CONTENTS
Foreword by Ken Burns
Preface
CHAPTER ONE: The Eighteenth Choice
CHAPTER TWO: Learning the Ropes
CHAPTER THREE: Witnesses to History
CHAPTER FOUR: The Dying Republic
CHAPTER FIVE: Einmarsch—The Invasion of Czechoslovakia
CHAPTER SIX: Under the Swastika
CHAPTER SEVEN: Changing the Rules
CHAPTER EIGHT: Helping the Kulturträgers
CHAPTER NINE: Money Talks
CHAPTER TEN: Last Days in the Protectorate
CHAPTER ELEVEN: The First Choice
CHAPTER TWELVE: In Lisbon
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Helping Hands
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Reunion in Cerbère
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Dividing Forces
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: The Emergency Rescue Committee
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: The Milk Arrives
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Refugees’ Odyssey
CHAPTER NINETEEN: Escape from Marseille
CHAPTER TWENTY: The Children’s Journey
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: The Home Front
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: The Family
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: Back to Europe
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: A Run for Congress
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: Palestine
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: Civil Rights and Chicago
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: Divergent Paths
Epilogue
Rescue and Relief Organizations
Acknowledgments
Notes
Works Consulted
Index
FOREWORD
Many people approach me to collaborate on films with them. Usually I must decline for the simple reason that I’m involved in too many full-time projects of my own. I expected to respond exactly this way when my friend Artemis Joukowsky sent me an early, very rough cut version of his documentary, which, like this book, recounts the amazing and largely unknown saga of his grandparents, Unitarian minister Waitstill Hastings Sharp and his social worker wife, Martha Sharp. On the eve of World War II, the Sharps ran toward not away from what Winston Churchill called the “gathering storm.” They helped scores of people to escape, many of whom surely would have died in the war and the Holocaust.
I agreed to look at his film, fully expecting that a few minutes in I’d decide that the project wasn’t for me. Yet what I saw turned out to be an extraordinary diamond in the rough. I’m interested only in stories that talk to us about us. Who are we? is the driving question in all the work I do. And here was a story that answered that basic question in a dramatic, compelling, and unexpected way.
I saw in the Sharps an exceptional couple. While their story is clearly heroic, it’s also nuanced and complex, full of unexpected turns and dangerous “undertow.” It took both personal courage and the strong moral calling of their Unitarian faith to face the dangers they did and to sacrifice so much of their emotional lives to serve desperate refugees. These two “ordinary” people—a minister and his wife, a father and a mother—left the quiet, snug, and secure world of Wellesley, Massachusetts, for prewar Prague and, later, Vichy France, where they mastered the dark arts of espionage in order to outwit the Nazis.
They devised codes and found ways to detect and defeat surveillance, lose people tailing them, finesse Fascist bureaucrats, launder money (Waitstill’s specialty), and smuggle to safety everyone from toddlers to so-called Kulturträgers —artists, intellectuals, and scientists on the top of Hitler’s most-wanted list. This is not the stuff they teach in divinity school!
So I surprised myself—and possibly Artemis too—when I agreed to help. Soon I was drawn into the project not just as an advisor but as co-director and executive producer, fully invested in telling the Sharps’ fascinating and truly American story.
We live in such a narcissistic age that it is difficult today to conceive how the Reverend and Mrs. Sharp—so deeply connected to their church and congregation, their community, and their family—would willingly give up their comfort and safety to lead double lives in order to save the lives of strangers amid the daily horrors and deprivations of wartime Europe.
Defying the Nazis hooks you, catches you up in the narrative, and pulls you along by all the elements of great storytelling. Will the secret police finally stop them? Will they be captured or killed? Whom can they trust? What risks are they willing to take? Ultimately, will they save these people?
It reads like a spy novel, but it’s all true.
The reason I call Defying the Nazis an American story is that it explores that rare level of character—selfless sacrifice for the greater good—that we have always admired and celebrated in this country. Abraham Lincoln, in his first inaugural address, called it “the better angels of our nature.”
The Sharps saw there was a job to be done and, quite simply, did it. Their objective was to rescue enemies and victims of the Nazis. Personal glory wasn’t the point. It was just the right thing to do.
Their story also transforms and deepens our understanding of the Holocaust. The notion of six million dead horrifies us, yet the massive number numbs and insulates us from the full reality of individual suffering. Existing records show that the Sharps rescued somewhat over one hundred people. Much documentation is missing, so the number is likely higher. At first, any number might seem inconsequential compared to six million murdered Jews or the obscene total of nearly sixty million human beings killed in the course of the Second World War.
It is clear that nothing gets done except by individual acts of courage, individual initiative. When someone risks his or her own life to save a stranger’s life, you get a sense of what real heroism is.
You also can begin to sincerely grieve for those people who did not get out alive, for those who could not be saved.
Through their existential commitments and actions, Waitstill and Martha help us understand our own fundamental obligation to one another. Martha once said that neither she nor Waitstill saw themselves as anything but ordinary, that anyone else in their circumstances would have acted in the same way. It’s hard for me to believe that’s true, but their remarkable story shows us why we should at least try.
—KEN BURNS
PREFACE
I remember the moment with absolute clarity.
It was 1976, and I was a freshman attending the Allen-Stevenson School in New York City. One afternoon I casually mentioned to my mother that John Pariseau, my history and social studies teacher, had assigned a class report on the subject of moral courage. He said our papers were to be built around a personal interview.
My mother just as casually suggested that I talk with her parents about their adventures in Europe during World War II. “They played an important role in rescuing Jews and other people from the Nazis,” she said. “Their story would make an interesting paper.”
What? I was momentarily speechless—-rare for me. “Mummy Mummy and Grandpa Sharp?” I blurted. “You’re kidding me!”
“Not at all,” she answered. “Go talk to them. They’ll tell you.”
She might as well have said that my grandparents, Waitstill and Martha Sharp, had conquered polio, invented jazz, or built the Empire State Building. Waitstill—Waitstill Hastings Sharp, a retired Unitarian minister—had never so much as mentioned World War II to me, much less acknowledged that he’d played a role in it. Likewise for Martha, from whom he had been long divorced. It was difficult for me to picture the two of them together under any circumstance, let alone as a dauntless duo carrying out dangerous rescue missions in enemy territory. To think that these unassuming people were heroes of the Holocaust astonished me, and I eagerly looked forward to learning more.
It wasn’t practical to interview both Marth
a and Waitstill for the paper, so I decided to focus on Mummy Mummy, as we grandchildren had always known her, who lived in an East Eightieth Street brownstone, near the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a short walk from our apartment. Just as my mother suggested, Mummy Mummy said she’d be very happy to talk with me. Days later, I showed up for our first interview. She was seventy-one at the time, slender and graceful, beautiful as she always had been, and one of the warmest people I have ever known. My grandmother had a knack for making you feel you were first in her affections no matter who else was in the room.
She greeted me at the door and showed me to a room where we would sit across a table from one another in a formal interview setting. I set up my audiocassette recorder, turned it on, looked up at her, and said something like, “Well, tell me what you and Grandpa did during the war.”
She gave me one of her radiant smiles and began slowly with a description of the January night in 1939 when she and Grandpa Sharp learned, to their utter surprise, that they’d been invited to undertake the Unitarian Church’s first-ever international relief project, a mission of mercy to the imperiled citizens of Czechoslovakia. Gradually she became more animated, regaling me with amazing tales from her six months together with Waitstill in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Later she would speak of Vichy France, North Africa, Israel, and the Middle East.
Martha told me about the frantic work of securing travel papers for Social Democrats, Jews, artists, philosophers, and the long list of others in Czechoslovakia who faced certain extermination if they couldn’t escape. She described their desperate schemes to pluck these otherwise doomed souls from the Nazis’ grasp: how exhilarating it was to succeed, how heartsick they were when they failed.
She taught me a little spy craft too: secrets of writing codes, watching for tails, dealing with tapped telephones, and gauging who could be trusted and who could not. From time to time it was necessary to remind myself that this was my tender-hearted grandmother talking, not some retired OSS operative.
I was amazed to hear what she and Waitstill had accomplished, and nearly as amazed to have known nothing of their exploits until that moment. I asked her why she had never spoken of it, nor had anyone else in the family. She shrugged it off, as if to say that risking your neck for strangers speaking strange tongues in a strange and hostile world thousands of miles from home didn’t merit discussion, certainly not special recognition.
It was just something that needed to be done.
We spoke together several more times, and out of these conversations came an eight-page document, entitled “A Matter of Faith,” for which Mr. Pariseau gave me the only AI ever received in high school.
I understood, of course, that Martha had confined herself to the highlights of her story. Exciting as it was, I instinctively realized that it was part of a much deeper and broader saga. And the more I reflected on it, the more I realized it would be up to me to tell this important story.
After high school, I entered Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, which is about twenty-five miles from the house where Waitstill then lived in Greenfield. The Reverend Sharp’s life since retirement from the pulpit in 1972 was fairly circumscribed, partially as a consequence of age-related infirmities. He no longer was quite so square-shouldered, strong, and resolute as he always appeared in photos, although he did still wear his signature wire-rimmed spectacles.
Waitstill read the New York Times each morning, watched the news with Walter Cronkite, and read a lot of historical nonfiction and biography, with particular emphasis on World War II and its causes. He was especially interested in books about the rise of Hitler.
Raised on a farm, he also taught me how to compost.
We attended church together on Sundays, and we often discussed religion, faith, and its role in both his public and private life. Though retired, he continued to deliver guest sermons from time to time. I attended a few of them and each had a profound effect on me. Each was fully considered and powerful. If there was an overarching theme to them, it was the importance of finding the joy of serving others. Since it was exactly that search that then occupied much of my time, I listened closely as he spoke.
The past seemed to interest him only insofar as it illuminated the present. He did humor me when I asked about the relief missions to Europe. He filled in a few blanks in Martha’s narrative, told me a tale or two of his own derring-do, and generally agreed that humans rebuffed my admiring suggestions that he and Martha had received insufficient recognition for their remarkable sacrifice.
Like Martha, he saw their deeds as just something that had needed to be done.
I saw the situation otherwise. Of course I was proud of them, proud to be their grandson and certain that their story needed to be told. My purpose, naturally, would be to learn from the example of Martha and Waitstill and their lives, but I also wanted to rescue their example as an object lesson for a new age.
As they both emphasized to me, if the civilized world learned anything from the Holocaust it was that to placate or ignore an evil such as Nazism is morally wrong and practically ensures there will be great suffering as a consequence. They had seen and deeply experienced it for themselves, firsthand.
Yet on the evidence of subsequent experience with the likes of Cambodia’s Pol Pot, Slobodan Milosevic in the Balkans, or the slaughters in Rwanda, Congo, and Darfur, the world’s people must relearn the hard lesson with every generation. What the Sharps demonstrated by example was their fundamental belief that this moral imperative—to confront evil wherever it appears—holds true for the individual as well as society. I can’t think of a more important message for me to carry from their generation to mine and beyond.
Unfortunately Waitstill died before I could begin systematic interviews with him. Martha survived him by sixteen years, but her memory was irretrievably lost to senile dementia before I was able to capture and fully record her story.
There seemed to be no way forward until a short time following her death in 1999, when we discovered among her possessions a trove of documents, photos, and personal artifacts dating back to her school days. The vast and eclectic archive includes everything from personal letters, official reports, and photos to maps, handwritten notes, calendars, datebooks, hotel tabs, ticket stubs, playbills, and other souvenirs of Martha and Waitstill’s travels. There are many deeply touching love notes between them in the collection as well.
In all, more than two hundred thousand of these and other documents discovered in my research are now digitally housed at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Brown University, Harvard University Divinity School library, and the Cohen Center at Keene State College in New Hampshire. Much of this book is drawn from those primary sources, as well as from Martha and Waitstill’s oral histories recorded in 1978; Waitstill’s unpublished autobiography; and several of Martha’s unpublished manuscripts, plus taped and filmed interviews with those who knew them and those whom they rescued.
The Sharps as they emerged from the research were quintessentially American, in the best and truest sense. They were relentless optimists but also realists, fearless but not foolhardy, resourceful and quick-witted, brave, and, more importantly, determined and tireless. They persevered through terror and anger, joy, frustration, privation, tragedy, and innumerable heart-stopping moments when lives hung in the balance. Through it all, they were buoyed by a fullness of spirit that only intensified as the threat of death lurked ever nearer.
For them it all came down to simple truths. I remember a wonderful, provocative question that Martha often asked me through the years: “What are you going to do in your life that’s important?”
I’ve learned to answer that question in many ways, but, as I will always be the Sharps’ grandson, I have taken on a lifetime commitment to make sure that the memory of their work and the legacy of their lives are carried forth. The actions and achievements of Martha and Waitstill deserve to be honored, and their courage and principles deserve to be celebrated so we may build a more just
and fair society. The story of the lives of Martha and Waitstill Sharp deserves to be told, and now I’m telling it.
To me, nothing could be more important.
—ARTEMIS JOUKOWSKY
August 2016
CHAPTER ONE
The Eighteenth Choice
On a frigid Sunday evening in the winter of 1939, the Reverend Waitstill Sharp had just wearily arranged himself in front of his fireplace when the parsonage telephone rang.
Sharp regarded the ringing phone for a moment.
His exhausting Sabbath had begun with his usual sermon—forceful, closely reasoned, articulate, and sometimes poetic—delivered to the Unitarian Society of Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts, west of Boston. Then he led a confirmation class before spending the balance of the winter day trudging through the snow on personal calls to mostly elderly, housebound parishioners. By nightfall Sharp was spent and loath to stir from the warmth and comfort of his hearth.
“Hello?” Waitstill finally answered what he would describe until the end of his life as “the most momentous call I’ve ever received.”
“Hello, Waitstill!” boomed a voice that Reverend Sharp knew at once. It was Everett Baker, vice president of the American Unitarian Association (AUA) and a member of his congregation.
Reverend Baker got to the point at once.
“Say, Waitstill,” he wondered, “has your day been too much that you and Martha can’t come over to talk with me?”
The summons—Baker added nothing more—was puzzling. After AUA president Frederick May Eliot, Baker was the second most powerful figure in the national Unitarian Church. Waitstill Sharp was a rising star within the hierarchy, but at thirty-seven he was comparatively new to the ministry, leading just his second pastorate. Why on a Sunday evening, he wondered, would the Bakers require Martha and me at their house on a moment’s notice?
Martha Sharp, thirty-three, Waitstill’s wife of ten years, was equally clueless—and intrigued. She called a neighbor girl to come sit with their two children, seven-year-old Hastings and two-year-old Martha Content, then headed out with her husband into the winter evening, both turning over in their minds what this urgent business might be.
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