Defying the Nazis

by Artemis Joukowsky

  March 15 changed all that. “Refugee relocation” was now a euphemism for shipment to Nazi death camps. As far as Martha and Waitstill were concerned, the best “constructive friendly service” they now could, and should, provide was immediate escape from the protectorate.

  The opportunities for moving many of the hunted at one time—such as the London-bound trainload of Social Democrats that Waitstill noted on their arrival at Wilson Station—quickly grew scarce. Instead, the Sharps would run a small-scale operation, glad for any small triumph in a deadly cat-and-mouse game with the Gestapo.

  The wild crush of terrified refugees that greeted them at their office on the morning of March 15 convinced Waitstill and Martha that in order to help the maximum number of “clients,” as they called them, they needed a system to quickly and efficiently capture each person’s vital information, so they and their staff of eight could then customize assistance according to the individual’s situation. Martha’s answer was to create a written questionnaire covering germane information that any refugee could complete without assistance.

  Three hundred of those files survive today at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

  For the balance of their time in occupied Czechoslovakia, Martha’s energies mainly would be devoted to steering clients through, or around, endless bureaucratic labyrinths in Prague and across Europe, the United States and Latin America. “We had lists of thousands of names,” Martha wrote, “all of them requesting exit visas. But it wasn’t as easy as simply requesting a visa from a foreign country. Through our contacts in Boston, New York, London, and other cities, we had to arrange for jobs, places to live. We had to match refugees in Prague with opportunities to live and work abroad.”

  They had to master the intricacies of immigration law in dozens of countries, lobby contacts for money, arrange for escorts, coordinate with other aid organizations, and manage endless details while trying to avoid trouble with the Gestapo.1

  The Sharps’ contacts in London, Paris, and Geneva (the YMCA and YWCA, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, and the Committee for the Placement of Intellectual Refugees) would try to match those clients with jobs or invitations of some kind anywhere in still-free Europe or in North and South America. At home, a Unitarian Case Work Committee, led by their friend Marion Niles of the Wellesley church, worked feverishly to find sponsors who would sign affidavits guaranteeing the financial solvency of refugees and to pry US visas from the State Department’s tight fists. The Sharps were losing hope that the US government would respond compassionately to the refugee situation.

  “For a fleeting moment,” Martha recalled, “when we first arrived in Prague, we had the vain hope that the urgent needs of the Czech people might move the US Congress to open the country’s doors. But our requests for special consideration were being ignored in Washington. The old US quota for Czechoslovakia allowed 2,800 Czechs to enter the US yearly on immigration visas. At that pace, most refugees realized that they might wait several decades to get an American visa.”

  Waitstill soon was specializing in even chancier business, one that put his prodigious memory and compulsive command of detail to full use. As the Nazis tightened their financial clamp on the Czechs, making it impossible for him to legally receive and distribute US dollars, he became a black-market currency broker and bagman. Not only did Waitstill risk expulsion, at minimum, and possible imprisonment and death if caught, he also enlisted the vital assistance of the US consul general in Prague, who acted as his banker.

  Sharp’s career in financial crime began two days before the Einmarsch when a messenger accosted him at the Hotel Atlantic. The man saluted Waitstill, then said, “Mr. Sharp, will you prove that you are Mr. Sharp?”

  “Goodness!” Waitstill replied. “Pardon me?”

  “This is very important,” the messenger said at length, then drew Sharp aside to quietly explain that he’d been sent by Dr. Alice. Before he said anything more, however, Masaryk’s emissary required identification.

  Waitstill produced his passport for inspection, which satisfied the man.

  “We must separate now,” he said. “Dr. Masaryk presents her compliments and asks you to take a taxi to her apartment as quickly as you can. Do not mention her name to anybody, particularly to the taxi driver.”

  Sharp proceeded as instructed to Dr. Alice’s apartment door. “I was scrutinized through a peephole,” he remembered, “I suppose by Dr. Alice herself. She let me in. Her usual aplomb was somewhat ruffled. There were no sweet introductions or anything.”

  Masaryk had with her two five-thousand-dollar checks, each made out in her name, from Nicholas Butler at AmRelCzech. She showed Waitstill the envelopes in which the checks had been mailed. Each had been opened. It appeared that the checks had been removed and replaced and the envelopes resealed. The only explanation, she said, was that the Gestapo was opening her mail. If she attempted to cash either of the checks, the Nazis would immediately revive their old allegations that Masaryk was diverting humanitarian aid to her own uses. At this sensitive moment, she could not risk another round of such accusations.

  “What am I going to do with this money?” she asked. “The Nazi Party here knows I have it. I cannot go to any bank. Surely, you see the situation clearly?”

  “Well, yes,” Waitstill replied. “But what shall I do with these?”

  “That is your problem,” she answered.

  Left to ponder the matter on his own, Waitstill headed by taxi back to the hotel in the gloom of a late winter afternoon. By the next day, March 14, an idea had formed. In the collection of calling cards that Malcolm Davis had provided Waitstill in Paris, there was one for Dr. Vladimir Pospisil, governor of the National Bank Czechoslovakia. Waitstill slipped the card into his pocket and headed out the door at once, hoping to catch Pospisil before the bank closed its doors for the day.

  He made it just in time, and presented the Davis card, along with one of his own, to a bank employee. Minutes later, he was seated opposite Dr. Pospisil at his big desk in the bank governor’s private office, where Waitstill explained the business with the two checks.

  It was Pospisil’s best advice that the American clergyman deposit the checks with the National Bank, unaware that by morning the bank would be under Nazi control. Sharp was willing, but by now it was too late, so he returned the checks to his wallet. Had he deposited the checks as Pospisil suggested, the ten thousand dollars would have been lost forever.

  The occupation introduced a whole new set of challenges when it came to financing foreign relief work. Henceforth it would be pointless to transfer hard currency into the protectorate. If the money came via normal, legal channels, the Nazis would grab it. If it arrived in some clandestine fashion, one risked imprisonment or worse. Moreover, the flow of donations, particularly from the United States, slowed precipitously with the fall of free Czechoslovakia. American donors weren’t about to risk seeing their dollars stolen to support the German war effort.

  Thus it was clear to Waitstill that the only way to make practical use of the ten thousand dollars—and keep the money out of the Germans’ hands—would be to take the two checks somewhere outside the protectorate. While he waited for the travel restrictions on foreigners to be eased, he considered his options, finally hitting on a variation of an old stratagem that perfectly suited his purposes. Like Martha, Waitstill would discover he had a talent for subterfuge.

  He headed by train for Geneva on March 22 with the two AmRelCzech checks tucked away in his money belt, hoping that the deference the Nazis had so far paid US citizens meant that he would not be subjected to the exhaustive personal searches that all other travelers were forced to endure. The gamble paid off. Waitstill’s US passport and a Gestapo Ausreise, or travel permit, were all that he needed to show.

  In Geneva he selected one of the larger banks, walked in and asked to speak to a bank officer, to whom Waitstill revealed his letter from Co
rdell Hull, which assured him of the banker’s close attention. Then he laid out his proposal.

  Sharp explained that he wished to open an account with the two checks, and to make a special arrangement for withdrawals. He said that on this account the only withdrawal form the bank was to honor was a torn calling card such as the one Waitstill produced to show the man. The amount of the withdrawal would be printed in pencil on the back of a torn calling card. Any person presenting such a card was to receive the amount indicated, no further questions asked.

  “The conditions in the Third Reich, where I am now living, preclude any documentation at all,” he said. “If you require documentation from me, anybody attempting to leave the Third Reich would go to the gibbet or the gas chamber after a Gestapo investigation. So we must have an agreement that this will be the way that these two sums, aggregating ten thousand dollars, will be drawn down. Do we agree on that?”

  One can imagine the bank officer’s wonderment at such a strange proposal coming from this bespectacled American with his gilt-edged bona fides from the US secretary of state. He gave Sharp a dubious look and said that this was a “highly irregular matter” that would require the attention of the bank’s legal department. Nevertheless, in just half a day the bank produced a contract that covered the necessary issues, and Waitstill shook hands on the deal.

  Next stop: Paris.

  There he confided the stratagem to Malcolm Davis, who endorsed more checks from the United States to Sharp. Waitstill then took the money and a copy of his Swiss bank contract—executed in English and French—to two Parisian banks, where he made identical arrangements. “I said, ‘This is a highly risky venture. Any recipient of one half of these cards could alter it. That person and I must gain as much confidence in one another as possible, and I must assume they will not alter that figure.’ Hatred of Germany being endemic, they agreed that this was the only way in which we could outwit the monster.”

  In the course of a second excursion, Sharp set up one of his special accounts with a Belgian bank, then moved on to London, where he left the balance of his funds with the British Unitarians, who would also dispense the money according to Waitstill’s plan. As it turned out, the London connection would be by far the busiest, followed by an account subsequently set up in New York.

  Finally Sharp returned to Prague to put in motion the second part of his operation. As he did so, Martha set out on an expedition of her own.

  On Friday, March 24, she met in her office with Tessa Rowntree of the BCRC. “She had a plan to lead about one hundred refugees, ostensibly household workers, to England,” Martha recalled. “All of them had British visas and Gestapo Ausreise and were ready to go. She would take half the group out on the first train to leave the Protectorate, scheduled to depart at 4 p.m. that afternoon, and asked me if I would take the next fifty on the next train at 4:30. I responded that I didn’t have an Ausreise and besides, Waitstill hadn’t yet returned. I couldn’t just go off without telling him.”

  “Nobody can do it as well as you, Martha,” Rowntree replied, “a clergyman’s wife and an American. Perhaps your consulate can get you the exit permission. If you’ll try, I’ll have your transport ready to join you at the station.”

  Martha knew full well that the transport entailed significant personal risk, Rowntree’s reassurances notwithstanding. The “household workers” included some of the most ardent and well-known political enemies of the Reich. Her US passport would not be much good if she was caught assisting these enemies of the state in escaping.

  On the other hand, she remembered thinking that saving these people seemed worth the personal risk. She went back to her office to pick up some papers and to leave a note for Waitstill when Lydia Busch appeared.2 When she learned that Martha was headed for London, Busch asked her to take along a bag of jewelry that was needed to help pay for a cancer operation for Lydia’s mother. Martha agreed to do so, and managed to get back to the hotel, pack a suitcase, pick up the jewels, and get to the train station by 4:15. Tessa Rowntree had already departed without incident at the head of the first group of refugees. A Miss Bull, who worked with Rowntree, was on hand to assist Martha with the second group.

  “Miss Bull had a typed list of my transport members ready for me,” Martha recalled.

  But not everyone had yet assembled. “Some will come out of hiding just in time to board the moving train,” she explained, and as she spoke new ones arrived, which she added to her list, using a pen she borrowed from a doctor standing near her. I noticed the pen wrote in green ink.

  She then gave me a ticket for each of my charges, apologizing as she did so that we were going to travel fourth class. This would mean wooden benches all the way across Germany and the Netherlands to the North Sea. As I discovered once we entrained, it would mean a single, non-flushing toilet for us, too.

  In all, thirty-three refugees showed up at the station for the trip.

  They were about to depart when two more men jumped on. Miss Bull cried, “They’re yours!” then disappeared altogether as the shriek of those piercing whistles and the swirling smoke from the locomotive enveloped us.

  As the train rolled west out of Prague into the Czech countryside, Martha glanced over her list of “household workers.” Some names were familiar to her: a doctor, an actor, an agricultural scientist relocating to a university in Canada; a brother and sister, twelve and fourteen, whose parents had committed suicide the previous week. There were a pair of European news reporters, one from United Press and the other from the Associated Press. Most of the rest of the members of the transport were average citizens who had family or other connections in England or elsewhere who had vouched for them. Martha introduced herself to each of them, trying her best to soothe their anxiety and put them at ease.

  At the German border the guards unhitched their car from the train and moved it onto a siding. Martha asked the border station personnel why they were being made to wait, but could get no answers. With no choice but to wait and see what happened next, they bought food from local vendors, washed up as best they could from a single available water spigot, and stayed close to the car through the night.

  To everyone’s immense relief, another train picked them up at dawn, and they headed west toward the Netherlands once again. Before they arrived at the Dutch border, however, they were twice more shunted to a siding and made to wait without an explanation. Finally, they were attached to a long express train headed for Vlissingen, in the Netherlands, where with luck they might catch a night boat to England.

  But first there was another inspection to negotiate at Rheine, in Westphalia.

  Before disembarking, Martha put on Lydia’s diamond bracelets, necklaces, and earrings and carried her luggage from the car for customs inspection. Her bags were casually opened and OK’d without a search. The refugees’ luggage received considerably different treatment. Every possession of value, from silver to jewelry to cash, was confiscated. The Nazi officials even removed wedding rings from refugees’ fingers and forced the women to hand over the small gold rings in their pierced ears.

  Martha remained on the platform while the group re-boarded to make sure that no one in the transport was detained. As she stood there, she heard her name being shouted from the rear of the customs shed. She ran back and through the door before the guards could stop her and found the two reporters, their bags torn apart on a table in front of them. They had, for some reason, raised the guards’ suspicion. One of them was trying to show a letter with the US seal to the guards.

  Martha’s semester of graduate-school German and the lessons she and Waitstill were taking from Professor Albin Goldschmeid, one of their clients, became very useful.

  “Have you orders to arrest these men?” she asked.

  “No,” one of the Nazis answered. “But we must get special permission from headquarters before they can leave.”

  Martha then took a calculated risk. Based on her brief experience with the Nazis, she believed their police woul
d act only on a direct order. If an unusual circumstance arose, they did not dare use their own judgment. Like Waitstill, she also counted on their reluctance to provoke an American. She took the letter from the journalist. It was written by Ambassador Carr, vouching for the men as reliable friends of the United States. Waving the letter in front of the guards, she translated, noting that the men were under her protection as an American citizen. She announced emphatically that she would not leave without them.

  At that moment, the engineer signaled with his whistle that the train was about to depart. Martha swallowed back her fear that it would leave without her and the two reporters. “I will call my government if you insist on holding these men,” she said to the German officer.

  The Germans conferred among themselves in low voices. Martha folded her arms and waited silently.

  “They may go,” the officer said at last. Martha swallowed hard once more. She’d gambled and won.

  She helped the wire-service reporters stuff their belongings back into their bags and sprinted with them to the train. They reached the border without further problems, but the ordeal was not quite ended. They now had to deal with Dutch customs inspectors. The station was filled with refugees, whole families with children and little babies who’d been able to get out of Germany but now were being refused permission to enter Holland on their way to England, where they had jobs or relatives. There they sat at the German-Dutch frontier, afraid to go back, unable to go forward. Martha took down their names and passport information and promised to get in touch with their families when she got to England.

  The Dutch officials came aboard and again their visas and passports were examined. They asked Martha for the names of those in her party, and she gave them her list to check against their documents. Suddenly, Martha heard someone call her name.

  The two newspapermen were in trouble once more. The Dutch officials had ordered them off the train and were going to send them back to Germany because their names did not appear on Martha’s list. Trembling with fear, they were standing on the platform with their luggage. Martha had to think quickly. She recalled,