Defying the Nazis

by Artemis Joukowsky

  A few days later, Waitstill sent Martha a brief note. “I shall always hope,” he wrote,

  that my coming really was Martha Content’s chief wish as to my relationship to her wedding. I hope that she and Art will always know that I did my best. The service was the most difficult which I have ever conducted. I am sure that the tension was clear to all—because it must have been shared in by all—between affection and hope and faith on the one hand; and on the other the sense of the permanent tragedy of selfishness overarching every detail of the transient beauty and the historic conventions of the moment.

  We are left only with the hope that two can hear and guard the Word which two others once heard and failed to cherish.

  Sincerely yours, Waitstill.

  As far as is known, this was the last personal communication between the Sharps.

  In 1957, Martha married David H. Cogan, a wealthy inventor who’d helped develop key portions of early television and radio technology. Her second husband also prospered as a manufacturer of vacuum tubes and of complete radio and TV sets.

  Over the coming years, Martha remained active in her support for Israel. In the mid-1970s, she took a special interest in “Beautiful Israel,” an urban beautification and environmental education program founded by Aura Herzog, wife of Chaim Herzog, then the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations and later its two-term president.

  In 1981, Waitstill departed Davenport for the Unitarian church of Flint, Michigan, site of Martha and Annabelle Markson’s “Men of Flint” triumph of two decades before. From Flint he and Monica traveled on to Petersham, Massachusetts, where he retired from the ministry and then settled in Greenfield.

  That same year, Waitstill attended Martha Content’s twenty-fifth anniversary celebration. Martha came to the gathering as well. At some point in the evening she noticed a familiar-looking old man standing alone in the room. At first, she did not recognize Waitstill, who had aged much more than she had. They did not speak.

  Waitstill died three years later of a stroke at the age of eighty-two. At that time, in 1982, Waitstill was an admired figure in the denomination. Jack Mendelsohn spoke for many when he said that Waitstill “was the kind of minister I wanted to be. That is, he wasn’t just a minister of a parish church; he was a civic figure, he was interested in the community in which he worked. He was interested in world affairs. He was interested in the need for peace in the world.”

  Waitstill’s eulogist portrayed a man who had grown less rigid and moralistic with age, one who had become slower to judge and who, when touched, was known to display a tear or two.

  In December of 1990, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Martha’s 1940 children’s emigration project, the Unitarians brought her together in New York with eleven of those she had rescued, including all six of the Theis sisters, for a two-day event. The meeting delighted her, although by now Martha was losing ground to old age and the early stages of dementia.

  Mercedes Brown, the difficult child who had traveled most of the way from Marseille to Lisbon in Martha’s lap, spoke eloquently for them all. “We were the first travelers,” she said. “We salute you and thank you for our journey to freedom.”

  By that time, Martha was a widow, David Cogan having died in 1985. Martha Content, then living in Providence, had been urging Martha to come live with them. “But,” as Martha Content has written, “she told us in no uncertain terms that she wanted to remain in New York where she could see her friends.”

  So it was settled at first that Martha would have a room in their house and visit whenever she could. She decorated the space with some of her favorite furniture pieces and her Rose Medallion china.

  “She often spent the weekends with us when she could get away,” Martha Content has written.

  With time, we knew that she had to move to Providence. Yet it also was evident that she wanted her independence.... So she purchased a lovely Cape Cod house a few doors down the street from us. We renovated it. She selected fabrics and colors, and we moved her furniture and favorite objects from New York so she would feel that she was in familiar surroundings.”

  For years every Wednesday we would prepare lunch at our home and invite people she could relate to. She was in command, and we wanted her to feel that way. It was always a festive occasion and completely revolved around her. She was always made up, elegantly dressed with her hair coiffed, and chatter was always animated. She was the role model and always gracious. Any male who happened to appear was always welcomed with her radiant smile and a sparkle in her eyes. With time, however, I could see a look in her eyes—the real world was slipping away.

  The trips to the piano became more infrequent, her old files were rarely opened, and her old friend Winston, her dog, died. It came to a point when she couldn’t manage the stairs, and we moved a hospital bed into the dining room. Her disposition was always pleasant and kind, and her charm continued to be directed to everyone, but it was but of a blush of her former brilliance.

  She was diagnosed with “sundown syndrome,” so we repainted the walls of the living room a soft peach color, and hung pastel flowered chintz drapes at the windows. Around the clock, bright lights were blazing, and we always had classical music playing. She loved Chopin and Smetana. With time she lost her balance; she frequently fell, and she was moved to a wheelchair from which she continued to orchestrate her life. Finally she was bedridden.

  We talked about life and death, and she signed a living will. She wanted to be cremated and to have her ashes scattered wherever I thought she would want to be. After a while she didn’t know where she was. Her thoughts were tangled, and whatever was said to her she didn’t remember. Every now and then there was clarity in her eyes, and she would utter an intelligent definitive statement.

  I think she knew who I was until she lapsed into a semi-comatose state. Did she suffer in death? I cannot know for sure, but I don’t think she did.

  Several years before Martha died, on December 6, 1999, her son, Hastings—Waitstill Hastings Sharp Jr.—came to live with her in Providence. We have no record of Hastings’s feelings about his parents’ frequent absences during his childhood or any sense of abandonment that he might have had. Childhood hurts are difficult to overcome completely, but it is possible that during the years that he spent with her a connection to the time when she took care of him after his army accident was made. Hastings died in 2012.

  EPILOGUE

  In 2006, the state of Israel formally proclaimed Martha and Waitstill Sharp “Righteous Among the Nations.” This honor is bestowed upon non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. The Sharps became two of only five Americans to be so honored by Israel—another being Varian Fry, with whom the Sharps collaborated on some rescues.

  A ceremony celebrating the honor was held at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, where Martha and Waitstill were described as “Heroes of the Spirit,” and their names were added to an honor roll that included such well-known names as Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg. The Sharps were honored with tributes by a group that included family, dignitaries, international press, and eighty-year-old Rosemarie Feigl, one of Martha’s rescued children. As part of the service, Martha Content and Rosemarie rekindled the Hall of Remembrance’s eternal flame.

  Speaking of her parents that day, Martha Content Joukowsky described them as “modest and thoughtful people who responded to the suffering and needs around them, as they would have expected everyone to do in a similar situation. They never viewed what they did as extraordinary. They would not have expected today to be singled out in this way.”

  But even among the honored at Yad Vashem, the Sharps were singled out—a point made clear by Mordecai Paldiel, head of the Department of the Righteous at the memorial. “The Sharps are an example of the minority among our righteous,” Paldiel explained. “The rescue operation was not thrust upon them. This is not a case where a person knocks on the door and says, ‘Help me! I just escaped from a ghetto, I ne
ed sanctuary. Can I stay in your home?’ In such a case, the rescuer becomes a rescuer on the spot. With the Sharps, [it was] a different story. They were motivated from the beginning to go into the kingdom of hell and try to get some people out. For this, we honor them.”1

  Martha and Waitstill’s names are engraved on vertical stone walls that partially enclose the Garden of the Righteous. There, on a gentle slope in the shade of some pine trees, Martha and Waitstill are honored and remembered. They are together once again, inspiring us to ask what we can do today to help others.

  The Sharps never published their own memoirs and rarely spoke of their accomplishments in public. It is worth noting, however, that no matter how heartbreaking and disappointing the dissolution of their marriage may have been, in later years, when Martha and Waitstill began to speak to family members and researchers about their past, they remembered each other in a most respectful way, with words full of admiration and affection. In their later years, when they finally began to share their stories, they did in fact find a way to reconcile and to appreciate each other anew through memory.

  Martha Content described her reckoning of her parents’ choices:

  We do not choose our parents but I do know that mine honestly followed their hearts and their ideals and threw themselves into their life courses. They were determined, tender, compassionate, and had a deep empathy to help others. They deeply cared and connected themselves to a larger life, showing kindness to, and saving, many people along the way.

  As a child it was hard to know what they had witnessed, and they didn’t want to talk with us children about their sustained work or the horrors and struggles they had seen or felt. And as an adult I was bewildered when I was told of their frightening life and death situations. Now I am less puzzled and realize that their passions were larger than life in spite of the dangerous worlds that they found themselves in. For the Sharps’ moral compass was devoted to a fundamental battle for human rights—that was a war worth waging and winning. They were wise with gifts of courage and dedicated to reshaping the Nazi political landscape. We are better people and wiser for their personal experiences, and that is what they inspired us to be.

  When the war raging around them unleashed the worst of human nature, Martha and Waitstill Sharp did all they could to protect the dignity and preciousness of human life. The Sharps saved lives and ministered to the immediate need for food and shelter of many trapped in the catastrophe of war.

  There is always the tendency to want to quantify the extent of the work, to pin it down in terms of numbers actually saved, either through direct emigration assistance or through relief efforts that allowed people to survive hunger and cold. But to do so is impossible. The work was day-to-day in a chaotic environment with little chance for follow-up. Extant records regarding emigration, including a list of about fifty people who sailed from Lisbon in 1940 during the Sharps’ tenure there and the rescues that can be directly attributed to them, suggest a number of about 125. But no one kept a tally, and valuable records, like those of the Committee for the Placement of Intellectual Refugees in Geneva, are lost. There are many intangibles that simply can’t be forced into a statistic. Waitstill’s feeding program at the Salvation Army in Prague, for instance, allowed 264 people to stay alive long enough to get out. Martha and Waitstill provided sustenance for eight hundred French children for a month. We have no idea how many of them survived the privations of the war. We don’t know if the two women Martha helped in Agde, Anna Pollakova and Ella Adler, survived. To cover an emergency, Waitstill gave Joseph Schwartz of the American-Jewish Joint Distribution Committee a loan of nine hundred dollars. Did the money save lives? Probably, but if so, how many? We just don’t know the answers to these questions. But we do know that Martha and Waitstill were there in the midst of unfathomable horror doing freedom’s work with loving commitment. Perhaps what matters most is not the number they were able to help, but that they chose to help at all. With little more to guide them than innate decency, a keen sense of fairness, and a deep love for each other, the Sharps stood up to unspeakable evil and made a difference. By any measure, Martha and Waitstill Sharp were heroes.

  RESCUE AND RELIEF ORGANIZATIONS

  American Committee for Relief in Czechoslovakia (AmRelCzech)

  American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)

  American-Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC)

  American Unitarian Association (AUA)

  British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia (BCRC)

  Carnegie Institute for Peace

  Children to Palestine

  Committee for the Placement of Intellectual Refugees

  Displaced Persons Division of the Middle East Mission of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation (UNRRA)

  Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC)

  Hadassah

  HICEM, Jewish emigration agency

  International Labour Organization (ILO)

  International Rescue Committee

  Jewish Refugee Committee

  Joint Anti-Fascist Committee

  National Committee of American Friends of Czechoslovakia

  National Security Resources Board (NSRB)

  Red Cross of France

  Red Cross of Portugal

  Red Cross of Spain

  Red Cross of the United States

  Salvation Army

  Society of Friends (Quakers)

  Unitarian Case Work Committee

  Unitarian Service Committee (USC)

  US Committee for the Care of European Children (USCOM)

  Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF)

  YMCA

  Youth Aliyah

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My purpose in telling Martha and Waitstill’s story is to inspire a new generation of rescuers. It is a call for action. The Sharps’ story shows that “ordinary people” can do extraordinary things, serving as an inspiration to all of us today.

  After that first talk with my grandmother, I was impassioned to make a difference in the lives of others. I also knew I had to help her tell their story to the world. Since that time I have been working beyond being a family historian to become a kind of self-driven historian-at-large who could add a critical and consequential story to our understanding of the events around World War II. Thus began an adventure that entailed extensive research deep within library archives, travels to Europe for primary sources and interviews, and the tireless efforts of professional researchers, archivists, and historians across five countries who have all collaborated to bring this book—and the accompanying movie, archive, and curriculum—to life.

  So, while the genesis of this book may trace back to my own ninth-grade humanities paper, getting the Sharps’ story fully explored and expertly told has required the efforts and devotion of many to whom I am deeply indebted. There are many people to thank and acknowledge. Please see the Credits page on the website Defyingthenazis.org for a complete list of all the supporters, filmmakers, writers, and interns who devoted their passions and skills to bring this story to the world.

  Between 1999 and 2005, Larry Benaquist, Bill Sullivan, and Tom Durnford, supported by the Cohen Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, helped break the case. They helped me uncover thirty boxes in my grandmother’s basement and eight hundred primary documents of Unitarian Service Committee rescue. Among the files were four hundred case files of names of people that my grandparents had attempted to help. Who were these people and what happened to them? We hired a private detective to find some of the surviving children, and one who we discovered was Eva Rosemarie Feigl, who came to the United States with twenty-six other children. Rosemarie, as she is known, testified to the historians at Yad Vashem that “Martha Sharp saved my life.” Because she was Jewish and over the age of fourteen, Rosemarie was a credible witness to verify that Martha Sharp risked her life to save her. As a result of that testimony, and others we made on behalf of Waitstill, the Sharps became just the second and third Ame
ricans to be honored as “Righteous Among the Nations” by the state of Israel.

  Along with Ghanda DiFiglia and archivist Aleksandra Borecka of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, our team systematically worked our way through the voluminous files of the American Unitarian Association, visited several Holocaust centers in the United States and abroad, and scoured university libraries, historical society records, newspaper obituaries, and church and municipal archives across the United States, Europe, and Israel. The team undertook research where we retraced my grandparents’ travels around Prague and elsewhere in Czechoslovakia and on to the south of France.

  Each time we located someone on our list, whose family had been touched by the work of the Sharps, we would ask for copies of their personal documents, and soon our source material was growing exponentially. The private detectives we had engaged located those who had been directly saved by the Sharps, and we conducted interviews with other members of my family, as well as with Holocaust survivors and Holocaust experts, who might shed insight on the work of the Sharps. Those documents are a part of the film, book curriculum, and archives. Thanks to my scholarly advisory team for all your valuable feedback and insights, including Alan Adelson, Jeff Diefendorf, Deborah Dwork, Henry F. Knight, C. Paul Vincent, James Wald, Yehuda Bacon, Yehuda Bauer, and David Wyman.

  Thank you for those who we interviewed for the book and the film, including Peter Braunfeld, Clement Brown, Joanna Brown, Mercedes Brown, Margaret Carroll, Catherine Vakar Chvany, Mary Deutsch Edsall, Haim Genizi, Mary-Ella Holst, Amelie Holstrom, Alain Le Roux, Gerda Stein Mayer, Rev. Jack Mendelsohn, Paul Mirat, Hanna Papanek, Justus Rosenberg, Ruth Rogoff, Sylva Simsova, Evelyn Strange, Alex Strasser, Joe Strasser, Susan Subak, Laura Tracy, Henry Walsh, and Jeanne Whitaker. These landmark interviews will be housed at the Spielberg Collection at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC, for students and scholars to access and use in the future.