Defying the Nazis

by Artemis Joukowsky

  She also would be allowed to take the children of foreign and stateless refugees from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere, whose citizenship had been revoked by the Nazis—provided that none were more than sixteen years of age.

  To assemble a group under these restrictions would be a challenge. Besides Joseph and Alex Strasser, Martha would select the six daughters, aged six to fourteen, of Edouard Theis, the liberal Protestant pastor in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon whom she’d met in August.

  There were thirteen-year-old triplets from Czechoslovakia, Amélie, Eveline, and Marianne Diamant, and three-year-old Mercedes Brown, the youngest of the children, and her seven-year-old brother, Clément. Irina and Alexis Okounieff joined the group with their seven-year-old son, Nicholas, as did the Vakar sisters, Catherine and Anna, thirteen and eleven, the French-born daughters of Russian émigrés whom the Okounieffs had befriended in Pau. Andre du Bouchet, sixteen, the oldest child, came with his fourteen-year-old sister, Helene. Their father and mother made the trip as well.

  At the eleventh hour, Catherine and Anna Vakar, thirteen and eleven, also made the trip. As Catherine remembered it, “My father said to Mrs. Sharp, ‘If you could only include my girls in the group of children to go to America,’ and she said, ‘Well, the group is full.’ And as it turned out, at the last minute, two boys did not show up. And my sister and I were included.” Accompanied by their mothers were Helene Vincent, nine; Germaine Triscos, ten; and Gerard Fuchs, six. Traveling with neither parent nor sibling were Wolfgang Fleischmann and Pierre Garai, both twelve; Hans Frank, eleven; Tes Huger, ten; Stephen Hawthorne, five; and Eva Feigl, fourteen.

  All the children’s histories were remarkable but none more so than that of Eva Feigl, who would later take her mother’s name, Rosemarie. She was a native Viennese like the Strasser boys and an only child, born into a life of privilege and ease only to see her world shattered by the Nazi Anschluss of March 1938. Eva remembered the Austrian sky turning black with Nazi warplanes, “like flies over Vienna.” Eight months later came the terrors of Kristallnacht.

  Franz and Rosemarie Feigl harbored no illusions about the Nazi agenda and taught their only child to fear for her life. As it happened, Franz, an attorney, previously had served as court-appointed counsel for a young Nazi who’d been arrested at a demonstration. Feigl had won the case, and his client had gone free. Soon after the Anschluss, the same young man came to the Feigl house with a warning for Frau Feigl that her husband was among those Jews already marked for arrest.

  “We’re going to come to get Dr. Feigl,” he said. “When we come I don’t want to find him here.”

  Eva’s father fled at once to Genoa, where his brother worked in the Austrian consulate. Eva remained in Vienna with her mother until January 1939. By then, the Nazis’ overt campaign against Jews had intensified to the point where people threw stones at Eva and other Jewish children each day as they walked to their religious school. Her maternal grandparents, who like most members of the family would not survive the Holocaust, sent her and her mother to join Franz in Genoa.

  The Feigls left Italy on a forged Belgian visa. In time they made their way to Marseille, where, by the summer of 1940, they were running out of money and hope. Franz, prevented from working, spent every free moment making the rounds of the foreign consulates in Marseille, searching without success for some avenue of escape before the Nazis came for him. It was in the course of these daily visits that he met Martha and arranged with her to save his daughter from the Gestapo. “My father,” remembers his daughter, “went from trying to get visas to go anywhere that was plausible. That’s how he met Martha Sharp who saved my life.”

  After returning to the United States, Martha would get both Franz and Rosemarie out as well.

  As late as October 20, 1940, Martha hoped to have the children on a boat for New York by the end of the month. No such luck, however. Not only were their US entry visas still held up, but complications now arose with the Spanish and Portuguese too.

  First, Portuguese authorities changed their rules to require that all visa applications be sent to Lisbon rather than be handled in Marseille as before. Then the Spaniards decided that they would not issue transit visas unless both Portuguese and US visas already were affixed to each applicant’s passport.

  At Harry Bingham’s personal request, the US ambassador to Spain successfully interceded with Madrid. Herbert Pell in Lisbon wired to report—incorrectly as it turned out—that the Portuguese would issue visas without requiring direct application from Martha and Helen Lowrie in Marseille. A new sailing date of November 22 was set but then postponed as before.

  Martha was repeatedly back and forth between Marseille and Vichy by airplane and train, each time forced to secure a series of official permissions to simply make the journey. She took sick again and again. But she never forgot her priorities. Right in the middle of her hectic and sketchy daily notes appears a notation that on November 11, in Vichy, Martha went shopping for Christmas stocking stuffers for the whole Sharp family.

  Finally, in the early morning hours of November 26, Martha, together with twenty-seven children (seventeen girls and ten boys) and ten other adults, boarded a passenger train at the Gare St. Charles in Marseille on the first leg of their journey to freedom. For the nine Jewish children among them, it was a matter of life and death. One can imagine the feelings raging through the parents as they saw their children off. Holding the application form many years later, Mercedes Brown mused: “And this is the paper that obviously was filled out so we could start our journey. And it must’ve been very painful for my mother to do this.” Yehuda Bauer, noted Holocaust scholar, noted: “Heartbreaking as it was for the parents, they wanted to rescue their children first and foremost so they handed them over to strangers rather than endanger them by keeping them with them.”1

  Just before departure, Martha issued each of the children a beige beret in order to more easily identify them as members of her group. For most of the trip to Portugal, three-year-old Mercedes Brown, who was not as yet toilet trained and was covered with impetigo sores, would occupy Martha’s lap.

  One of the parents on the trip suffered recurrent psychotic episodes.

  This was not going to be simple.

  Beginning with their first stop, in Narbonne, the entire party would be taken off the train to be questioned fourteen times. Their sixty-seven articles of luggage likewise would be closely examined each time. Alexis Okounieff, the single able-bodied adult male aboard, carried the bags off and on at every stop.

  Martha later described their stop in Cerbère in a letter to Helen Lowrie:

  The station agent called me to say that Thomas Cook’s man in Portbou wanted to speak to me. This conversation, confirming the fact that tea and supper waited for us at the Spanish frontier, cost me my place in line for the passports—and necessitated an hour’s wait in line. When their turn came, each child had to be passed in review—Mercedes was passed with Clément, but refused to leave until Tes Huger and Dr. Dubouchet accompanied her. She started to wail. The passport officer was adamant: No. Tes Huger came with the H’s he said. Finally, however, he could bear it no longer and took Tes and Dr. Dubouchet before the others. Then those two led the weeping child into the next torture chamber—the customs inspection. Meanwhile, [one of] the Strasser boy[s] lost his lunch and howled and a scene was had by all.

  They reached Barcelona at eleven that night, went sightseeing the next day, then boarded the Madrid train at 10 p.m. “It was a terrible night,” Martha wrote. “Mercedes woke every hour and cried and kicked me.” The train pulled into the Spanish capital at about noon. They boarded another one that night at ten-thirty and reached the Portuguese frontier at seven the next morning.

  A customs inspector discovered a small package of dishes Martha was bringing home for Martha Content. When he asked her about them, she explained that she had purchased them in France for her daughter in America—just children’s toys.

  “Oh no!” he repl
ied excitedly. “You’re bringing them to the ceramics market in Portugal!” he accused. “Open up! You’ll have to open up everything else!”

  Martha protested. “These are just for my children to play with.”

  “Madame,” he answered. “How many children have you?”

  At precisely that moment the passport officer approached with the group’s papers. “Señora Sharp,” he said, “all your twenty-seven children are in order.”

  “My God!” shouted the customs inspector. “You have twenty-seven children! That’s marvelous! You know, I have twenty myself. I’m not going to make your exit any more difficult. Put back all the packages. You take anything you like, and I bless you for the rest of the journey!”

  Martha delivered the children in time to make their scheduled departure that day. However, in Lisbon, Ninon Tallon met the train with bad news. The steamship company, not believing that anyone could move such a group across three countries in three days, had released all their tickets to other passengers. The good news, Tallon went on, was that she had arranged for the children to be taken as a group to an agricultural school outside the capital, where they would be housed and well fed until new trans-Atlantic accommodations could be found for them.

  Transportation of any sort out of Lisbon for America was of course very scarce and dear. After several days of intense discussions with a US company, the American Export Lines, Martha found berths for herself and a couple of the children on the SS Excalibur—the ship Waitstill and Lion Feuchtwanger had taken in September. The Excalibur departed Lisbon for New York on December 6. The balance of the group, including Ninon Tallon, would come a few days later aboard the SS Excambion.

  Getting Madame Tallon out was yet another victory for Martha against a stubborn bureaucrat. Ambassador Pell was reluctant to issue the woman a visa because he disapproved of her leftist leanings. Martha somehow prevailed, and Tallon received her visa.

  On board the Excambion, the crew covered a dining room floor with mattresses to create a dormitory for the children. Anna Vakar remembered trying to rest while Clément Brown and some of the other boys stomped over the mattresses playing tag. A steward taught them English words using fruit as prizes. The child who correctly said the name of each piece of fruit as it was held aloft received it as a reward.

  Many of the children remembered being seasick.

  Clément Brown and Hans Frank looked for German U-boats, so that they could wave at the captains, thinking they would wave back. The Excambion, in fact, would later be torpedoed and sunk by a U-boat.

  Tes Huger was frightened by the imagined sound of bombs and planes in the night. In letters never mailed, Josef Strasser reported to his father that he and his brother were upset because their grandmother had not met them in Lisbon. He begged for his father and grandmother to come quickly to the United States.

  When the Excambion docked in Jersey City on December 23, 1940, Martha was there on the pier, waiting to greet her young charges and to pass around mugs of hot chocolate. Newsreel cameras recorded the happy scene as the New York press paid extensive attention to the extraordinary and uplifting story.

  Although they were safe, the children now faced a new world vastly different from what they had known. Most would be in the company of strangers, at least for the time being, and many would have to begin by learning a new language.

  Frustrated by her lack of fluency in English, Anna Vakar hardly spoke for three months. Her sister, Catherine, adapted more easily.

  Mercedes Brown continued to fear the Nazis and cried inconsolably at the sound of any siren.

  Tes Huger, who went to live with a young childless couple in Iowa, also struggled to master English. But she quickly adapted to her new home and later reported that her new family had spoiled her.

  Some of the refugee children were reunited with parents or relatives. Others, such as Huger, went to live with utter strangers. Hans Frank joined his mother in New York. Wolfgang Fleischmann was reunited with his father, a physician at Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore. The Brown children stayed with their mother’s sister in Virginia. Anna and Catherine Vakar were welcomed into the family of Kerr and Elsie Atkinson, members of the Wellesley Hills Church. Their parents arrived the following year, but the children stayed with the Atkinsons for several more months until Mr. and Mrs. Vakar were settled in their new lives. The Vakars repaid the Unitarian Service Committee for their passage.

  Dr. Rudolph and Charlotte Diamant, Pierre Garai’s father, and Mrs. Brown emigrated during the war, as did Tes Huger’s parents.

  The children’s lives proceeded as lives do. They married or remained single, raised children, divorced or didn’t, worked, and traveled. Anna Vakar would teach French, then work as a technical translator before moving to Canada, where she wrote and published haiku. Catherine Vakar stayed in the Boston area, raised three children, and earned a PhD at Harvard. She was a professor of Russian studies at MIT until her retirement in 1994.

  The Strassers settled in New York State. Josef Strasser became a successful businessman; Alexander, a physician in Rochester, New York.

  The Diamant triplets and their parents traveled across the United States to settle in Oregon, where they had relatives. All three of them would marry and raise families. Amélie taught for forty years. Eveline became a dentist like her father. Marianne worked as a legal secretary and court reporter.

  Nicholas Okounieff went on to work for a large electronics and defense firm for several years and then for a security company. Clément Brown joined the US Army, took graduate degrees from schools in Tennessee and Georgia, and became an educator. His sister, Mercedes, known as Dee, would travel to France regularly as an executive in the cosmetics business. She settled in New York, where for years she lived just down the street from Martha.

  Tes Huger raised three children and eventually moved to the seaside community of Rockport, Massachusetts.

  Jeanne Theis became Jeanne Whitaker and a language professor at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. Her sister, Jacqueline, would teach elementary school in Philadelphia. Cécile, Louise, Françoise, and Marguerite Theis went home to France, where three of them became teachers and the fourth, Marguerite, studied psychology. Their father, Edouard Theis, died in 1984.

  Pierre Garai became a professor at Columbia. He went through a period of disillusionment and distraction that led to a midlife suicide.

  Wolfgang Fleischmann became dean of the School of Humanities at Montclair State College. Fluent in seven languages, he edited the first edition of Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century. Fleischmann died suddenly in 1987.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The Home Front

  During the six months she spent on her second mission abroad, Martha had traveled thousands of miles within France by car, train, bicycle, and on foot, as she and Helen Lowrie set up the milk distribution program and simultaneously wrestled with bureaucrats for the official papers that would make French children’s emigration a reality. She made the two-hundred-mile round trip to Vichy three times and suffered the disappointment of being able to use only twenty-seven of the fifty visas she had originally acquired. Despite bouts of illness she kept going with single-minded intensity. Dr. Charles Joy, her USC successor in Marseille, likened her to a mother bear fighting for her cubs.

  Waitstill too had spent his summer in feverish activity, trying to rescue a thousand Czech soldiers who were stranded in Agde, organizing refugee relief and emigration from the USC’s new office in Lisbon, and getting the Feuchtwangers safely out of France to refuge in the United States. It was time, the Sharps seemed to agree, to head for the harbor, pull down the sails, and resume life as it had been two years earlier. They both felt that their most important work was, as Martha put it, “to grow souls together”—a reference not to the ministry but to child rearing.

  AUA leaders had other ideas, however, and continued to use the Sharps as prime publicists. For Waitstill, combining parish duties with speaking e
ngagements would have been particularly onerous. Nonetheless, he was so successful at speechmaking that the AUA offered a recording of one of his talks to interested constituents. Martha meanwhile gave seventy talks between December 1940 and June 1941.

  There was another factor. Both seemed unable to leave the overseas work behind. A Christian Register article noted that Waitstill “is continuing to work on individual and group cases of refugees still abroad whose papers and problems he has brought home with him.” Martha too kept up her efforts for the refugees they had been unable to help while in France. While on her speaking tours, she missed no chance to solicit the precious affidavits without which there was no chance to secure visas. She was quite successful at this. The Case Work Committee reported that 30 percent of the people who expressed interest actually did sign affidavits, saying that “we are hopeful to get more affidavits for these, technically, enemy-alien cases. As an illustration, we may mention the instance where we were in desperate need of a sponsor for an urgent case—a wire to Niagara Falls following up one of Mrs. Sharp’s leads produced an affidavit in 24 hours.”

  She took time to publicize the situation of refugees by penning two articles for the Christian Science Monitor: one about the Czech soldiers in Agde and the other about the thousands of people languishing in internment camps with no country willing to take them.

  Despite their increasing separations and the attention each gave to their work, Martha and Waitstill were bound in marriage by more than love, respect, friendship, or faith. They believed that they completed each other, that their union was greater than the sum of its parts. When tested in the crucibles of their two European aid commissions, this sense of shared purpose gave them the strength to succeed in courageous and daring enterprises. As Martha wrote Waitstill from France in October of 1940, “We must be together.”