternoon. They arrived at Haverford in the midst of a swirling snowstorm. Making their way carefully through the snow-covered campus, they found it difficult to find Jones’s house. Finally, as