Defying the Nazis

by Artemis Joukowsky

  Dr. Sum described the chaos as frightened, hysterical men, women and children, clutching whatever they could put their hands on as they fled, arrived at the new border by the thousands in every conceivable kind of vehicle, as well as on foot.

  Some did not even have sufficient clothing. Most were without money or any preparation for the journey. Families, jobs, everything was forgotten in their fear of torture and imprisonment by the Nazis. Shelter, food and medical care were their immediate needs.

  The Emergency Committee had filled the dormitories at Prague University with the first arrivals. Women and children volunteered to collect food and prepare it for the refugees. But thousands more poured in every day. The heads of the private welfare agencies offered their services. The government provided eight korunas (about twenty cents) per refugee per day for food. The Salvation Army opened vast soup kitchens. The Red Cross undertook medical care. Child welfare agencies assisted homeless and orphaned children. Youth groups in churches, together with the YMCA and YWCA, opened their summer camps, and made volunteer staff available. Social organizations such as the Sokols helped displaced persons find jobs, shelter, [and] provided essential furniture and bedding. The newspapers printed want ads for free.

  When the government ran out of rooms for the refugees, giant sewer pipes were used as temporary housing.

  The Sharps asked Dr. Sum, who had prepared a long, itemized list for the meeting, where best for them to begin. The Commission for Service in Czechoslovakia discovered that its modest financial resources were in urgent demand, many times over.

  For their initial few weeks in Prague, Waitstill and Martha would work out of No. 55, Vysehradska 16, a large, two-room office suite provided at government expense on the third floor of the former Ministry of Health, in the southern section of the city, near the Vltava River. The immense building had been re-designated the Central Institute for Refugees, and it housed all foreign aid groups, including the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia. The Sharps forged a close alliance with members of that group, especially with Quakers Elizabeth (“Tessa”) Rowntree and Beatrice Wellington, a Canadian working for the British.

  They bought a few cheap desks and tacked up a US flag brought from Wellesley Hills for that purpose. They also displayed a Czech flag, the white lion rampant on the quartered arms of Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia, and Ruthenia. Finally the Sharps pasted a Unitarian-Quaker letterhead on the door and opened for business. Since their commission was the de facto umbrella organization for practically all nongovernmental aid from the United States, they soon became known simply as “American Relief.”

  Business hours would be eight to six, with the office closed for lunch from one to two, roughly the norm for most governmental offices in Prague. Martha and Waitstill typically rose each day at six, listened to the ever-more-distressing international news on the BBC, breakfasted downstairs at the Hotel Atlantic, then took a trolley car across the city to work. They ate supper at about eight each night and turned in early unless they had a date for the philharmonic or opera.

  At first they were frequently out of town, reconnoitering the countryside for suitable projects to support under their mandate from AmRelCzech. Their very first expedition, a trip thirty miles outside Prague to the village of Lysa nad Labem, would demonstrate to Waitstill and Martha the enormous amount of good they could accomplish, even with the relatively limited means then at their disposal. But the trip would also come to show them the futility of optimism.

  They were escorted by Madame Ruzena Palantova, social service chief in the Lord Mayor’s office, to an exceptionally beautiful, sixteenth-century Bohemian castle. The Czech baron who owned the enormous and superbly maintained residence no longer could afford to live in it and was willing to sell. The Institute for Refugees, Madame Palantova explained, wanted to buy the castle and convert it into housing for two hundred refugee families. According to the larger plan, the Czech army would later take it over as a military hospital. In the interim, there were local manufacturers eager to hire the refugees, including a dressmaker willing to employ sewing-machine operators to work on the grounds of the castle.

  A little back-of-the-envelope math told Martha and Waitstill that the conversion could be undertaken for about twenty-five thousand dollars. They were excited. “The wonderful inventiveness of this social engineering filled me with admiration,” Martha wrote. “I realized how important it was to be able to harness experience and imagination with money.”

  On another expedition, to a refugee receiving camp south of Prague, their host and guide was Alice Masaryk, Jan’s sister, a founder and head of the Czech Red Cross. On the way to the camp in her chauffeured limousine, Dr. Alice, as she was called, guided the Sharps through Ceske Budejovice, home of the original Budweiser beer.

  Unlike the rest of her family, Dr. Alice was not a Unitarian but a Presbyterian, a member of the Church of the Czech Brethren, another liberal denomination with old ties to the Unitarian Church. She had trained to be a social worker and had spent time as a volunteer in Chicago settlement houses in the early part of the century. Dr. Alice and Martha hit it off immediately.

  “Her single-minded devotion to the Czech people and sense of humor were like her brother Jan’s,” Martha wrote. “But there the resemblance ended. She was a self-effacing, pious, kind and devoted daughter.”

  Dr. Alice had been enmeshed in the tumultuous and bloody events of central Europe and the Balkans following the 1914 assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, the flash point for World War I. In 1916, the Austrians pronounced a death sentence for treason on Alice and her father, Tomas Masaryk, whom they accused of plotting with Czech nationalists. Because he was beyond the Austrians’ grasp in London, Tomas Masaryk was sentenced to death in absentia. His daughter spent nine debilitating months in prison until vehement and repeated protests from the United States persuaded the Austrians to free her. The experience permanently compromised Alice Masaryk’s health.

  Now her life again was in peril. Her late father was deeply revered among the Czechs, and Dr. Alice was widely admired in her own right. When the Nazis finally pounced, they would not let her remain as a symbol and possible rallying point for the nation. She’d have to be eliminated. Already the Germans had launched a propaganda campaign against her, alleging that Masaryk pocketed private funds sent in her care to aid Czech refugee relief efforts. These included substantial amounts from AmRelCzech.

  Gustave A. Prochazka, patriarch of the Czechoslovak Hussite Church, which had separated from the Catholic Church, greeted the Sharps with a briefcase that bulged with church mortgages, for which he was guarantor at local banks. The patriarch, who spoke no English, was disappointed to learn that the Unitarians would not be relieving him of this financial burden, although the Sharps did offer to personally present the case for American assistance in Boston upon their return. What became of that effort is unknown.

  The pious old fellow (once the local Roman Catholic archbishop) escorted Waitstill and Martha on a thirteen-parish foray that took them far and wide into the countryside. Crowded together in the snug rear seat of his official car, flying both the flags of the National Czechoslovak Church and the Czech Republic, they whizzed around the outskirts of Prague to the front steps of thirteen newly built churches, where they were greeted each time by a minister and board of directors.

  Both Sharps immediately were in high demand as public speakers at parties and meetings, especially Martha. Invitations poured in for her to address suggested topics, such as “Feeding the American Baby,” “The Two-Party System of American Democracy,” and “American Women’s Organizations.” These innocuous public appearances, and day trips such as the serial church tour with Patriarch Prochazka, helped maintain the Sharps’ cover as a visiting minister and his wife, at least for the time being.

  “We accepted as many as we could,” Martha said. “I began to wish that I really had more recent figures and wider knowledge about American medical, social and
other sciences, and had brought reference material and photographs with me. But my audiences were enthusiastic, in spite of my slender facts, and the laborious translations necessary after nearly every sentence.”1

  By the start of their second week in Prague, Martha was seriously chafing over accommodations at Hotel Atlantic. Ugly and incongruous furniture was by no means the only problem. There was nowhere to comfortably read or write at night and no proper light by which to do so. They also needed a separate room for private discussions that occurred with increasing frequency and at all hours.

  Their main concern, however, was security.

  “As the city filled up with Gestapo,” she remembered, “we found them taking extra special interest in us. For example, they lingered in the lobby to note the names of those who called in search of us. To make matters worse, whenever we came in sight the concierge would shout our most confidential messages at us, no matter who was there to share the news. We politely asked him to be a bit more discreet, but whether out of pride at his smattering of English, or naïve confidence that he was behaving responsibly, he also managed to forget our admonitions.”

  The deal breaker came one day when the Sharps returned to their room to find all the furniture and their possessions in the hallway. According to hotel staff, their room required a coat of paint. Afterward, they found that certain important papers and belongings had vanished.

  Fortunately, friends connected the Sharps to a Czech businessman named Hans Wertheimer who was willing to rent them his two-room apartment within Prague’s seventeenth-century Waldenstein Palace for a thousand korunas a month. The extra room would allow space for private discussions with their Czech contacts. The move-in date was March 10.

  Shortly before they were scheduled to move, Wertheimer’s sister, Lydia Busch, a well-known Czech actress, called the Sharps to ask if they could delay moving a few days and explained that the current tenant, a Russian diplomat, refused to leave any sooner. Since the Sharps now had the weekend open, Lydia invited them to visit her and her family at their villa at Roztoky, about thirty miles from the city.

  Peter Busch, Lydia’s husband, until recently had run Czechoslovakia’s largest glass-manufacturing plant, in Sudetenland. Following cession, he had refused to work for the Nazis, and he and Lydia had relocated to Roztoky, where he owned another plant. Many of his senior personnel had followed him as well.

  Hans Wertheimer picked up the Sharps in his Skoda at the Roztoky train station, and on their way to the Busch villa he explained how the Nazis had tried every inducement to get Busch to reopen his Sudeten plant. They needed his glass for windshields for their military vehicles, but Peter Busch was immovable.

  Lydia, forty, made an immediate impression on Martha. “She was scintillating,” Martha wrote, “striking in appearance, and grace itself as she moved about the house, or sat at the piano playing our favorite music. She had a lovely voice, and as she played and sang, her auburn, page boy hair swinging back and forth caught the light from the fire.”

  Dinner on Saturday night started out as a grand and convivial affair, served on antique Meissen china by candlelight. Both Sharps noticed, however, that Peter Busch said little and excused himself frequently during the meal to listen to his radio in the den. Evidently the news was not good, and as the evening wore on, their host looked increasingly gloomy.

  Hitler originally demanded cession of the Sudeten region under the pretext that the Czechs there were mistreating the ethnic Germans. His actual aim, soon to be clear, was conquest of all Czechoslovakia. He intended to appropriate its extensive industrial infrastructure—including Peter Busch’s glass factory—in advance of Germany’s invasion of Poland, planned for September 1939.

  Edvard Benes, Tomas Masaryk’s successor as president of Czechoslovakia, resigned on October 5, 1938, and moved with his family to London, where Benes eventually set up a government in exile. The following month he was replaced as president over what remained of his country—Bohemia and Moravia, Slovakia and Carpatho-Ukraine—by Emil Hacha, sixty-six, a distinguished lawyer with few political enemies and almost no political experience. Hacha, who was in poor health and of widely questioned mental acuity, would be the first and only president of the Second Czechoslovak Republic.

  Hitler secretly set March 15—the Ides of March—as the date for invading Czechoslovakia. Once again in need of a pretext, Hitler stirred up secessionist fever in Slovakia, where, with Nazi connivance, a virulently anti-Semitic priest, Jozef Tiso, seized power.

  President Hacha had no choice but to respond.

  “Why so grim?” Lydia Busch finally inquired of her distracted husband at dinner.

  “President Hacha has put Slovakia under martial law,” he answered angrily, “and put Monsignor Tiso under arrest.” Busch went on to say that the confrontation between the Hacha government and the Slovak nationalists was just the sort of crisis the Third Reich needed as an excuse to intervene. He was plainly pessimistic.

  “I feel we must make our own plans for the family,” he said at last, signaling the end of the dinner party. Busch and his brother-in-law, Hans, immediately fell into a discussion of whether Hans, too, should consider leaving the country, and how the glass plant might continue operating in their absence.

  The Sharps made their thank-you’s and good-nights and withdrew. In their bedroom they spoke together until dawn, wondering and worrying about their mission. Deep foreboding gripped them both.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Dying Republic

  On Tuesday, March 14, 1939, Slovakia declared itself independent under Tiso. When Czech troops mobilized to put down the insurrection, Hitler summoned Emil Hacha to Berlin, where he was given an ultimatum: order your soldiers back into their barracks or the Luftwaffe will level Prague. Hacha reportedly fainted on the spot. After regaining consciousness he reluctantly signed the document.

  That same day, Martha headed for the Prague airport to deliver a package of outgoing mail, most of it sensitive, to Trevor Chadwick, an English schoolmaster who was escorting a group of Czech refugee children to London that morning. Among the documents Chadwick would carry for the Sharps was Waitstill’s first report from Prague to Robert Dexter in Boston.

  “The situation is serious here,” Waitstill wrote,

  both for the Jews and the life of the state. I am writing you just after the Austrian putsch anniversary and the recent near-secession of Slovakia about which you probably have been reading. Five divisions of the German army are waiting at Bratislava. People here seem to think that the German intention now is to split Slovakia off on the pretext of rescuing the “abused” German minority there or the pretext of preserving order after an appeal for that purpose has been made by the anti-Czech government of Slovakia.

  The Nuremberg laws are being steadily put into effect by this helpless government and by the various college faculties in the city. Medical students are being told ... that if they are Jews they have no hope of being graduated. Dr. [Albin] Goldschmeid was dismissed from the German University because an ancestor was a Jew. He and others are coming to us, begging for help in escaping to America. They will starve or commit suicide if some large-scale plan of emigration is not worked out.

  The situation was not quite as Waitstill portrayed it in his letter, perhaps because he had much to discover about Czechoslovakia and its “helpless” government. Not all refugees were treated with the same care as he saw from humanitarians such as Dr. Sum and Alice Masaryk. Trains carrying refugees were often turned back at the border by Czech authorities. The refugee camps outside Prague were deplorable. Food was inadequate and people suffered from the cold because of broken windows and the scarcity of blankets.

  Czechoslovakia, in short, was not immune to the virus of anti-Semitism that infected most of Europe as well as the United States. A series of polls taken between 1938 and 1942 revealed widespread negative impressions of Jews among Americans and support by about one-third of the respondents for anti-Jewish policies.1


  In Czechoslovakia, the Munich agreement had stipulated that Sudeten Jews, most of whom were now refugees in Bohemia and Moravia, were entitled to apply for Czech citizenship. But based on an analysis of British government reports, historian Louise London notes, “the pattern of bureaucratic discrimination against Jews from the Sudetenland emerged, and they were systematically denied access to funds they had brought out.” According to London, all three hundred thousand Jews in Czechoslovakia were under threat from the national authorities. “The Czech government made it clear,” she writes, “that Jews of Czech nationality were not wanted and put various forms of pressure on them to emigrate.”2

  Trevor Chadwick’s departure with the refugee children from the Prague airport that March 14 was a landmark moment in the increasingly frantic effort to rescue high-risk refugees from Czechoslovakia before it was too late. It was also a particularly poignant for Martha.

  The flight was to be the first of eight transports—the others went mostly by train—that ultimately brought 669 Czech children to England.

  The operation had been initiated by stockbroker Nicholas Winton, a Jew by birth, whose German parents had him baptized an Anglican and changed the family name from Wertheim.

  Winton’s program was modeled on, and later integrated into, the famed Kindertransport rescue missions. Between December 1, 1938, and September 1, 1939, Kindertransport brought to England between nine thousand and ten thousand children (seventy-five hundred of whom were Jews) from Germany, Austria, Poland, Holland, and Czechoslovakia. Kindertransport itself was a response to the Kristallnacht carnage of early November 1938.

  Following the savage attacks against Jews, British aid organizations, among them the Jewish Refugee Committee and the Society of Friends (Quakers), pushed the British government to relax immigration restrictions. Public opinion supported their efforts, and the government agreed to give temporary refuge to an indeterminate number of children under the age of seventeen. Each child’s care and maintenance was to be guaranteed by individuals or by organizations. It was assumed at the time that the youngsters would eventually return to their families.