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

States Senate. After being recognized, Wagner announced the introduction of a bill he had authored that, if enacted, would dwarf the plan that Gil had been discussing with George Messersmith at the State Department.
    Wagner, who had been elected to the Senate in 1926 after spending several years as a New York state legislator and judge, knew firsthand what it meant to be an immigrant looking to America for safe haven. As a young boy, he and his parents had come to the United States from Prussia (which later became part of Germany) and settled in New York City’s Yorkville neighborhood. After attending the city’s public schools, Wagner enrolled in the College of the City of New York (which later became City College) and later earned a law degree from New York Law School. While serving in the New York State Senate, he led a committee that investigated the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the 1911 disaster that claimed the lives of 146 garment workers, most of whom were young Jewish or Italian immigrant women. Throughout his political career Wagner remained a steadfast supporter of immigrant rights. By early 1939 he had been working on his children’s rescue measure for weeks, aided by refugee relief groups and influential individuals. Wagner’s bill—formally known as Senate Joint Resolution 64—would allow twenty thousand children from Germany to enter the United States over the next two years, above and beyond the existing German immigration quota. “Millions of innocent and defenseless men, women and children in Germany today, of every race and creed, are suffering from conditions which compel them to seek refuge in other lands,” Wagner said as he introduced his bill. “Our hearts go out especially to the children of tender years, who are the most pitiful and helpless sufferers.” Passage of his bill, he added, would provide them with much needed relief “from the prospect of a life without hope and without recourse, and [would] enable them to grow up in an environment where the human spirit may survive and prosper.”
    Five days later, Edith Rogers, a Republican congresswoman from Lowell, Massachusetts, proposed identical legislation in the House of Representatives. “In Germany you have the situation where families . . . are willing to have their children come to a place where they feel they are safe,” said Rogers, who had been one of the first members of Congress to take up the cause of Jewish victims of Nazism. “I have also had the hope that many of the children would go back to their parents later. I do not feel that Hitler will always be in power in Germany.”
    The Wagner-Rogers bill at least in part was inspired by the British government’s decision in late 1938 to ease its immigration rules and allow thousands of Jewish children into England. Jewish leaders in Britain delivered an urgent personal appeal to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain five days after Kristallnacht, which resulted in Parliament’s swift approval of a bill that waived immigration requirements for children under the age of seventeen, who would be permitted to live, at least temporarily, with British foster families. The first group of nearly two hundred children left Berlin on December 1, 1938, and arrived in England the next day. Over the next nine months, some ten thousand children—most of them from Germany and Austria—were evacuated to safety in England, sent away on trains and crossing the English Channel in boats that, collectively, came to be known as the Kindertransport .
    Within weeks of the introduction of the Wagner-Rogers bill, scores of newspapers around the country published high-minded editorials in favor of allowing the twenty thousand children into the country. “It is difficult to see how anyone with humanitarian impulses can oppose” the bill, declared Virginia’s Richmond Times-Dispatch . “Those of us who have enjoyed a normal and happy childhood should try to place ourselves in the