Defying the Nazis

by Artemis Joukowsky

  By June, the Anglo-American colony in Prague had shrunk to no more than a couple dozen diplomats and aid workers. Although the circle clearly was closing, the upside was that with fewer nationals to watch over, consular officers such as Irving Linnell could act on their behalf more quickly.

  The day after their return, Martha realized that she had acquired a permanent Gestapo minder, installed in the room next door. “One morning when I went to the office door,” she remembered, “I saw him outside posing as a relief worker, questioning the people as to why they were there. They told him everything, thinking they were safe.”

  After weeks of practice, Martha was adept at losing a tail. But this particular minder soon was inhabiting her head as well. “His evil face and burning eyes began to appear in my dreams,” she said. “His ruthless look made me shiver.” Henceforth, she would rarely be alone.

  In mid-July, she received a surprise visit from the vice president of the Czech National Women’s Council, who explained that the council needed her help. Frantiska Plaminkova, founder and president of the council, as well as a former senator, Czech representative to the League of Nations, and a prominent feminist, was returning to the protectorate after some meetings and a lecture tour abroad. The council leadership feared that the outspokenly antifascist Plaminkova—known familiarly as “Pani” or sometimes “Plam”—faced almost certain arrest and imprisonment.

  “We must prevent her from returning,” the woman said. “She has turned aside every effort which we have made personally, in letters, to dissuade her from coming back. We feel she does not understand how difficult and changed life is here now, and that she can be of more help to us on the outside.”

  “Why do you tell me all of this?” Martha asked.

  “Because we feel you understand what is happening,” she answered, “and because we feel she will listen to you.”

  Martha was doubtful but agreed to help if possible.

  Plam was expected in two days at Lovosice, known in German as Lobositz, which coincidentally was the site in 1756 of the first battle of the Seven Years’ War. “Since we heard you have been able to go in and out of the country,” she continued, “we hoped you might be willing to meet her at the border and explain to her why she must turn back. If she still insists on coming in, you will journey back with her and be a witness if the Nazis try to abduct Plam and take her to prison. She has been saying some strong things about them!”

  Martha considered the question overnight, weighing the risk to herself and to the mission against the importance of trying to protect such a leading figure in Czech political life. She decided to give it a try. On the morning of Tuesday, July 18, Martha took a five o’clock train out of Prague for the German border, where she showed her papers, carefully counted and registered the korunas in her possession, and then set out on a short walking tour as she awaited Plaminkova’s train to arrive from Switzerland.

  She had brought along her camera, and was clicking away when suddenly she heard a voice behind her. It was a German officer on a bicycle. “Do you like to take pictures?” he asked casually.

  “Very much,” she replied.

  “Would you like to see some of the picturesque spots?” he wondered.

  “Yes,” she said cautiously. “But I must be here to meet the train from Switzerland.”

  “We shall be back in time,” he said. “I must be here for that too.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I must check the passports. Don’t you remember me? I checked your American passport when you came off the train. I couldn’t imagine why an American lady was getting off here. But now I see that you are a photographer.”

  Worried lest the officer suspect her of spying, Martha explained that she had not come to take pictures but to meet an older woman, whom she’d help with the balance of her trip.

  “What is her name?” he inquired.

  She hesitated, uncertain if Plaminkova might be on a border watch list. “Oh, she has a funny Czech name you’ll never remember.”

  “I will show you!” he said genially. “Tell me and I will introduce you to the commandant who will let you through the wicket before the others, as soon as her train stops, so you can join her at once.”

  There was no way out. Martha could not very well say she didn’t know the woman. At least it would give her more time to talk with Plaminkova while they checked the rest of the train.

  “Pani Plaminkova,” she said.

  The German officer laughed. “No wonder you thought I wouldn’t remember,” he said. “It is a funny name.”

  They walked on to the edge of town where Martha noticed that a whole section of houses had been gutted by fire. The officer pointed at the ruined structures. “See these?” he said. “They are the houses Jews lived in.”

  “What happened to them?” she asked.

  “We blew them up!” he said, pride in his voice.

  Martha instinctively wanted to document what he said. “Let me take your picture,” she asked. “Won’t you pose in front of the houses?”

  “No,” he answered. “I don’t like the composition.”

  Martha got her pictures anyway.

  When the train from Switzerland pulled into the station, she was led as promised to the front of the line to board first. Her escort, a young passport officer, pointed out Frantiska Plaminkova, then moved on to check the other passengers, saving Martha a potentially sticky moment. Plaminkova was mystified and wary of her.

  “I quickly explained my mission,” Martha recalled. “I begged her with all the strength at my command not to go into the Protectorate.”

  Plaminkova was immovable on the subject.

  “Shall I stay in comfort on the outside, while my women are suffering?” she asked. “Shall I have to go about with my lips sealed, so as not to endanger them while I do nothing to help? No! I must go back and fight. But I am most grateful to you for being willing to accompany me to see that I arrive safely in Prague.”

  Martha recognized the same implacable resolve she had seen in Norbert Capek. Logic dictated that if they stayed in the protectorate both no doubt would pay with their lives. In neither case, however, was logic a principal consideration.

  The train bumped to life. The passport officer called auf Wiedersehen as they passed by. “Thank you very much!” Martha shouted back.

  She was apprehensive about the Gestapo guards at the frontier, but Plaminkova reassured her that her visa was good. “I went all the way to Berlin,” she explained, “to get permission to enter the jaws of the wolf!”

  But to what end? she thought to herself.

  The next morning Martha overslept, and in the rush to catch the streetcar had forgotten a paper she needed for a meeting that day. She hurried back to the room to find people in it. A maid was running her hand over the new bed mattress. A man sat at the desk, reading papers from the drawers. They were equally surprised to see Martha, who realized that she should leave her hotel room as nonchalantly as possible. “Oh, excuse me,” she said, “I will just be in your way.” Closing the door behind her, she was serene. Gertrude Baer’s lessons in London had come in handy once again. Anything of potential interest to the Germans already had been turned to ashes and flushed down the toilet. All she’d preserved were the letters from home.

  The increased surveillance was no surprise to Martha. The Germans had been clamping down on foreign refugee groups for some time. In mid-April, American Relief (and probably all other foreign relief agencies) had been evicted from their headquarters at the former Ministry of Public Health. At about the same time, the Gestapo took in Beatrice Wellington of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia for grueling interrogation, during which time she was made to stand for six hours. All British Committee staff, except for the indomitable Wellington, returned home by May 9. Wellington would finally leave on August 3, shortly before Martha did.1

  At lunch that day with other aid workers the topic was Frantiska Plaminkova and her continuing
defiance of the Nazis, who had ordered Czech women to donate their furs to line German soldiers’ winter coats. The Wehrmacht had tried to enlist Plam in the campaign, but she adamantly refused. “My women will assist the poor,” she said, “as well as the sick and homeless. They will work for peace. But they will not move to enable you to carry on a war.”

  After the invasion of Poland, Plam was briefly arrested. She was rearrested in 1942 and taken to Terezin, where, according to what Martha learned, she was tortured. On June 30 of that year, Plam was executed in another Nazi reprisal for the ambush assassination of Reinhard Heydrich.2

  The Germans finally shut down all refugee aid programs on July 25. The volunteers at American Relief by then had interviewed and enrolled 3,500 would-be émigrés. Security dictated that no master list ever be prepared.

  Over the several weeks leading up to July 25, Waitstill repurposed a few bales of korunas to help young people—mostly students—make their own escapes from the protectorate. A favorite route took them northeast of Prague into the rich coal region on the border with Poland.

  As Waitstill described it, the student refugees donned mining gear and headed down into the mines, crossed under the border into Poland, and then reemerged on the other side. There, members of the Polish resistance took over, conveying some of the émigrés north to the Baltic port of Gdynia, where British submarines picked them up by night. Many ended up in the Allied armed forces.

  Waitstill was very proud of his role as financier of this underground railroad. His standard donation was ten thousand korunas per student. An unknown number of these otherwise doomed young men and women were rescued as a result.

  But these final weeks also brought him his most bitter and painful failure. Despite Martha and Waitstill’s considerable efforts, all eight of the young Sudeten Jews who ran their refugee office—four couples—eventually died in concentration camps. In the case of one couple, a simple typographical error—an “O” instead of a “D” for a middle initial on the British visa application—led some bureaucrat somewhere to deny the application and thus consign the two to the gas chambers.

  On August 7, his penultimate day in Prague, Waitstill met with Karl Deutsch’s father, Martin, who had finally perfected his own escape plans for Sweden. If nothing went awry, Martin soon would be reunited with his wife, Maria.

  But suddenly a glitch had occurred.

  “Mr. Sharp,” he said, “I am in a very serious emergency. If we cannot solve it, it may cost me my life. I have everything arranged but have just been told that the Swedes accept only hard currency for the ferry ride from Sassnitz to Malmo. I cannot raise the three dollars and twenty-eight cents American that I need. What can I do?”

  By this time Waitstill was not at all surprised to hear that a human life hinged on $3.28.

  “In my pocketbook,” he later said, “I happened to have a hoard of five one-dollar bills, which I kept against such an emergency as this. I gave Martin Deutsch four dollars. He said, ‘This is my ticket to life.’ It was the last I saw of him.”

  Martin Deutsch successfully escaped to Sweden, where he rejoined his wife. The Deutsches subsequently made their way to New York City, where they lived out their years in peace in an apartment on the corner of Seventy-Fifth and Broadway.

  Karl Deutsch’s in-laws were not so fortunate. According to their granddaughter, Margaret Carroll, Hugo and Hermione Slonitz “were convinced that what happened couldn’t happen. They didn’t try to leave until it was too late. They first were transported to Terezin and then to Auschwitz, where they perished, as did one of my mother’s sisters.”3

  Waitstill left Prague for the last time on August 8 to address a meeting in Arcegno, Switzerland, of young people sponsored by the International Association of Religious Freedom. When he tried to return to Czechoslovakia, his Ausreise was confiscated and he was not allowed back in. He nervously waited for Martha in Paris.

  Martha hoped to remain in the protectorate until as near as possible to their sailing date, August 30. However, on August 14, a Monday, Jaroslav Kosé, former Czech representative to the ILO in Geneva, warned her that the Gestapo intended to arrest her in two days. So Martha left for Paris aboard the first available train on August 15. Thirteen friends gathered to see her off at the station, laden with flowers and presents.

  Martha also was carrying pearls, gold bracelets and diamond rings for the wife of Pavel Eisner, a noted Czech literary scholar and translator. Her assignment was to deliver the jewelry into the safekeeping of novelist H. G. Wells in London.

  In Paris she rejoined her relieved husband for whom the five-day wait and the knowledge that she was in danger would have been almost unbearable. Uncertainty is hard for anyone, but for a man of Waitstill’s energy, and with his tendency to be proactive rather than passive, enjoying the safety of Paris while his beloved wife was still operating under the Nazis’ watch would have had him climbing walls.

  They met once more with Malcolm Davis, the Lowries, and other members of refugee aid organizations there. Martha took ill but continued to work from her bed, classifying the refugee cases in preparation for a final trip to London on August 23 (the day Josef Stalin and Joachim von Ribbentrop would conclude the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact).

  The Sharps spent just two full days in London, where Wells duly accepted Frau Eisner’s jewelry and even signed a receipt, which Martha preserved.

  They then returned to Paris on August 26 and filled their remaining days there with more refugee work and long strolls together through the city they both cherished.

  Martha would write of walking down the Champs-Élysées and after a dinner one night watching Notre Dame “fade into darkness.” They browsed through a flea market where Waitstill bought Martha a silver buckle. They hoped for a day trip to Chartres, but the trains were running late and there wasn’t time.

  On September 1, the day after the Sharps boarded the Queen Mary at Le Havre for New York, the Germans invaded Poland. Two days later, England and France declared war on Nazi Germany. “I was standing over the propellers when the British radio cracked out the news,” Waitstill recalled.

  We were summoned to the grand saloon where we heard the voice of Neville Chamberlain: “Calling all radio stations in the British Commonwealth of Nations, the Parliament of England declares a state of war obtains now between the United Kingdom of England, Ireland and Scotland and the Imperial German government.”

  We were no longer aboard a civilian ocean liner. We had become a war target. The course of our ship was changed to run north, for German submarines had been reported due west, waiting to sink this pride of the British fleet. Portholes were fastened and painted black to prevent light from showing, and nobody was allowed to smoke on deck at night.

  The order had been sent down from the captain’s bridge. “Give her the max!” The ship came alive, and we went up to very cold waters. She hit the great waves of the North Atlantic with such violence that the sea came right over the ship.

  The great ship steamed on past Newfoundland and then southwest for New York, where she safely berthed on September 4 with no further alarms. On September 3, while the Sharps were still at sea, the SS Athenia, a British passenger ship, became the first casualty in the Battle of the Atlantic. It was sunk by a German U-boat west of the Hebrides. One hundred and eighteen lives were lost.

  The Sharps felt the tension drain as they disembarked and headed for Grand Central Terminal to board the New York–New Haven train for Boston and home.

  “We were back in another world,” Martha later wrote. “Love, children’s arms, plentiful food, and the only thing that concerned Americans that September seemed to be which team would win the World Series.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The First Choice

  Martha and Waitstill returned as heroes to Wellesley Hills and the American Unitarian Association. That autumn the AUA laid on a heavy schedule of press interviews and public appearances—particularly for Martha—to capitalize on their new celebrit
y and to raise money as well.

  Accolades notwithstanding (as Waitstill put it, “[They] filled our cup”), the Sharps were slow to recover from their months of nervous stress, long hours, chronic illness, poor food, and emotional turmoil. Waitstill had been so wound up during the last hectic days in Prague that he found two days in Lucerne on the way to Paris after the Arcegno conference “nerve-wracking” instead of a respite.

  More troublesome from a parental perspective, despite the fine surrogate work done by the Stebbinses, Hastings and his little sister Martha Content had suffered from their father and mother’s long absence. It “had made them fearful that whenever we left the house we might not come back,” Martha remembered. “Fortunately, they were too young to understand the risks and the difficulties of living in the front seat of a tragedy during war conditions, which had been our daily lives. They did know that they needed us and they missed our love. And I knew that I missed them terribly. Every suffering refugee child had made me think of home and wonder how my children were. Since we sometimes were cut off from news for two or three weeks, the not knowing was even worse.”

  The Sharps might reasonably have collected their honors and resumed their old lives and responsibilities, assured that they had done more than their share. But they didn’t. Coordinating with the AUA Case Work Committee, which had been set up to support the Sharps’ work in Czechoslovakia, Martha and Waitstill continued to press the State Department for visas. During speech-making events, Martha tried to find people who might give affidavits of support, indicating that potential immigrants would not become public charges. Without these affidavits no visas would be issued.

  One of their few successes in Washington was to obtain visas for Dr. and Mrs. Albin Goldschmeid, who arrived in New York in mid-November of 1939. Dr. Goldschmeid had been their German tutor in Prague, hired perhaps as much to provide him with a small income as to learn the enemy’s language. The Goldschmeids stayed at the parsonage until they could find a place of their own.