Defying the Nazis

by Artemis Joukowsky

  Ev Baker wouldn’t disappoint them.

  He sat Martha and Waitstill down in his living room and announced that they had been chosen by the “highest authorities of the church”—that is, President Eliot and the AUA board—to perform a unique and historic service. As soon as possible, Waitstill and Martha were to sail for Europe on an emergency relief mission to beleaguered Czechoslovakia, then menaced by Nazi Germany. Never in the AUA’s 114-year history, Baker told them, had American Unitarians reached out in this way. The Sharps had been selected, as he described it, for “the first intervention against evil undertaken by the denomination.”

  Waitstill was savvy enough to recognize a sales pitch when he heard one. Still, as an ardent internationalist both by faith and personal inclination, he found the notion of a rescue assignment to Czechoslovakia compelling to contemplate. However, the obstacles seemed insuperable.

  Foremost, there were their two young children and the congregation to consider. Moreover, neither of the Sharps knew anything of foreign relief work (especially in a potential war zone). Yet Sharp also bore the Nazis a deep personal enmity, and the sudden opportunity to act directly against the fascists, rather than just rail about them from the pulpit, was a powerful temptation.

  He and Martha listened intently as Baker explained how the idea for the mission had been born the previous autumn. The Unitarian leaders were shocked and outraged in late September of 1938 over the Munich Pact, in which the British and French formally ceded the Sudeten region of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis.

  The Munich Pact was yet another misguided gesture in British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasing, rather than confronting, Hitler’s expansionism. Chamberlain (coincidentally a Unitarian) believed that appeasement would secure “peace in our time,” as he put it. Subsequent events would prove him tragically wrong.

  The betrayal at Munich struck a deeper chord among the internationally minded directors of the AUA and many of the sixty thousand US Unitarians than it did among most of their fellow citizens. Domestic revulsion at the savagery and enormous costs of World War I had fed a strong strain of isolationist sentiment, led by such prominent voices as that of Charles Lindbergh, head of the America First movement. Moreover, the majority of Americans were too distracted by the protracted rigors of the Great Depression to care much about remote events across the Atlantic.

  Very few US voices were raised throughout the 1930s as Hitler consolidated absolute power in Germany, wove his violent anti-Semitism into the country’s civil codes, then began methodically to spread the Nazi virus to his neighbors.

  In 1935, it was little remarked in the United States that with enactment of the Nuremberg Laws, the Nazis effectively stripped German Jews of their rights and nationality. The next year there was minimal outcry when Hitler re-annexed the demilitarized Rhineland. Similarly, there was scant anger expressed in the United States over the Anschluss of March 1938, when Austria in effect disappeared into the Third Reich.

  American Unitarians, however, took note and spoke out throughout the 1930s, regularly expressing themselves in the pages of the Christian Register, the Unitarian monthly journal. They condemned fascism in Spain, Italy, and Germany, as well as the anti-Semitic rants of Father Charles E. Coughlin, the popular radio priest whose broadcasts were heard by tens of millions of US listeners at the peak of his popularity.

  In its December 1, 1938 issue, the Register published an essay by the Reverend Henry Wilder Foote, titled “The Deadly Infection of Anti-Semitism.” Foote rightly predicted that the Nazis would exile all Jews who could afford to emigrate, and exterminate those who couldn’t. “Coming centuries,” wrote Foote, “will record this anti-Semitic campaign as on one of the blackest and most discreditable pages of history.”1

  Unitarianism is part of the deep, wide stream of dissent and disagreement within Christian thought that for centuries has periodically cost its adherents dearly, most particularly their lives.

  The faith emerged in the sixteenth century during the Reformation among theologians who dissented from the doctrine of the Trinity but still believed that Jesus was a divinely inspired moral teacher. Unlike most dissenters of the day, these Unitarians also insisted on religious freedom for all nonconformists, not merely for themselves.

  The modern church promotes active, participatory democracy at all levels of political organization, as well as equality, defined as broadly as possible. Unitarians have been active in almost all American social reform movements, including abolition and universal suffrage, as well as the later civil rights, antiwar, and gay rights movements.

  Unitarians also are generally united on one other point. They see humans, not God, as the source of most earthly ills, and they therefore believe that humans are responsible for healing these ills.

  “Earth shall be fair,” said the Reverend Howard Brooks, one of Waitstill’s colleagues. “But only if we make it so.”

  The Munich Pact particularly distressed America’s Unitarians for three major reasons. First, many in the AUA greatly admired the Czech government. Modern Czechoslovakia was founded in 1918 on the democratic models of France and the United States. It was led until 1935 by its founding president, Tomas Masaryk, whose American-born wife, the former Charlotte Garrigue, was a Unitarian from Brooklyn.

  Second, Prague was home to Unitaria, a 3,500-member Unitarian church founded by Norbert F. Capek, a former Baptist minister who’d converted to Unitarianism in the United States following the First World War.

  Unitaria, completed in 1932, was housed in a pair of buildings Capek purchased with considerable AUA financial help. He combined the structures—one ancient, one relatively new—into a sort of Unitarian spiritual and community center. Besides a chapel and meeting rooms, the complex featured living quarters for ministers-in-training and even a health-food restaurant in the basement. Unitaria was also going broke. Without financial intercession, Unitaria faced liquidation by May of 1939.

  One of Capek’s daughters, Bohdana, and her husband, Karel Haspl, who was involved in ministry at Unitaria, were graduates of the Pacific Unitarian School of Religion in Berkeley, California, and were well known in American Unitarian circles. Visits from American Unitarians to their coreligionists in Prague forged additional personal connections. Waitstill later recalled an almost frenetic anxiety among Unitarians following the Munich Treaty. These are our friends! he remembered thinking. What are we going to do?

  The third American Unitarian concern regarding Munich was that the liberal National Czechoslovak Church, which maintained close ties with American Unitarians, had numerous congregants in the largely German-speaking Sudeten region, a major chunk of Czechoslovakia that the Nazis had long coveted. Even before Munich, members of the National Czechoslovak Church, many of them Social Democrats (both liberals and leftists), already were being harassed by a local Nazi organization, the Sudeten-German Party (SdP), led by “sharp-nosed, hard-lipped” Konrad Henlein, as Time magazine described him, the “Sudeten German Nazi No. 1.”2

  Canadian-born Robert Cloutman Dexter, director of the AUA Department of Social Relations, was fifteen years Waitstill’s senior and one of his closest friends in the hierarchy. Dexter was in New York when he learned of Chamberlain’s capitulation at Munich. He later wrote, “I spent every hour from the moment I heard about it in a sort of daze.”

  Dexter took the night boat to Boston but could not sleep. Out of his dark hours of agonized reflection, however, emerged a personal resolve. “I knew that there would be untold suffering in the Nazi-occupied territories,” he wrote, “and I was equally convinced that something should be done about it by those of us who felt we had an obligation to aid our friends who had been so betrayed.”3

  Within a month, the AUA executive committee voted to send Dexter to Europe to assess the situation. He reported back in person on November 16, 1938, that the situation in Czechoslovakia was critical. With winter fast approaching, Dexter estimated a quarter-million refugees from Germany, Austria, a
nd the Sudeten region already had poured into what was left of the country. According to Dexter, twenty-six thousand of these displaced people required immediate emigration assistance. That is, they were Jews, intellectuals, artists, labor leaders, political leaders, and others on the Gestapo’s wanted lists who faced internment and death if they didn’t somehow escape Czechoslovakia.

  The Nazis delivered a foretaste of their agenda on the night of November 9, just five weeks after Munich, when Hitler dispatched waves of his goons to terrorize German Jews on what became known as Kristallnacht, the “crystal night,” or “night of the broken glass.” Wielding sledgehammers, storm troopers in Germany, Austria, and the newly acquired Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia smashed the windows of Jewish homes and businesses, ransacked and burned synagogues, and vandalized Jewish cemeteries. Two hundred sixty-seven synagogues were destroyed and seventy-five hundred Jewish businesses attacked and looted. An estimated ninety-one Jews were killed, and thirty thousand Jewish males were sent to concentration camps, where hundreds perished. The rest were released with the proviso that they start proceedings, which were to prove mostly futile, for emigrating from Germany and German-occupied lands.4

  Waitstill and Martha had closely followed the unfolding crisis. In Wellesley Hills, they formed an international relations club that met regularly for in-depth discussion of world issues. In mid-November, the Sharps’ own presentation to the group was entitled “The Rape of Czechoslovakia.”

  “The more we learned about Czechoslovakia,” Martha later wrote in an unpublished memoir, “the more we admired this plucky little democracy. In our opinion, its progressive social welfare and economic programs had made it the leading and most financially sound country in Central Europe.”

  The Sharps, of course, had plenty of questions for Everett Baker.

  “Now Ev, look out,” said Waitstill in rapid-fire mode. “Who’s going to take my confirmation class? Who’s going to take all that a minister’s supposed to do here for the church school? Who’s going to take the preaching? Who’s going to take the calling on the sick, the burying of the dead, the marrying of the connubially minded?”

  “I am,” Baker replied.

  That seemed to satisfy Waitstill, who followed with a bit thornier query.

  “How many men have you offered this to?” he asked.

  Baker shifted in his chair.

  The AUA leadership had deliberated at length over whom they should send to Czechoslovakia, before deciding that a married couple would be best. According to a document developed during their discussions, there were a number of other qualifications too. These included good health and the couple’s willingness to leave almost at once and to remain in Czechoslovakia for four to six months. According to the paper, the commissioners should be “the type who would make a good impression on people there, government and otherwise,” and “be well enough known to have their report accepted” among church members in the United States. They needed, as well, “some knowledge of Europe and preferably of Czechoslovakia,” and they would “preferably” have “Anglo-Saxon names. Certainly not Czech or German or Hungarian names.”

  A remarkably high number of American Unitarian ministers and their wives met all of these requirements, giving the church a wide choice of potential commissioners from which to choose. Unfortunately, every one of those whom Baker had approached so far had refused the honor.

  “Seventeen,” he told Sharp.

  There was a pause.

  “Ev,” Waitstill began again, “do I understand from you that I am the eighteenth choice?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did they turn you down?”

  “For three reasons,” Baker replied. “They didn’t want to impair their professional advancement. They didn’t want to break up their families. They think a war is definitely coming. They don’t want to be in danger.”

  Waitstill, of course, would have to struggle with the same set of personal considerations, as well as the prospect of war in Europe at any time. And there was Martha. He couldn’t go without her.

  Some forty years later, Waitstill recollected that both he and Martha accepted the assignment almost immediately. “As we went home beneath the starry skies,” he reminisced, “we went home with a promise to do it.” Martha remembered the decision process differently, noting that Waitstill was eager to go, assuming, of course, that she would go with him. Missionaries, he reminded her, leave their children. It was a touching expression of his love, respect, and need for Martha. Yet he also was forcing her to choose between him and the children. She knew there would be consequences no matter how she decided.

  Although Martha had serious doubts, she shared Waitstill’s sense of responsibility, as she later wrote: “My husband and I felt that something should be done. Refugees in the Sudetenland had been murdered; people were being imprisoned and hurt.” Her greatest concern, however, was for their seven-year-old son and two-year-old daughter: “I had never for one minute entertained the thought of leaving them.” Knowing that Waitstill wouldn’t go without her, she recalled being “torn between my love and duty to my children and to my husband.”

  Martha took the matter to an old friend and mentor, Edna Stebbins, whom she thought of as an aunt, and addressed her accordingly. Aunt Edna advised her to go. “If you prevent Waitstill from taking this assignment,” Stebbins said, “he’ll always regret the lost opportunity. He might subconsciously blame you for not helping him fight the Nazis. It would be a great experience for both of you. I think you ought to go.”

  Then Edna sealed the deal by offering to come with her husband, Livingston, to take care of Hastings and Martha Content while their parents were away.

  The encouragement and offer to help persuaded Martha to give her consent. In later writings and in speaking about her public life, she often expressed ambivalence about having left the children. Those who knew her were aware of the guilt that followed her into old age at the choice of service over family that she repeatedly made.

  The AUA booked the Sharps, and a secretary, Virginia Waistcoat, aboard the RMS Aquitania, departing New York City for Southampton on February 4, which left them just two weeks to prepare.

  Besides the rounds of appointments, meetings, and errands, there was also the congregation to think about. Priscilla (“Puss”) Sweet, Waitstill’s part-time secretary and Martha’s tennis partner, remembered that the Wellesley Hills congregation voted its approval of the mission unanimously, although not without individual misgivings. “We were concerned about their safety,” she said, “because we didn’t know what kinds of problems they’d get into. I know they were worried about leaving the children too.”

  Some members of the flock did question the advisability and appropriateness of the mission, particularly the role that the minister’s wife played in it.

  “A lot of people thought Martha was out of hand and irresponsible not to stay home and take care of her children,” recalled Marnie Mette, a congregant who, like Martha, was a young mother in 1939. “There was a strong feeling at that time that a woman’s place was in the home,” she said. “Anybody who decided to have a career or wanted to do something for themselves as a woman was certainly wide open to criticism. It was not the thing to do.”

  Mette herself questioned Martha’s decision to leave Hastings and Martha Content to go to Czechoslovakia, but she did not question her friend’s heart or instincts. “I think that Martha was very courageous,” she said. “I like to see that in women.”

  By far the hardest part for Martha was saying good-bye to her children. “I had been so driven by duties and details,” she wrote, “that it was not until the morning of our departure that I was suddenly hit by the impact of the long absence from our children. We had talked it over with our son, Hastings, and had tried to answer his questions and set his heart at rest.”

  He had been very brave about it, even though he was quite upset. The night before, he had wanted me to read to him for a long time before he went to bed. I cou
ld see that Aunt Edna’s arrival before dinner had both given him security and alarmed him, for it meant that our time for going was near. At seven years, he was unusually sober and thoughtful. He went off to school that morning with hugs and kisses but with no tears.

  It was a sleety day. Martha Content, my baby girl, was standing on the sofa in the library window watching Waitstill carry our bags out to Ev Baker’s waiting car. Ev would drive us to the station to get the train to New York. Martha Content was jumping up and down, chanting, “Mommy and Daddy going bye-bye! Mommy and Daddy going bye-bye!”

  I gathered her up in my arms and hugged and kissed her, trying to explain that we would be gone for a while but that we would come back. Fortunately, she didn’t understand. She struggled to get back to the sofa to see what Daddy was doing now. I suddenly realized that it was better she did not know. Brushing away the tears in my own eyes, which she had not seen, I kissed her again, and with the sweetness of her neck in my nostrils, I bade Aunt Edna and our loving maid, Alberta, good-bye and hurried out to the car, waving as gaily as I could as we drove away.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Learning the Ropes

  The Sharps’ shared mission to Czechoslovakia was the continuation of a partnership formed in the earliest days of their marriage, when Martha sat in on Waitstill’s classes at Harvard whenever his job with the American Unitarian Association took him out of town. Long attracted to the ministry, Waitstill had graduated from law school more to please his parents than himself. When he finally had to make a career choice, he rejected an offer from a leading Boston law firm to accept the job of director of religious education for the AUA.

  During his first ministry, at the Unitarian Church in Meadville, Pennsylvania, and later in Wellesley, Martha was his “right hand.” She led religious education classes, directed the Christmas pageant, held teas, helped with church visits, critiqued his sermons, and, perhaps most importantly, provided the social aspects of ministry that Waitstill, by his own admission, did not do naturally. She was far more effective then he at mediating disputes, stooping down to talk with a child, and making small talk after church with a perhaps too-loquacious parishioner. They saw themselves as helpmates, one indispensable to the other. Over the next six months, it was a connection that would deepen to an extent that even they could not have imagined.