Gil and Eleanor Kraus. Up until a week ago, those names meant nothing to me. Yet, their bold endeavor to rescue 50 children from Nazi-occupied Vienna ranks with Schindler’s List in rescue attempts.

A Bold Rescue
A Jewish couple from Philadelphia with two children, they lived a comfortable life even in the aftermath of the Great Depression.  However, after being approached by the leader of a Jewish humanitarian organization, Gil began to follow his heart and his legally-trained head into a series of decisions that would forever change not only their lives but also the lives of countless desperate families.

One of the uniquely  painful policies of Nazi Germany was that Jews were encouraged to leave Germany to emigrate to other countries; however, having been severely persecuted and stripped of their livelihoods and money, many were unable to actually get out. The United States, which was in a largely isolationist mindset trying to pull its own people out of the muck of the Great Depression, had stringent quotas regarding people allowed to immigrate from each nation. However, even those stringent quotas were not filled in the years of the Nazi reign.

As a lawyer, Gil Kraus came up with a plan to use some of the unfilled visa spots from previous years in a last ditch effort to at least save the lives of 50 children whose parents had received permission to come to the United States but were unable to pull off the emigration for various reasons, mostly financial and logistical.

Eleanor spent months doing tedious paperwork and countless errands which enabled 50 spots for children to legally enter the United States without their parents. Gil pulled strings and sat through disappointing conferences with US officials, trying to come up with an air-tight rescue plan that would be legally-solvent.

Both risked their own lives, entering tense, Nazi-occupied nations and leaving their own children under care of others, that they might be able to rescue 50 children. Even when they arrived in Austria, they knew there was no guarantee their plan would work.

They conducted heart-wrenching interviews with Viennese families, each seeking to get their child or children one of the coveted spots to safety. They had to select, from among hundreds, the children who would be most likely to be allowed to both leave Austria and enter the United States to live apart from the only family they knew.

Once they arrived in the US, the children stayed at a Jewish summer camp until arrangements could be made for foster families to host them until, God willing, their parents (or who was still alive among them) were able to eventually join them. Some were reunited with one parent a decade later. Some never saw their parents again.

These sad, yet hopeful shipments of parentless children out of Nazi territories came to be called kindertransports. As I read the story of these particular rescue, my pillow became wet with tears. As a mother, I cannot imagine the strength it would take to pack up your child and send them away to safety, knowing that you may never see them again. Eleanor Kraus vividly remembers the parents standing on the train platform with forced smiles of comfort and bravery, unable to wave for fear that they would seen wrongly as honoring Hitler.

A Costly Salvation
The heart-gripping thought of parents saving their children at such grave emotional costs to themselves and their own children gave me an even greater picture of the gospel.

God, the Perfect Father, who had only ever known perfect relationship and nearness to His Son, sent Jesus to the earth, knowing full well that He would treated unjustly and would die a torturous death. He did that to secure the most daring and unthinkable kindertransport of history.  His sacrifice and risk, far greater than the huge sacrifices and efforts of the Kraus’, secured salvation for those who would flee to Him through faith in the gospel.

The costs to the Kraus family and their supporters were great. The cost to Christ and the Father were infinite. The spots on the Kraus kindertransport were limited. The space on the Father’s kindertransport are as abundant as His children. The Kraus kindertransport provided earthly safety and opportunity. The Father’s kindertransport provides eternal security and endless opportunity.

What an undeserved, unearned, unthinkable salvation we have received. We have been shipped from the dominion of an enemy even more cunning and crafty than Hitler. We have been carried by, by costly grace through faith, to the safety of the house of the Father. May such a salvation shape the way we live every moment of our ransomed lives.