Defying the Nazis

by Artemis Joukowsky

  Martha switched back and forth among several personas: mother, wife and social and political activist. Her schedule for November and December 1939 was a blur of conferences, sewing circle meetings, teas, dinners prepared at home for visiting clergy, speeches, school pageants, press appearances, and shopping trips. Among the few unscheduled days were Thanksgiving and Christmas. The only two dates that apparently were canceled were dances. Martha loved to dance.

  Just before Thanksgiving, she traveled with Robert Dexter to Washington to lobby Ernest Gruening, governor of the Alaska territory (and later a US senator), on behalf of Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes’s proposal to relocate as many as ten thousand non-quota refugees to the sprawling, remote, and underpopulated land. A proposal, the King-Havenner Bill, reached Congress the following year, but was voted down.

  Meantime, AUA leaders, including Waitstill, met to create a permanent organization that would carry the Unitarian message and continue humanitarian efforts in Europe during the war and in the world to come after the fighting stopped.1 The model would be the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), founded in 1917 for the relief of civilian victims of World War I.

  In early January 1940, Waitstill wrote to Dexter, suggesting that the new organization be called the Unitarian Service Committee (USC). “Prepare now,” he advised, “for a standing service record like that of the Quakers.” Nearly a quarter century later, the USC merged with the Universalist Service Committee to form the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC), a respected international social-change organization.

  Although Great Britain and France had declared war on Nazi Germany immediately after Hitler’s invasion of Poland, not much else of military significance happened right away. The so-called Phony War, or sitzkrieg, had set in, seven months in which the principal declared belligerents—Germany, Great Britain, and France—made no important moves against one another. Great Britain and France were focused on rearmament and mobilization, looking west across the Atlantic to the Roosevelt administration for much-needed money and materiel. The Germans were interested in consolidating their gains in Poland, and preparing for the next stage in the Führer’s grand design.

  In January of 1940, the AUA dispatched Dexter and his wife, Elisabeth, on another survey trip to Europe, this time to assess the Czech refugee situation outside the protectorate and then to return with recommendations for possible further action. The Dexters traveled through western Europe and Britain, meeting with contacts Martha and Waitstill had made the previous year. They discovered that the Sharp name, as Dexter put it in a letter, was “an open sesame here.”

  They reported back that Czech exiles in France, mostly intellectuals and civic leaders, were in great need of services, and they proposed opening a Unitarian center in Paris, funded at twenty thousand dollars a year, to aid Czech refugees and to act as liaison with their separated families wherever in unoccupied Europe they might be.2

  The obvious choices to head the new office were Martha and Waitstill, although they saw it otherwise. Dr. Eliot urged them to accept the challenge, writing to Waitstill,

  I most earnestly hope that the first act of the [Unitarian Service] Committee—after making Robert Dexter the Executive Director—will be to invite you and Martha to go to France as our ambassadors extraordinary. Then you will have to face a momentous decision. My personal hope is that you will decide to go. There just aren’t words to express my feeling of admiration and deep respect for what you two people have done and for what you are. My dream for the USC centers on you, and it is a very big dream.3

  The Sharps declined to be considered for the post. The leadership of the Wellesley Church, care of their children, and heavy speechmaking on behalf of the AUA was time-consuming enough. They felt that they had done, and were doing, their share. Martha, especially, didn’t want to leave Hastings and Martha Content yet again for another extended assignment to Europe.

  Before the Dexters returned, the Phony War turned real. In April of 1940, the Wehrmacht marched on Denmark and Norway. On May 10, German forces began to smash their way into Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Using tanks, Stuka dive-bombers, and ruthless aerial bombings, they took Holland in five days and Luxembourg, which had no army, in one. Belgium surrendered on May 28.4 That’s when the mass evacuation of Allied soldiers at Dunkirk began. This heroic water-borne rescue of close to 340,000 mostly British troops, as well as some French, Dutch, and Belgians, was the single bright moment in a catastrophic spring for the Allies.5

  On May 23, as the grim developments in Europe dominated the front page, Eliot summoned Waitstill to his third-floor office at 25 Beacon Street. The soft sell hadn’t worked, so he employed stronger tactics, offering the assignment again but not as an option.

  Waitstill was thunderstruck.

  “Dr. Eliot” he said, “my family has been broken up since early February of last year. I have two young children who need steady parenting. We’ve been eagerly counting upon a vacation at our lakeside cottage on Lake Sunapee.”

  At this Eliot exploded.

  “Vacation!” he shouted. “Europe is falling to pieces and you talk about vacation! I won’t hear the word! Let me tell you something. It is your moral obligation to go overseas and resume what you have proved you can do so ably. You must go! There is no debating it.”

  There was no further discussion and no debate.

  Waitstill went home and told Martha. She was as shocked as he was but could see no way to refuse, as Waitstill recalled:

  But we agreed, all things considered, including our future in the denomination, that this was the only thing that could be done. And more than any other factor was the point that Dr. Eliot made that we could land in Europe as no one else could and begin with the connections that had only been temporarily severed by the fall and winter of 1939–1940. This appealed to us as the compelling reason for doing what he demanded; I cannot say requested.

  When Dr. Eliot announced at the May meetings in Boston that the Sharps would be going to France, Martha burst into tears in the pew, even as their friends crowded around them to offer congratulations. She mumbled “thanks” through her tears. She had never fully agreed to go and leave the children again. Martha and Waitstill would not know it at the time, but looking back, Martha Content has said, “That was the beginning of when they began to lose each other.”

  It was a nearly silent drive back to Wellesley Hills. “We were hurt by Frederick Eliot’s assumption that his command was all that was needed,” Martha wrote, “and by his ruthless neglect of our right to decide what was best for our family. The implied threat to Waitstill’s future in the denomination, threatening to side-track his success in Wellesley Hills or questioning his suitability for another pulpit, was frightening. And Waitstill wasn’t the only one drafted. I was part of the package. The web was very strong.”

  When Martha and Waitstill arrived at the parsonage that evening, Martha Content ran to meet them at the door. “I hugged her so hard,” Martha recalled, “she wriggled free as a few of my tears dropped on her dress.”

  The AUA’s plans to send the Sharps directly to France were frustrated by the war’s sudden acceleration. On June 3, the Germans bombed Paris, which fell eleven days later. France was sliced into two zones, a northern one occupied by the Axis powers and a southern one that was not officially occupied but was controlled by Germany. The reactionary Marshal Philippe Pétain, then eighty-four, known as the Lion of Verdun for his command skills in World War I, was installed as head of the puppet regime at Vichy.

  Chaos reigned in France as a vast human tide—millions of civilians and soldiers—streamed south, immediately overwhelming the region’s limited resources. Food and fuel were particularly scarce, as was potable water. Many of the refugees suffered bullet and shrapnel wounds as the Germans intermittently strafed and shelled the long lines of vehicles snaking slowly along the choked roads.

  The Sharp family managed to shoehorn a two-day vacation into the brief and frenetic time
that Waitstill and Martha were given to prepare for their mission. It was decided that Hastings would head to camp for the summer. His sister would spend part of her time with the Stebbinses at the family cottage on Lake Sunapee, in western New Hampshire, and the rest with Marion Niles, at her summer house on Martha’s Vineyard.

  With the fall of France, President Roosevelt issued an order prohibiting all US vessels from entering French waters. Percival Brundage, a senior partner at Price Waterhouse, the accounting firm, and a member of the new Service Committee board, used his influence to secure passage for Waitstill and Martha out of New York to Portugal aboard a Pan Am flying boat.

  Martha Content accompanied her mother on several expeditions to purchase the numerous items unattainable in Europe. Martha tried to explain to her the purpose of all the activity, but Martha Content still was too young to understand.

  “Hastings,” Martha wrote, “hid his unhappiness by making believe he didn’t care, absenting himself, or being difficult. At age nine, he felt he was the head of the family when his father was not at home.”

  No one on either side of the family thought much of the expedition. “Mine pledged to help the children in case of need,” Martha reported. “Waitstill’s brothers did the same. Privately, they all thought we’d taken leave of our senses. Of course, they knew that Waitstill was a fighting idealist, but who goes off into a war situation and leaves his two small children when he doesn’t have to?”

  On Sunday, June 2, Reverend Sharp delivered a farewell sermon urging war. He was so vehement that the Boston Globe devoted about four inches of column text to it. Under the headline “WELLESLEY PASTOR URGES U.S. TO DECLARE WAR ON GERMANY,” the paper reported,

  Stating, “we have talked long enough of measures short of war,” Rev. Waitstill H. Sharp, minister of the Wellesley Hills Unitarian Church, today in his sermon called for immediate declaration of war by the United States upon Germany. Rev. Mr. Sharp, who is to go to France this month, said German victory with a goal of mastery would upset our sources of raw materials, and give Germany naval domination of trade routes and a “whiphand over satellite currency systems.” An immediate declaration of war would have the following five results, he said: “It would deter Italy in her dictator’s course of cheap opportunism: inject hope into the Allies and the neutrals; discourage the Germans; warn the Fifth Column workers of South and Central America; and fix the status of the Fifth Columnists in our own nation, before their plans are refined any further. We desperately want the Allies to win, but so far we are not willing to secure that victory by any sacrifice or by running any risk of sacrifice. This is a very unhealthy dilemma.”

  Waitstill’s stark oratory framed the issue succinctly, but in isolationist America he expressed a decidedly minority position. As for the Unitarians, perhaps a significant proportion agreed with him, however reluctantly, that war was the only possible answer to Nazi aggression. Others doubtlessly agreed with Reverend Leslie T. Pennington, the forty-one-year-old minister of the First Parish in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a family friend who was nonetheless critical of Waitstill’s war advocacy.

  Leave-taking was once again painful.

  “We tried to explain to the children that we loved them so much that we had to share our love with children in France who were in desperate need,” Martha remembered.

  “On the day Dr. Baker arrived to take us to the Back Bay Station, Martha Content stood in the library window, jumping up and down as she had sixteen months before, chanting, ‘Mommy going bye-bye!’ We kissed her and Hasty, who also shook hands with his father. Then we climbed aboard our old Ford with Ev Baker at the wheel and waved at the children until we turned the corner toward the turnpike to Boston.”

  That evening, the Sharps dined in New York with the Brundages. “E. P.,” as he was known to his friends, steered that evening’s conversation to a subject of personal concern—children. Brundage told his guests that he was on the board of the US Committee for the Care of European Children (USCOM). Although USCOM’s initial focus was to remove children from the dangers of the aerial war raging over Britain, as the war progressed it went on to remove children, including Jewish children, from other countries.

  “He thought that I might come across some children in France,” Martha recollected, “whose families also might like to have them escape the danger and privations of the war. If so, we should advise him and he would be glad to try to arrange for the US committee to bring them over and find homes for them.” His suggestion led to Martha’s major endeavor during the fall of that year: the rescue of twenty-seven children from Vichy France.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  In Lisbon

  At three-thirty on the afternoon of Monday, June 17, 1940, the Sharps boarded the Pan Am Dixie Clipper at New York’s newly opened LaGuardia International Airport, bound for Lisbon with a refueling stop in the Azores. Neither of them had much history with airplanes, and none with Pan Am’s recently introduced four-engine Boeing B-314 flying boats. “My limited flying experience,” Martha wrote, “was no preparation for the clipper, and any regular takeoff cannot compare to those old flying boats that needed a certain amount of surf, wind and speed to rise from the water. The noise in the cabin, the shaking of the ship, the long horizontal push when it seemed we couldn’t possibly rise, and then up, up and away, the blue Atlantic below, and the ships getting smaller and smaller. For almost forty-five minutes we were beguiled by this new sensation.”

  The cabin’s comfortable, upholstered seats were configured into sets of facing twins, similar to the seating in passenger train compartments. Across from Martha and Waitstill sat “a young Yalie,” as Martha put it, who turned out to be Whitelaw Reid II, grandson of the famous New York Herald editor. Reid was en route to England on newspaper business. Next to him sat a heavyset middle-aged man wearing a name tag that read “Vice President, Nirosta Corporation.”

  The passenger may have been anonymous, but Nirosta was not. Part of the giant Krupp basic industries in Germany—essentially the flywheel of Hitler’s war engine—Nirosta was a major international supplier of stainless steel sheets. Nirosta steel had been used in building both the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building in Manhattan. Also on board the Clipper were a number of Britons, as well as Myron Charles Taylor, the former CEO of US Steel, who now served as President Roosevelt’s special ambassador to the Vatican. Taylor, who did not look well to Martha, was accompanied by his wife, a personal physician, and a secretary. Two hours into the flight, the steward emerged from the cockpit with curious news. Due to weather conditions, he announced, they had changed course for Bermuda. “Mrs. Taylor,” according to Martha, “already was knocking on the door of the cockpit, objecting to the decision. She insisted we go across according to the original plan, because the delay would not be good for Mr. Taylor’s health. Meanwhile, I saw ‘Vice President, Nirosta Corporation’ across from me throw up his hands and mumble, ‘It’s all up with me.’ Then he began to sweat. As the perspiration rolled down his face, I asked what was wrong. He didn’t answer, but began to wring his hands until his knuckles were white. His face grew redder and redder.”

  They landed in Bermuda, in perfect weather, at about nine-thirty that evening. British officials met them as they disembarked. Since the United Kingdom was now at war, they explained, passengers, no matter what their nationality, were required to surrender all personal belongings: luggage, briefcases, wallets, purses, personal papers—everything.

  Martha noticed that “the ‘V.P.’ had now perspired not just through his shirt, but also through his jacket. Whitelaw Reid whispered to me that he was going to the weather station to check on the flying weather.” The passengers were taken by bus to the Belmont Manor, a seaside hotel where the Sharps were given a room with a lovely view of the ocean. At dinner they learned that two British passengers were members of Parliament, returning home from US lecture tours. Two others were Irish antique dealers, caught by the outbreak of war in the United States, where they had
been hunting antiques to repatriate. Reid reported to the group that no one on the island seemed willing to discuss the weather with him, as if it were a military secret. The man from Nirosta said nothing at all.

  The passengers did a bit of sightseeing the next day, then late in the afternoon boarded their B-314 for the Azores—minus the man from Nirosta. As they cleared Bermuda’s hills, they saw a convoy of twelve ships lying at anchor. Martha learned that seventy-five vessels had assembled in Bermuda the previous week, then departed together for an undisclosed location. Above the clouds, they saw a rainbow, then the sea was lit by a full moon and stars bigger than any Waitstill and Martha had ever seen before.

  Next morning they refueled at Horta in the Azores. Reid had excused himself to check on the weather once again and had not yet returned when the refueling was complete and reboarding for Lisbon begun. Once everyone but Reid was aboard, Mrs. Taylor imperiously demanded that they leave without the newspaperman. The captain demurred, explaining that some weeks there were but one or two flights in and out of Horta.

  “So we waited,” Martha remembered. “Fortunately, Reid soon made his appearance, only to be stopped at the doorway by Mrs. Taylor. ‘Young man,’ she scolded, ‘don’t enter this airplane until you tell me where you’ve been. Don’t you know you’ve held us all up?’ ‘I was wiring my mother,’ he answered meekly. ‘You should have stayed home with your mother!’ the ambassador’s wife barked. With that, Reid slid into his seat, fastened his belt, and we took off.”

  The Dixie Clipper slowed, circled, and descended to lightly skim the waves of Lisbon’s broad Tagus River, gliding to stop at its berth at just after seven on Thursday evening, June 20. Because hotel space in Lisbon was scarce to non-existent, the Sharps and most of the rest of the passengers were driven by bus to the resort town of Estoril, about fifteen miles away, where rooms awaited them at the Hotel d’Italia.