While studying medicine in Vienna, Muriel Gardiner Buttinger dedicated her life to helping refugees escape Hitler’s reign in Europe. She also paid tuition and rent for many who had already escaped to the U.S., and continued to use her wealth to help others escape even when she returned home. (Photo courtesy of the Watershed Association.)

Muriel Gardiner Buttinger lived the second half of her life in what is now the Watershed Association in Pennington, but she is most remembered for the risks she took and lives she saved as Hitler’s power was growing. She used her vast amount of wealth to help refugees flee from the Nazis. She paid for ships’ passages to the U.S., obtained visas and documents for refugees in Europe, and she even opened up her home in Vienna for those trying to escape. After she returned to the U.S. when World War II began, she still used her wealth and connections to get people to safety.

While the Buttinger Nature Center has preserved the memory of her generosity to the Watershed Association, the people she saved will always remember her as Muriel Gardiner.

Author Sheila Isenberg spent three years researching Gardiner, including a visit to the archives of the resistance in Austria with the help of German translators. Her biography, Muriel’s War: An American Heiress in the Nazi Resistance, tells the story of the woman who tried to change history.

“The more I found out about her, the more I couldn’t believe she was real,” Isenberg said. “It was hard to believe she had existed.”

Gardiner was born in 1901 in Chicago to a wealthy family in the meatpacking district. At 13, she inherited the equivalent of $30 million.

Gardiner studied literature at Oxford, then went to the University of Vienna medical school to study psychoanalysis. There she met her third husband, Joseph Buttinger, who was an official of the leftist Social Democratic party and leader of the Austrian underground.

“This sounds trite, but she really lived life,” Isenberg said. “She did not fool around — if she wanted something, she took it.”
Many of Gardiner’s companions were extremely well-known, including Albert Einstein and the Freud family. Gardiner also had three husbands and dozens of lovers, Isenberg said.

A testimony to Gardiner’s actions lives on in the lives of the people she helped to save. She also paid for rent and tuition for those who already escaped to the U.S. There is no definitive number, but Isenberg estimated Gardiner assisted hundreds of people.

Kurt Sonnenfeld, 85, is a living example of Gardiner’s efforts.

A native of Vienna, Austria, then 13-year-old Sonnenfeld and his parents fled Austria in 1938 shortly after Hitler had invaded it. They traveled to Southern France, where they met up with Joseph Buttinger. Sonnenfeld’s father knew Buttinger from when they had both been active in the Social Democratic party in Vienna and was able to seek help from him. It was because Sonnenfeld’s father was involved in the party and because they were Jewish that his family was forced to leave Austria.

“[Buttinger’s] wife agreed to give us that voucher and tell the consulate in Paris that she would vouch for us, and that we wouldn’t be a burden,” Sonnenfeld said. Through Gardiner, he and his parents were able to obtain entry visas into the U.S.
After spending two years in Southern France, Sonnenfeld and his parents traveled through Spain to Lisbon, where they boarded a boat that took them to New York.

“We came here, and at the harbor where we arrived, Muriel Gardiner was there to welcome us,” Sonnenfeld said.
That was the first and last time Sonnenfeld saw Gardiner, but knows it was through her efforts that he and his family were able to escape.

Sonnenfeld continued living in New York since he arrived there at age 15, and currently lives in Queens.

“Muriel Gardiner has quite a significant place in our lives in our family,” Sonnenfeld said. “Because of her, we were able to escape with our lives and are able to come to this country and have our lives here.”

When she returned from overseas, Gardiner settled in a historic farmhouse in Pennington but continued to help those trapped in the war zone.

“She was a great philanthropist among her many contributions to the world, and the environment was something that came to her a little later in life,” said Jim Waltman, executive director of the Watershed Association.

Although nature was not Gardiner’s first love, she supported the cause and was a charter member of the Watershed Association. When she passed away in 1985, she left 600 acres of land, her historic farmhouse and one-story ranch homes and a barn and other buildings at Honeybrook Organic Farm to the Watershed Association.

Her ranch home was then converted into the Buttinger Nature Center, which houses nature exhibits, live animal displays, small classrooms and staff offices.

As an eminent psychoanalyst, Gardiner also began working with children with mental health issues at a Trenton hospital.

“That was a great passion she had for helping children with mental issues,” Waltman said. “She would bring patients out to the farm here and try to give them a place to be safe and be nurtured. And that’s something we’ve continued here.”

The Watershed Association has a program called Trenton Link that invites elementary school students from Trenton to see and learn about the reserve.

Gardiner’s generosity extended further than the Watershed, too. She established the New-Land Foundation, the Freud Museum in London and the International Rescue Committee.

“The five years she spent working in the Nazi resistance and was a courier smuggling documents and money across the border — it’s all part and partial to who she was as a person,” Isenberg said.

Gardiner published a memoir in 1973 titled Code Name Mary, which focused on the work she did in Austria in the 1930s.

“This is a great example of a woman who was born into phenomenal wealth and decided she was going to make a difference in the world,” Waltman said. “She made such a huge impact in so many different ways — literally saving people’s lives, helping heal people with severe mental health issues, and of course, her environmental dedication.”

Muriel’s War: An American Heiress in the Nazi Resistance is available at Barnes and Noble, amazon.com and www.indiebound.org, and the Watershed Association is set to host a book event featuring Isenberg at the Princeton Public Library on Feb. 5 from 5 to 7 p.m. For more information about the book or author, go online to www.sheilaisenberg.com.