Defying the Nazis

by Artemis Joukowsky

  I asked the passport officer for my list and realized instantly that we’d neglected to add their names to it back in Prague. There was one chance of rescuing them. I found the doctor with the green-ink pen and used it to add their names on the reverse side. Just as the train was about to depart, I found the passport officer.

  “These two men are in my party,” I told him. “You should have turned over the list.” He was dubious. “I am sure the names were not there before,” he said. I assured him that they were—it was just an oversight—and that the two men were part of my transport. Shaking his head, the official OK’d their passports and we all climbed aboard the train once again. This second near-miss drained me emotionally. Such a thin line between life and death!

  The farther west they proceeded from the German border the more relaxed they became. Their luck even improved. In the dining car, where Martha went to get a cup of coffee, a charming couple, both Czechs traveling on British passports, asked her about the transport. When she explained who they were, and how they were essentially penniless, they casually pressed fifty pounds sterling in Martha’s hand, saying that she could pay them back in London if she liked. Feeling suddenly rich, Martha went back to the fourth-class car and brought all thirty-five of her charges to the diner for their first real meal in more than a day.

  Night fell. At about ten o’clock, the train pulled onto the dock at Vlissingen. The night boat was waiting. The refugees wearily gathered their things and lined up on the dock, waiting to be checked aboard the vessel. An official emerged from his office in the distance. In the dark, he called out in English, “Is Mrs. Sharp here? Does anybody know whether she and her party got through?”

  “Here I am!” Martha called.

  “How many did you get out with you?” he asked as he approached her.

  “All of them.”

  “Thank God!” he said, and led her back to his office. She handed the official her stack of fourth-class tickets.

  “Wait just a moment,” he said, then disappeared out the door. Moments later he returned, grinning broadly. “I can put you all in berths—with a little doubling up! And this will be at the company’s expense!”

  Martha was near tears. After all that she and all the refugees had been through, to hear, in English, a message of kindness and consideration for her tired and emotionally exhausted group nearly overwhelmed her.

  She and the official assigned everyone rooms aboard the boat. Then she took the excited children on deck. They had never been on such a large vessel or even seen the sea. As the ship pulled away into the North Sea, Martha turned their attention to the night sky and pointed out the major stars and constellations.

  The next morning they were met at the dock by Margaret Stevenson, president of the British Unitarian Women and a representative of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia.

  To an anxious group waiting for people who were not on the boat from Holland, Martha showed the list of refugees she had encountered at the frontier and the telephone number of the train station. A couple on the dock saw the names of relatives on the list and hurried to the telephone. They somehow got through and were soon speaking to their family members.

  The British Committee took the group to the hotel for a bath and breakfast. As they walked along, Margaret Stevenson could not resist a bit of teasing. “My dear,” she said to Martha, “your face looks as if you have been in a coal bin. But your diamonds are glorious!” Martha had completely forgotten that she still was wearing Lydia Busch’s jewels.

  Martha treated the members of the transport to a bus tour of London that morning before dropping them off at the British Committee offices to begin their new lives. As she finally said good-bye to them all, the doctor stepped forward to present her with a thank-you note from the group, written in green ink. “Dear Mrs. Sharp,” it read. “We shall never forget what you have done for us and wish to thank you from the depths of our hearts. Yours and gratefully.” Twenty members of the transport signed the note, found, carefully preserved, among Martha’s papers more than sixty years later. One of those who signed is Heinz Oestreicher, who escaped to England with his family and then reentered the RAF as Henry Walsh to fight the Nazis.

  Martha wrote reports to New York and Boston, and wired Aunt Edna in Wellesley Hills to assure the Stebbinses, as well as Martha Content and Hastings, that she and Waitstill were safe and well. She met with Jan Masaryk, who debriefed Martha and then entrusted her with several messages to be delivered upon her return to Prague. Some of them were concealed in toothpaste tubes.

  Then Martha moved on to Paris to confer with Malcolm Davis of the Carnegie Endowment and others on how best to assist the many artists and intellectuals—the so-called Kulturträgers, or bearers of the culture, as the imperiled intellectuals and artists sometimes were known—still trapped in the protectorate. An emergency committee of French thinkers and artists and diplomats arranged for French visas to automatically be issued for these individuals on Martha’s authority. Don and Helen Lowrie agreed to head a committee focused on finding teaching positions and other employment for the émigrés as they came out of the protectorate. Dr. Clayton Williams, minister of the American Church in Paris, where the Sharps attended services, offered office space for the Lowries’ committee.

  Martha allowed herself a single indulgence during her brief stay in Paris, a new hat. Then on Wednesday, April 5, she boarded the Orient Express at 3:40 p.m. and was bound once more for Prague.

  The train carried only a few passengers out of Paris, and for the first several hours Martha’s journey was uneventful. Toward dinner time, still in France, a military transport was added to the train, as was a dining car. Unfortunately for Martha, her walk to and from dinner that night took her through a long string of coaches filled with rowdy French soldiers.

  She knew that the German frontier was just ahead, and that she’d have to show her papers at the border. But the long days of work and worry and short nights of sleep finally caught up with her. After dinner, Martha lay down in her dressing gown and shut her eyes.

  Her next conscious impression was the sound of a key turning the lock on her compartment door, which then loudly slammed open to the limit of the chain bolt. At first, Martha assumed it was the steward. Then she looked up to see a crowd of drunken French soldiers pushing against the door, trying to get at her. One of them was able to grab the coverlet and pull it off her.

  Confused and terrified, she rang for the steward. No answer. The laughing, shouting soldiers yanked again and again at the door as Martha pressed against it from the inside, hoping that the four small screws holding the bolt anchor to the door jamb wouldn’t break, as they appeared likely to at any moment. The door handle already had fallen clattering to the floor.

  “Then,” she recalled, “the cursing, laughing men stopped. There was a short silence. I heard the conductor and the steward coming through the car, checking tickets as we slowed for the German border. When I told the steward what had just occurred, he expressed his regrets and said the French military transports would not cross the frontier.”

  Still thoroughly frightened, Martha nevertheless composed herself in time to deal with the Nazi border agents. They gave her US passport a respectful look and searched her suitcase. A young officer commented on what a lot of papers she was carrying but did not attempt to examine them. He made no mention of her several tubes of toothpaste.

  The great Orient Express picked up steam once again and rolled eastward into the night. Martha slept in her clothes. The next morning, with the French troopers long since gone, the walk to the dining car was peaceful and brief. She made no mention of her previous night’s ordeal at the breakfast table that she shared with three businessmen, but was not surprised to hear one of them mention that the steward was under arrest.

  The charge, however, was a surprise. The negligence that nearly had gotten her gang-raped, or worse, had nothing to do with why the steward was taken from the train. His crime, according
to the businessmen, had been currency smuggling.

  Waitstill greeted Martha at the Wilson Station that Thursday night, April 6, with news that the Germans had requisitioned the entire Hotel Atlantic, so he had moved them to the Hotel Pariz, about half a mile away by foot. The Pariz turned out to be a very welcome upgrade. The hotel was (and remains today) an Art Nouveau citadel, a lovely structure of beautiful interiors. The room rate was ninety korunas a night, at which Waitstill must have winced.

  In the cab on the way to the hotel, he motioned for Martha not to speak aloud and pointed at the driver’s back by way of explanation. After the short respite in London and Paris, where such precautions were as yet unknown and unnecessary, Martha felt herself quickly slip back into the habits of silence, fear, and distrust. The hopefulness of sunny April days in Paris immediately gave way to the wintry reality of Prague.

  When they entered their new room at the Pariz, Waitstill silently looked under the beds, in the closets and bathroom, and every place large enough for a recording machine. Finally he took off his jacket and draped it over the telephone.

  “Last week, I found my bed wired for sound,” he explained. “There was a machine hidden underneath. I disconnected it.” The next day, as Waitstill had been conversing with a Czech engineering professor in the room, a man identifying himself as a telephone repairman had arrived to adjust the room handset, he said. After he left, the engineer had examined the telephone and explained to Sharp that it was now a microphone, capable of picking up and transmitting conversations in the room. He showed Waitstill how to foil the device by covering it with a thick piece of cloth, such as a jacket.

  Henceforth, Waitstill warned Martha, they had to assume that every telephone in Prague also had been “adjusted” in the same way. Similarly, he said, if they attempted to access a forbidden radio station, it was imperative to spin the dial afterward so there’d be no trace.

  Then he produced a sheaf of much-delayed letters from Aunt Edna, the first news of their children since they’d arrived six weeks before. “She wrote as from another world,” Martha recalled,

  long newsy accounts of the children. Hastings had required a vaccination and booster, which he took “like a stoic,” as Aunt Edna put it, and later made “scornful comments on those who cried.” He was bringing home good grades from school.

  Martha Content was growing. She now weighed 25 pounds and her slips were beginning to look like “longish shirts” and her dresses just barely covered her panties. Aunt Edna felt that Hastings might be experiencing resentment over the attention given to his younger sister, so she became especially mindful of giving our son “equal time,” and calling him “dear” or “darling” as often as she did little Martha. I was strengthened in the sense that the children were in good and loving hands.

  Within a few days Martha and Waitstill had assembled a thick file on Czech Kulturträgers who required immediate rescue. Waitstill left for Paris with the dossiers on Saturday, April 15. Martha had intended to accompany him but decided at the last minute that she had too much pressing business in Prague. Ever since the Einmarsch both Sharps had realized that their mission was now a moment-to-moment endeavor, conducted under the Nazis’ increasingly intense and hostile scrutiny. Time was drawing short; even the loss of a moment’s work could cost lives.

  On Monday morning, April 17, Martha arrived at Vysehradska 16 to discover that the Germans had forcefully evicted American Relief from their third-floor offices. All their furniture lay in a pile on the sidewalk in the snow. With the help of the volunteers, she found new operating space at Studensky Domov, a cramped student bungalow not far away.

  Waitstill wrote her from Paris on April 19, after learning of the incident:

  You are not only beautiful, but a brick. That rare combination spells out the PERFECT WOMAN, the answer to the quest of the ages. I really mean this—Venus and Minerva cast in one blended statue of loveliness and wisdom. THAT’S YOU. Ever, my beloved madam, your most fortunate servant, Waitstill.

  On April 23, Martha left Prague to join Waitstill in Paris, where visas were being prepared for the Czech artists, intellectuals, and “politicals” on their endangered list. Don and Helen Lowrie and their committee were busy finding jobs for them. The Sharps returned on April 30 to Prague, where their first priority was to contact those Kulturträgers for whom visas or employment had been secured.

  High on Martha’s list was Jan Blahoslav (“J.B.”) Kozak, a prominent Protestant thinker and professor of philosophy at Charles University. Kozak had aroused the Nazis’ attention as head of the local Thomas Mann Society, a strongly antifascist group of intellectuals then active across Europe in helping their colleagues and one another escape persecution.

  As Martha approached the professor’s residence, she could hear a deeply sad violin solo from within. After she knocked several times the music stopped and a maid timidly peeped out the front door. Martha quickly tried to explain who she was and why she had come. Kozak himself then appeared, violin in hand.

  “Don’t you realize you’ve endangered yourself by coming to my home?” he asked sternly.

  “I have a very important matter to discuss with you,” Martha replied. “Why are you so apprehensive?”

  The professor had no end of reasons for apprehension, all stemming from the Nazis’ adamant refusal to let him leave the protectorate. “I am suspect,” he told Martha, “and everyone who sees me is suspect.”

  The older of Kozak’s two sons had escaped to join the French air force, and the professor interpreted his problems with the German authorities as reprisal. He told Martha that he might have escaped along with the older boy, but his wife was seriously ill with cancer, and they had the much younger second son to worry about.

  “I have tried every means to leave this country,” he said. “The last excuse the Nazis gave for denying me exit permission is that they accuse me of being non-Aryan. I brought them my family tree to prove we’ve been gentiles for ten generations on both sides.”

  Martha handed the professor a letter inviting him to join the faculty at Oberlin College in Ohio. In most cases, such a letter would trigger issue of the necessary travel documents, and the lucky invitee would be as good as gone from Prague. But Kozak was a special case.

  “It’s no use,” he told her. “I know they won’t give me an Ausreise. It would take a miracle.” He added that he would not leave without his family.

  Martha asked him if he would at least apply for a passport.

  Kozak said he would, just because she had made such an effort on his behalf. But he held no hope of securing the vital exit visa. “It will be for no good!” he said.

  “Let me worry about that,” Martha said as she prepared to leave. On the way out the door, she noticed a man standing in the window of a house across the street. When he saw Martha, he raised a camera and took a picture of her.

  Consul General Irving Linnell, who with Ambassador Carr’s recent departure had become the senior US diplomat in the protectorate, was a veteran and battle-tested foreign-service professional. His last posting had been Canton, China, which Linnell had fled the previous autumn, just ahead of the advancing Japanese columns.

  The Sharps and the consul general had come to know one another better as Martha and Waitstill had appeared repeatedly at the embassy in support of Czech academics and intellectuals seeking US visas.

  Linnell warmly received Martha in his office. After she explained the situation, he was more than willing to intervene on the Kozaks’ behalf. “This is probably a tough one, Martha,” he said. But Linnell also had a potential solution. “Suppose I call up the Gestapo,” he said, “and ask whether they’ll give him and his family an Ausreise as a personal favor to me?”

  “That would be wonderful,” said Martha. “I hope with all my heart that you succeed.”

  Against all reasonable expectations, Linnell succeeded in getting exit visas for the Kozak family. “They said okay!” he reported with delight to Martha by telephone th
e next day. “Send your professor around as soon as possible.” In less than two weeks, an incredulous J.B. Kozak, together with his wife and youngest son, were safely bound by steamer for the United States, where they rode out the war years at Oberlin.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Money Talks

  The second stage of Waitstill’s covert refugee finance program—which he would later describe as “the most risky and perhaps the most dramatic aspect of the operation in Czechoslovakia”—began with tentative outreach to the wealthier individuals, Jews and gentiles, still hoping to slip out of the protectorate before it was too late. Besides their prominence and their peril, many of these individuals shared a problem—no access to the hard currency necessary to finance their escape.

  Within occupied Czechoslovakia they could not liquidate their property—land, buildings, inventory, personal effects—for dollars, pounds, or any other hard currency lest the ever-vigilant Reich instantly seize the proceeds. Their Czech korunas, nominally worth about twenty to the dollar, were spendable only inside the protectorate; they were valueless elsewhere.

  This was the financial gap that Sharp would bridge. Carefully, he let it be known through intermediaries that a mechanism was now in place for those holding korunas to trade their currency inside the protectorate for dollars or pounds or francs held in accounts outside the protectorate, and therefore safe from the Nazis’ greedy fingers.

  “People approached me in increasing numbers,” he remembered, “complicating my safety problem. They’d open a briefcase or a small trunk or go into large pouches under their suit coats and pull out bales of Czech money. I soon stipulated that I did not want to see notes in denominations of less than a thousand korunas. I agreed to exchange their Czech money with US currency from what was left of our operating funds. There was a sliding scale: the most needy getting the best rate of exchange. They couldn’t cross the border with foreign currency so I went in and out of Prague seven times and placed the dollars in banks strategically in Geneva, London, and Paris, so that if they could escape their money would be waiting for them.”