Defying the Nazis

by Artemis Joukowsky

  Waitstill’s last words from the pulpit before their departure for Czechoslovakia were a ringing denunciation of Hitler and the Nazis. Edna Stebbins was right: Waitstill’s enmity toward Fascism ran deep, and this opportunity to confront evil was vitally important to him. To Waitstill, this was a transcendent mission. In a letter to the congregation, dated June 13, 1939, Waitstill put that sense of mission into words: “Our last night as we sailed down the Harbor is still very vivid in our minds, a great lighted statue—a monument to an ideal, towering into the night. We live and work very much in its memory.”

  By the time Martha and Waitstill were ready to leave, the Unitarians had raised more than twelve thousand dollars in donations (equivalent to about two hundred thousand dollars today), suggesting significant support among Unitarians for the mission. There was a second commission too, from the American Committee for Relief in Czechoslovakia (AmRelCzech), which was headed by Nicholas Murray Butler, then president of Columbia University. Butler had been a close friend of Tomas Masaryk. AmRelCzech came up with an initial twenty-nine thousand dollars to be used only for large-scale resettlement projects and only for the benefit of Sudeten refugees.

  Most of these funds were wired ahead to banks in Prague. Waitstill would carry three thousand dollars in a money belt. Martha stashed a similar sum in a pouch against her leg. They also carried a letter of introduction signed by US secretary of state Cordell Hull, courtesy of Representative Robert Luce, a member of the Massachusetts congressional delegation. Seth Gano, a wealthy Unitarian financier who helped arrange the commission, also insisted they carry with them three ledger books to keep track of accounts. The ledgers would return to Boston unused. Auditors would affirm that the couple’s accounting, largely from memory, was accurate within pennies.1

  The Unitarian churches of the New York City area hosted a farewell reception for the Sharps on the afternoon before they sailed. It was a chance for them to meet the Czech ambassador to Great Britain, Jan Masaryk, the son of Tomas Masaryk. Masaryk made a deep impression on Martha, who remembered him as “an amazing personality, part philosopher, politician, lover of democracy, part worldly wise and cultivated diplomat with a gorgeous sense of humor. He made me feel that if he were representative of the Czechs, they must surely be wonderful people.” The Sharps’ friendship with Masaryk blossomed from that moment and would last until 1948 when, as foreign minister in the postwar Czech government, he jumped, or was pushed, to his death from a window.

  Prague-born Karl Deutsch, a convert to Unitarianism who in the second half of the twentieth century would emerge as one of America’s preeminent social thinkers, particularly on issues of war and peace, approached Waitstill soon before he and Martha sailed. Deutsch, twenty-six, had been an active antifascist in Czechoslovakia. He and his wife, Ruth Slonitz, were in the United States in September 1938 when the Munich Treaty was signed. At the strong urging of his parents, Martin Morris and Maria Deutsch, Karl and Ruth did not go back home.

  Now a PhD candidate in the government studies program at Harvard, Deutsch was deeply concerned for the safety of his parents still living in Prague. His father, an optician who owned a factory and a couple of retail outlets in Prague, was a Jew. His mother was a leading leftist (she’d named her son for Karl Marx) and founding member of the Czech Parliament. Julius Deutsch, Karl’s uncle, was a communist. Waitstill would recall tears in Deutsch’s eyes. “Do what you can for my father and mother,” he beseeched Sharp. “They are in terrible danger.”

  It’s doubtful that Martha and Waitstill had more than the dimmest conception of how they would go about responding to Karl Deutsch’s plea or to the needs of the desperate refugees who would come to them for help in Prague. But they were young and full of passion for life, partners in a courageous and daring enterprise that would mark both a beginning and an end in their lives.

  In the iconic news photo of the Sharps waving from the Aquitania, Waitstill is every inch the carefully groomed Unitarian minister in his three-piece suit standing next to his smiling wife, who is bedecked in a stylish hat with ribbons, holding a bouquet of roses, and wearing an oversized corsage. Behind them appear the wings of a bomber aircraft secured to the Aquitania’s upper deck.

  Seasickness kept Martha in her berth through much of the crossing. They docked briefly at Cherbourg, where, as Waitstill later wrote in a draft of their official report, they witnessed a foreboding scene: “Our welcome to Europe was the sight of a French warplane scudding out from the gray skies over Cherbourg and launching a torpedo at a target simulating a battle ship in the harbor; the steering gear of the torpedo went wrong and drove it in a wide circle to strike the side of our liner as we lay at anchor. The plane on the deck and the torpedo were a foretaste of the spring and summer of Europe’s dying peace.”

  On February 10, six days out from New York, the Aquitania arrived in Southampton. A short train ride brought the Sharps to London where they had honeymooned ten years before. At that time they had visited all the tourist sites, inspected the churches, attended the theatre, and cruised along the Thames in the popular flat-bottomed, pole-propelled boat called a punt. This time they encountered a very different London, sober, purposeful, tense, and once again preparing for war.

  Martha saw immediately that the British were not as blind as most Americans to the condition of the Czechs. “Average English citizens,” she noted, “seemed to be more aware and more emotionally involved in Czechoslovakia’s plight than their counterparts in America. Most of the people we met seemed to feel a sense of responsibility and shame for the steps Chamberlain had taken to appease Hitler.”

  That concern was reflected in a gift of 4 million pounds sterling from the British government for refugee relief and resettlement, as well as private donations to several relief agencies. One of these, the Lord Mayor’s Fund, raised 318,000 pounds sterling in a very short time. Another, the Earl Baldwin Fund, raised 500,000 pounds sterling in six months. Soon after Munich, the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia (BCRC) was set up to provide relief and to help refugees arriving in England. Waitstill and Martha would work closely with members of the BCRC in the months to come.

  For two weeks, the Sharps were put through an exhaustive series of interviews and debriefings in London and Paris with contacts among Unitarians, the British government, and international aid organizations. Their Unitarian contact was the Reverend E. Rosalind Lee, whom Waitstill affectionately described as someone who had just “stepped out of Mother Goose down to silver buckles and her towering Welsh hat.” Eleanor Rathbone, MP, perhaps the most outspoken champion of refugee relief and emigration, who had spent time in Prague assessing the refugee situation, promised that she would raise in Parliament any issues the Sharps presented. Gertrude Baer, president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), gave Martha a lesson in elementary spy craft. “She noticed,” Martha wrote,

  that I was writing in my little notebook the names and addresses of the women in danger whom she wanted me to find and help. “Do you know how to keep notes so that if found by hostile persons they cannot be understood?” she asked.

  “No,” I replied, “I never heard of it!”

  “Would you like a few pointers?” she offered, and thereupon gave me a short course in some of the memo-taking techniques which cannot be easily deciphered and, if you can’t make notes, how to memorize key words to remember important data. She also suggested various methods of destroying incriminating papers. She explained how to ascertain if you are being shadowed, and various ways to elude your follower.

  She warned me that we would probably be followed and spied upon the moment we reached Prague. This put a new complexion on things. I destroyed the old notes and adopted her new systems, wondering if I, who had been so used to openness and honesty, could ever get used to living with secrets and suspicion.

  Martha fought another bout with motion sickness on the night boat-train to Paris, but recovered on the brief morning ride from Calais t
o the Gare St. Lazare. In Paris, their meetings with Malcolm W. Davis of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, whose refugee experience dated back to Russia in the days of the Bolshevik Revolution, provided them with an invaluable background briefing on Czechoslovakia, as well as a comprehensive list of in-country contacts.

  Davis wrote the names of these key people, individually, on the backs of dozens of his business cards, then gave them to the Sharps to use as calling cards. Because he was plugged into the Carnegie Endowment’s extensive international executive networks, Davis would also be a welcome and vital source of accurate, behind-the-scenes information about developments from Berlin to Moscow, Paris, London, and Washington, DC. Waitstill described him as the “most helpful single person” among all their contacts.

  Davis made available to Martha and Waitstill the visiting lecturers’ suite at the Endowment’s exquisite palais on the Boulevard St. Germain and lined up a weeklong series of informational meetings as well. The Sharps met everyone from the Czech ambassador to France to labor unionists, members of PEN—Poets, Playwrights, Essayists, and Novelists—and various friends of the endangered Czechoslovakia, among them Donald A. and Helen Lowrie, who were then at the University of Paris. Donald Lowrie was an essayist and journalist and, like Davis, an old Russia hand. He had known Grigori Rasputin, and in August of 1916, in Moscow, had conducted an interview with Patriarch Tikhon, leader of the Russian Orthodox Church. He had been a YMCA executive at various European postings, as had Helen. Lowrie also had written a Tomas Masaryk biography.

  These connections in London and Paris provided the Sharps with two legs of a supportive tripod. The third leg would be in Geneva, where they would soon work with Marie Ginzburg, secretary of the Committee for the Placement of Intellectual Refugees (Comité International pour le Placement des Intellectuels Réfugiés). Formed in 1936, the committee worked to match refugee journalists, professors, doctors, and other professionals with jobs in what were then safe countries. In the course of the next six months, Martha and Waitstill would make a total of ten trips out of Prague to one or another of those cities with piles of documentation from people desperate to get out of Czechoslovakia. They would return to Prague with the names of more people to find and, if possible, help. Waitstill would also transmit messages between the Czech resistance and Jan Masaryk in London.

  The Sharps took the Orient Express from Paris to Prague, arriving at Wilson Station—Wilsonovo Nádrazí—at just after seven on the sub-freezing Friday evening of February 24, 1939.

  The station, originally named for the Hapsburg Emperor Franz Josef, had been renamed in 1919 for the US president who had championed the creation of the Czech nation. Now Masaryk’s bold experiment in democracy was teetering toward oblivion.

  “The air,” Waitstill later wrote, “was full of sorrow, disillusion and foreboding.” From his compartment on the “majestic train” as he called it, he was puzzled and astonished to see another train headed out of the station filled with nothing but men.

  Norbert Capek, founder of Unitaria, led a grave-faced greeting committee on the platform. Martha remembered that all were dressed in black coats and black hats. Five or six relief organizations had sent representatives, each eager to meet as soon as possible with the Sharps.

  Martha was presented with a bouquet of red, white, and blue flowers.

  Also on hand was Karel Haspl, Capek’s son-in-law. Martha and Waitstill knew Haspl personally from his student days in the United States. He would help Waitstill sort out and record everyone’s name, address, and telephone number in order to make appointments.

  Dr. Capek stepped forward, extended a hand, and greeted them with what Waitstill described as “affectionate but restrained and sober joy.”

  “Brother Sharp, Mrs. Sharp,” Capek said, “we are very glad and relieved to see you here. You’ve come to a nation in crisis.”

  Formalities over, Waitstill asked Capek, “What is the meaning of that very unusual train two platforms over? Who were those men?”

  “They were Social Democrats, fleeing the Sudetenland.”

  “Where are they going?”

  “London, if they can get through.”

  Capek noted Waitstill’s confusion. “Here,” he said, “we see the reverse of the law of the sea. It’s not women and children first, but men first.”

  “These women,” he continued, gesturing with his arm, “may never see their husbands again, nor the children their fathers. These men have to get out. And somebody is taking it upon himself to convey them.”

  Capek himself chose to stay in Prague rather than flee, knowing full well that the decision was tantamount to writing his own death warrant. Two years later, the Gestapo arrested him for high treason and the capital offense of listening to foreign radio broadcasts. About the same time, his daughter, Zora, was arrested for disseminating summaries of the broadcasts. A German court, sitting in Dresden, acquitted the elderly minister of treason and recommended a reduced sentence on the second charge. The Gestapo nevertheless used poison gas to execute the father of Czech Unitarianism at Hartheim Castle, near Linz, Austria, in October, 1942.

  It is commonly assumed that Capek was killed as part of the Nazis’ retaliation for the May 1942 assassination by Czech partisans of Reinhard Heydrich, “Reich Protector” in Bohemia and Moravia and a leading architect of the Holocaust. Zora Capek, sentenced to eighteen months in a Saxony prison, survived the war.2

  AmRelCzech had reserved a room for Waitstill and Martha at the four-story Hotel Atlantic at No. 9 Na Porici, conveniently situated near the center of town. The place was odd and unappealing—“potty,” Waitstill called it—fitted out with heavy, veneered pieces upholstered in bright rayon. It was a vivid contrast to the soft colors and antique furniture of their house in Wellesley Hills.

  There was no bureau or closet, just a few open shelves and a hybrid secretary-armoire. The Sharps wondered what the Czechs did with their clothes. They were also confused by the room’s upholstered beds. Neither was fitted with a mattress. Instead they were provided with large down puffs inserted into linen cases, like oversized pillows. Martha found them strange and uncomfortable.

  The rent was eighty-eight korunas a week, or about two dollars and twenty cents. Food was cheap. Breakfast—coffee with a boiled egg on toast for the both of them—would be fifty cents or so. Dinner at the hotel, again for two, was less than a dollar.

  They went out for their first meal, a substantial dinner of soup, bread, dumplings (knedlicky), meat and gravy, and a chocolate dessert. Martha was surprised by the Czechs’ liberal use of caraway seeds in almost every dish. Then they tried to digest the meal on a brief, late evening walk around Prague.

  Both were tired, hopeful, and apprehensive, eager to get started. Back in the room, as they started to unpack that night, Martha suffered a sudden attack of homesickness. She missed Martha Content and Hastings terribly. “I tried to figure out the time differential and picture what the children were doing,” she wrote. “Hastings was probably home from school and either playing outdoors with one of his pals or up in his room taking something apart to see what made it tick. Aunt Edna might be reading or sitting before the fire in my upstairs study, or keeping an eye on Martha Content, who would be across the hall in her pink and turquoise nursery.”

  Waitstill caught her expression and put his arms around her.

  “Tired? Homesick?” he asked quietly. “It will all be over before you know it.”

  Martha began to cry. “I miss the children so much!” she said.

  Waitstill was not good at such moments.

  “That’s natural,” he said. “But we can’t dwell on it. Come, let’s go to bed. We have to be up early.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Witnesses to History

  “Waitstill,” Martha later wrote of their first Monday in Prague, “looked so handsome dressed for our first formal courtesy calls. He wore a new black suit with his Phi Beta Kappa key dangling as usual from the gold chain across
his vest, anchored on one side by ‘the turnip,’ a heavy gold pocket watch inherited from his Revolutionary War ancestor.”

  Prague, city of a thousand spires, was an architectural mélange of Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Art Nouveau, and more modern building styles. In 1939, its ethnically diverse population was about eight hundred thousand, mostly Slavs but also a significant German-speaking minority and a relatively large Jewish community of about fifty thousand. Like Vienna, Prague’s days on the center stage of world affairs were long past. But prior to the mutilation of Czechoslovakia after the Munich Pact, it was the comparatively prosperous heart of a “plucky little democracy,” as Martha called it, a showcase of economic development (in the midst of a global economic depression) as well as political and religious freedom.

  But the flow of refugees into Prague—first a small stream of leftists, Jews, artists, and intellectuals fleeing the Nazis in Germany, then a river of terrified émigrés in the aftermath of the Anschluss in Austria, and finally a tsunami of the displaced and desperate following cession of Sudetenland—threatened to drown the Czech capital in sheer human misery and fear.

  The Sharps’ first stop that Monday was the office of Dr. Antonin Sum, head of the Czech government’s Emergency Committee for Refugees, and a former consul in the Czech embassy in Washington, who provided them with an overview of the mounting catastrophe. As Martha recalled,