Defying the Nazis

After the opera performance, on what usually was a ten-minute walk back to the Hotel Atlantic from the National Theatre, the Sharps encountered Nazi thugs roaming the Czech capital, carrying out Berlin’s directive to provoke as much chaos as possible, thereby underscoring the urgent need for authority—the Reich’s ostensibly beneficent, pacifying hand.

They saw one young man under a street lamp wound himself superficially with a pocketknife. As the blood ran, he smeared some on his face, then hurried over to a Czech policeman, complaining in German that he was “a poor German student” who’d been attacked by a young Czech, whom he pointed out in the crowd.

The policeman grabbed the suspect, who protested that he had never touched the German youth. Waitstill jumped into action, charging across the street to inform the cop of what had actually occurred. The potentially violent confrontation quickly cooled into a routine incident, with the policeman instructing everyone to move along, and the young Czech thanking Waitstill in broken English for intervening.

As they approached their favorite kavarna, or coffee house, intent on a quiet nightcap, the Sharps encountered a riot, as Martha put it. “Chairs, dishes and all sort of movable objects were flying out the door.”

The police arrived to restore order. The Sharps asked the owner what had touched off the melee. He told them a group of German students had arrived early that evening and had tried to provoke fights with every Czech student who came in. “Our boys refused to take them up,” he said, “but finally the Nazis went too far. It was a point of honor for the Czechs to defend their country.”

Waitstill and Martha took a taxi the rest of the way to the hotel, each lost in private, sober musings.

“Are you afraid?” he replied. “Do you want to go home to Wellesley and let the Czechs fight their own battles?”

Martha didn’t answer at once. But as their cab wound carefully through the increasingly crowded streets—very unusual at that hour in Prague, a city that habitually got its sleep—Martha reflected on their original reasons for coming to Prague and on the Czechs’ clear need for their help.

Although it was well past twelve when they finally reached their room, Martha telephoned Alice Masaryk.

Dr. Alice told them that a mob of Nazis had gathered below her apartment windows, shouting threats and insults. At one point the crowd had tried to rush the building’s front door. The Czech police finally broke up the demonstration.

“No,” Masaryk answered, “I think I must undergo this myself. Why should I involve you with my personal problems?”

Before Martha could answer that she and Waitstill were already deeply involved with Dr. Alice’s personal problems—that’s why they were in Prague—Masaryk changed the subject.

“I have heard that some of the embassies are offering asylum,” she said. “If the United States should invite me, I might consider it. I must think about it. Please keep in touch.”

“Who under the sun is calling at this hour?” Waitstill wondered. He opened the door to discover Jiri Vranek, a Czech diplomat and member of former president Benes’s staff in London. The Sharps had met Vranek in Paris.

“Just a couple of hours ago,” Vranek replied. He had brought along some of their mail, and a note from Malcolm Davis, but that was not his reason for calling at such a late hour.

“Hacha just telephoned from Berlin,” he said. “Hitler has ordered the Nazi army to march into Czechoslovakia at six this morning. They entered one of our frontier barracks at midnight. Our men were outnumbered. Every one of them was killed. Hitler has threatened to wipe out the whole Czech army and to bomb Prague unless all resistance is called off.”

In all, two hundred thousand Wehrmacht infantrymen would pour over the Czech border in the coming hours.

“Hacha told the cabinet that he already has signed an agreement that the Czechs will offer no resistance. He asked for their confirmation. Poor weak Hacha! To save Czech lives he signs their death warrants.”

Vranek slumped in a chair, overwhelmed for a moment. Then he continued: “Dishonor is worse than death. This is the end of the republic. It was too successful. Everyone wanted to grab us.”

“We are going to stay and keep on working as long as we can, whatever happens,” she told him.

“Thank God!” he said, looking up with a smile. “Some of our friends have guts.”

He advised the Sharps to destroy any incriminating documents and warned that the Nazis were certain to search their files, openly or in secret.

“We set to work to review letters of introduction, commissions to be discharged, and lists of people to be found and helped,” Martha recalled. “Fortunately, many of the projects discussed in these documents were already underway and could be continued without the original paperwork. They made a rather large pile, however.”

“Too many to flush down the toilet?” Vranek asked. “How about burning them? I know the way to the hotel furnace.”

Deep under the Hotel Atlantic we came upon a queue of people, all waiting their turn to approach the furnace. It was a silent line. Evidently all of us there understood that from this night on, no one was to be trusted. I watched as they threw their papers in the fire. For a few brilliant moments, the flames illuminated each face, betraying each person’s fear, dejection, pensiveness and hopelessness. As each turned and was swallowed in the darkness, their shoulders seemed to give away something lost in the ashes. Memory? Hope? Honor? Freedom?

The Sharps said good night and good-bye to Jiri Vranek, and returned to their room. From the window, they could see that a snowstorm had driven the crowds indoors. But there was no sleep in Prague. Lights burned in all the buildings along the street, in banks, offices, and apartments, throwing yellow patches on the newly fallen snow.

“Waitstill,” Martha remembered, “was going through his futile nightly ritual of trying to anchor the four-by-six down puff on his bed by tucking a steamer robe around it. He muttered. ‘This barbarous custom! No sheets! No blankets! Arms and legs exposed! You either swelter or freeze! How the Czechs have survived—’”

“Then I fixed the one on my bed, and snapped off the light,” she said. “But it was not so easy to turn off my mind.”

Two hours later, at 6 a.m. on March 15, 1939, German troops crossed the border into Czechoslovakia, reaching Prague a little more than three hours later. The Einmarsch (invasion) had begun. Waitstill recalled that “every trace of Czechoslovak democracy vanished as the grey troops poured in through the falling snow.”

International condemnation quickly followed. Neville Chamberlain, admitting to the failure of appeasement, said, “World opinion has received a sharper shock than has ever been administered to it.”¹ In Washington, the acting US secretary of state, Sumner Welles, condemned the invasion. “It is manifest that acts of wanton lawlessness and of arbitrary force are threatening world peace and the very structure of modern civilization,” he said.² The Soviets called Hitler’s actions “arbitrary, violent, and aggressive.”

The Einmarsch was front-page news everywhere and proof, in case anyone had held lingering doubts, that the Nazis would not be stopped at the negotiating table. On March 17, the British Guardian headline read, “German Rule in Prague, Rounding Up the ‘Harmful’ 10,000 Arrests?” The unsigned article reported:

Prague, a sorrowing Prague, yesterday had its first day of German rule—a day in which the Czechs learned of the details of their subjection to Germany, and in which the Germans began their measures against the Jews and against those people who have “opened their mouths too wide.” Prague’s streets were jammed with silent pedestrians wandering about, looking out of the corners of their eyes at German soldiers carrying guns, at armoured cars, and at other military precautions.... Suicides have begun. The fears of the Jews grow. The funds of the Jewish community have been seized, stopping Jewish relief work. The Prague Bar Council has ordered all its “non-Aryan” members to stop practising at once. The organisation for Jewish emigration has been closed. Hundreds of people stood outside the British Consulate shouting: “We want to get away!” This is only the beginning. According to an official spokesman of the German Foreign Office in Berlin last night, the Gestapo (secret police) will have rounded up hundreds of “harmful characters” within the next few days. So far about fifty to a hundred men have been put in local jails. “There are certain centres of resistance which need to be cleaned up,” said the spokesman. “Also some people open their mouths too wide. Some of them neglected to get out in time. They may total several thousand before we are through. Remember that Prague was a breeding-place for opposition to National Socialism.” The head of the Gestapo in Prague is reported to have been more definite: “We have 10,000 arrests to carry out.” Already, says a Reuters correspondent, everyone seems to have an acquaintance who has disappeared.

The enormity of the Czechs’ national disaster was evident everywhere, from the crowd’s hollow stares to the huge bright-red, white, and black swastika flags snapping arrogantly in the cold wind. However, the true nature of the calamity was at first unclear to Martha and Waitstill, and it would take time for them to grasp the full extent of Nazi evil.

At 7 a.m. on March 15, the Sharps arrived as usual at the refugee institute, only to discover an enormous crowd standing outside in the snow. They approached one of the Czech police officers helping to hold back the throng.

A policeman led them through the crowd toward the door, patiently asking each person to stand aside—“Prosim, please move, please move”—and then up the staircase toward their office. With each step the mass of humanity shifted and quivered, as if ready to explode. The sheer pressure of so many desperate people jostling and shoving one another frightened Martha.

“These people have been gathering all night,” one of the volunteer staffers said as they finally made it into the office. “They think this is American territory and if they can just get inside the office, they’ll be safe.”

Waitstill went out into the hall, raised his arm for quiet, then addressed the crowd in English and some German.

“American Relief for Czechoslovakia is here to give medical and material help to Czechoslovak refugees,” he said. “We are not a visa agency. We are not an emigration agency. We are not an official branch of the US government. You are endangering yourselves and your families by being here, for the Gestapo may be among you and they think that if you are here you must need to escape. For your own protection, and that of your families, please go home.”

The speech had negligible impact. Some people left, but others kept trying to elbow their way forward. Meanwhile, inside the office, Martha was confronted by a hysterically frightened husband and father waving a handgun. “I came here for help, to save my family!” he cried. “Here are my wife and two sons. I am hunted by the Gestapo! I am only one step ahead of them! I have no place to go. If you force me out of here I shall shoot my family, and then myself! There is no other choice!”

Martha took him into her private office alone, offered him a cigarette, and gradually calmed the man. He told her he was an attorney, from the Sudeten, where he had come to the Gestapo’s unwelcome attention by winning cases against a number of their leaders in the Reichenberg area.

He had learned just in time that he was marked for elimination, and he had escaped to Prague with his family. Now that the occupation was a fait accompli, he knew that he and his family were doomed unless they could escape again. He had no money, no connections, and, without help, no hope.

Martha offered to do what she could, if he would leave his gun with her. The lawyer finally agreed and said he thought perhaps he could hide out for a bit longer. They agreed to meet again the next morning.

“Thank you,” he said as he gathered his wife and sons to leave. “Thank God for you.”

Since the crowd outside their office would not disperse in spite of Waitstill’s entreaties, the ad hoc solution to the crisis was to take everyone’s name, note their place in line, and then promise to take up their cases, one at a time, beginning the next morning.

The Sharps conferred by telephone with Dr. Alice, who now asked that they request that she be given asylum at the US embassy, and with Lydia Busch, who reported that her husband, Peter, was safe within the French embassy, but that her brother, Hans, was being hunted by the Gestapo, who intended, if they could, to use him as a bargaining chip as they continued to pursue Peter. She asked Waitstill and Martha not to move into the Waldenstein Palace apartment just yet. Hans was hiding out there.

The Sharps assured her not to worry. Moving was their last concern at the moment.

Martha later noted in her datebook that Hans Wertheimer was arrested by the Germans. Nowhere does she write that he was released, and it’s likely that their new friend was one of the 263,000 Czech Jews who died in the Holocaust.³

Peter Busch escaped to France inside a large box labeled “Furniture” that was included with a French diplomatic shipment. Even more artful was the way Karl Deutsch’s mother took her leave of Prague.

The former Leopoldina Scharf, named for a Holy Roman emperor and nicknamed “Poldy” by her friends but known generally as Maria, had suddenly been stricken with appendicitis. She was recovering from emergency surgery in a Prague hospital as the Germans marched into the city. When the Gestapo checked patient rosters, as surely they would eventually, Frau Deutsch without question would be arrested. Although largely incapacitated by major abdominal surgery, she had to be moved as soon as possible to save her life.

According to Waitstill, Maria Deutsch’s salvation was a clever trick conceived and executed by the hospital nursing staff. They wrapped her as a corpse in an undertaker’s basket and sent her to the train station in a hearse. Her destination was the German Baltic port of Sassnitz, from which it was a short ferry ride to southern Sweden and her destination, the city of Malmo.

It is unclear for how much of the journey Frau Deutsch needed to pretend she was dead. According to her granddaughter, Margaret Carroll, who is today a professor of art history at Wellesley College, the train passed through Deutsch’s old Parliament district as it neared the German border. Luckily, the local train inspector recognized her and did not betray her to the Nazis. We know she did make it safely to Malmo, and ultimately to New York City. She died in 1969.

The Sharps held a brief and unsuccessful meeting on Dr. Alice’s behalf with US ambassador Wilbur Carr, who said that he could not help. “United States State Department regulations which, by the way, I helped draft myself,” Carr explained, “allow us to take into the embassy only our own nationals in time of crisis.”

Although Martha and Waitstill never were publicly critical of the sixty-eight-year-old ambassador, Carr had for his entire State Department career supported the restrictionist immigration policies he had helped promulgate in the 1920s. Anti-Semitic, not unusual for the State Department at the time, he also was a stickler for regulations, never inclined to relax the quota rules for anyone.

Evidence suggests that Carr in 1930 advised officials in several European consulates to restrict immigration visas to just 10 percent of their allotments. Fortunately for the Sharps, he was succeeded a month later by Irving Linnell, who proved to be a far more compassionate and helpful official.

Martha and Waitstill conveyed Carr’s unwelcome news to Masaryk, and promised to carry their appeal to the British embassy. They ate a brief lunch they hardly could taste on St. Wenceslaus Square, then walked back out to the street. It was shortly past noon.

“The snow still was falling and now was about ten inches deep,” Martha remembered.

In spite of the piercing cold, and the difficult footing, the whole Nazi Army, blue with cold, seemed to be marching down the main square of Prague. Goose-stepping to martial music, with their primitive battalion symbols and flying animal tails encrusted with snow, they came proudly along in endless ranks, it seemed.

Every building flew the Czech tricolor as far as the eye could see. Unless one knew that a policeman had visited every house and ordered that it fly the Czech flag before noon, or its owner would be arrested, one would think that the Czechs were welcoming the Germans!

Loudspeakers had been placed at all main intersections, and between the military music we heard, “Achtung! Achtung! Congratulations, Czechs! You are now citizens of the Third Reich and will be protected by the Führer, who will come to speak to you, himself! Stay off the streets tonight, for your own safety. After eight p.m., Prague is under martial law. Anyone who disobeys this order will be shot on sight.”

As we stood in a scattering of people, looking at the parade, I made a snide remark to Waitstill in German about the broadcast. Most of Czech adults had turned their backs to the parade, and were seemingly absorbed in the show windows. A man nearby, who heard me speak German, turned to me with a raised hand, and livid face.

“You are a Nazi, Fräulein?” he snarled.

“No, I am an American,” I answered.

“Then why are you speaking their filthy tongue?” His arm still was raised, as if he was going to strike me.

“I’m sorry,” I said in English. “I don’t speak Czech, and I just came out of a shop where I was speaking German—”

“Then, by God, speak American!” he interrupted angrily. “It may be the last time you have a chance!”

I nudged Waitstill along, and we spoke quietly in English from then on.

As we moved along in the gathering dark, a number of Czechs drifted into earshot, whispering, “Go to the Old Town Square. Go to Starometske Namesti.” Soon, these voices were everywhere, so we turned and as if drawn by a vast human tide we joined the crowd departing the spectacle of triumphant Nazism for the genuine expression of Czech pride and unity at the traditional gathering place, the Old Square and fourteenth-century Prague Town Hall, where enshrined was the casket of their Unknown Soldier from World War One. Starometske Namesti was the hallowed heart of the ancient city.

As we entered on foot we saw thousands of people standing or kneeling in the snow before the Town Hall chapel, bareheaded, praying, indifferent to the frigid snow and their own tears. Before them on the pavement were thousands of tiny bouquets of snow drops or violets arranged in instinctive designs, frequently the heart shape of Bohemia.

There was no sound, only the heavy silence of a tomb, broken by sobs quickly smothered. Impotent hands clenched and unclenched. The Czech Republic was dead. Their naked despair was terrible to see and share. We placed our offering among the others and slipped away.

Waitstill’s later summary in his report to the Unitarian constituency was brief and grim: “Civilization as it is understood in administrative practice, in banking practice, in government by principles and common law, had ended at noon on March 15.”

At about 4:30 p.m., Martha and Waitstill met with several other workers from foreign aid agencies at the British embassy. Likely among them were representatives of the American-Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the Jewish emigration agency HICEM, the Quakers, the BCRC, and the YMCA and YWCA. At the embassy they learned that in advance of the Einmarsch the Gestapo had raided the Social Democrats’ Prague headquarters, where they seized the passports of three hundred workers ticketed for escape to Great Britain the next day. All three hundred were immediately picked up and jailed.

In contrast to Ambassador Carr’s by-the-book refusal to help shelter the hunted, the British had put a priority on emigration assistance to political refugees, especially German Social Democrats from Sudetenland and the “Old Reich” refugees—those who had fled to Prague from Germany and Austria.

At the British embassy that afternoon, the Sharps and the rest of the gathered relief workers learned that the British were offering asylum to eight endangered individuals, among them Wenzel Jaksch and Siegfried Taub, leaders of the Sudeten Social Democratic Party, a communist named Katz, and Werner T. (“Bill”) Barazetti, a Swiss-born BCRC volunteer who worked closely with Nicholas Winton.⁴ Several aid workers, Waitstill and Martha among them, were dispatched to bring in those people.

Martha’s job was to escort a man she always and only referred to as Mr. X. For some reason, she would never disclose his identity, if indeed she knew it. For a young minister’s wife, Sunday school teacher, and mother of two from Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts, it would be a defining Mata Hari moment on the freezing, snowy streets of occupied Prague.

“I found a taxi in the darkness,” Martha wrote, “and noting that the driver had a companion with him in the front seat, gave an address which was near my destination, but not the exact address.”

“The extra cargo’”—clearly a Gestapo agent—“tried to engage me in conversation, but I parried his questions. Arriving at the place, I hastily paid the driver and hurried around the corner to hide in the first doorway to watch and see whether I was being followed.”

The Nazi operative soon rounded the same corner on foot, looked up and down the street, as well as into several alleys, and walked on, very alert. The cab driver honked.

“My heart skipped a beat,” Martha wrote. “I flattened myself against the entrance. In the darkness, he walked right by me! Once he heard the taxi horn, however, he evidently decided I wasn’t worth following.”

The bitter cold and a rising wind might have affected the Gestapo man’s inclinations, as well. “He returned to the cab,” Martha reported, “and soon after they drove away.”

She slipped from her hiding place, turned the corner, and found Mr. X’s address, a five-story walk-up. The vestibule was dark. Martha fumbled along the wall for a light switch, then pressed it to illuminate the first floor long enough for her to climb the stairs to the second floor, where she repeated the process until she achieved the topmost story—Mr. X’s floor.

Martha rang the bell. A woman answered. “No,” she said. “There wasn’t anyone by that name here. Never heard of him.”

Martha wrote: “I begged. I told her there was little time. I produced my American passport. When she saw it, she said in Czech, a moment,’ then snatched my passport from me and shut the door in my face.”

Martha’s first foray into clandestine operations looked at that juncture to be a bust. What will I do, she asked herself in the unlit hallway, if she never opens the door again? To her immense relief, the door did open. A man stood before her.

“I asked him if he was Mr. X. He replied in English that X could be given a message. I explained it had been arranged for X to proceed to the British Embassy for safety until he could be convoyed out of the country.”

The man asked Martha to wait a moment and shut the door once more. Moments later he emerged in his overcoat and handed back her passport. “I am X,” he said quietly, as if his identity were a secret even from his neighbors, and they headed down the stairs together.

Back on the street, they noticed that nearly every cab now carried a minder. “We better walk to the embassy,” X said, and he led the way at a brisk pace through the icy wind. Within twenty minutes they reached the ancient Charles Bridge over the Vltava River. There, a young German soldier stepped out of the shadows to challenge them. He was shivering from the cold in his thin uniform; icicles hung from his cap.

“Americans,” Martha responded in English, adding, “en route to the US embassy.” She pulled out her passport to show him.

Martha later surmised the guard figured it was too cold to argue. “Gehen,” he said—“Go”—and they did, straight across the cobblestone bridge.

The same ploy worked just as well on the opposite side of the Vltava, leaving Martha and Mr. X about a half-mile uphill walk to go. Then came the hard part. As they approached the British embassy, they encountered a Gestapo detachment stationed at the courtyard gate.

“My heart thumped again. Were we to fail with the doorstep to safety in view?”

Luckily another strategy popped into her head. As Martha and X neared the gate, she began complaining loudly and angrily about the cold and the wind and the lack of taxis on the street. “We never should have accepted this appointment with the secretary!” she snapped angrily at Mr. X, who stood silently at her side. “If I had known we’d have to walk here!”

Martha accosted one of the German agents, and asked the bewildered man if he knew whether Mr. Swanson was still in his office. “We are so-o-o-o delayed!” she added dramatically.

Martha produced her passport once more, handed it to him, and regally inquired, “Will you please tell Mr. Swanson that Mr. and Mrs. Sharp are here?”

“I am not the British embassy guard,” he answered testily, handing Martha back her passport as he spoke. “He is there,” he said, gesturing to a British soldier in the distance. “Go ask him.”

Once inside the embassy, Martha warmed up with a cup of tea and bade farewell to a grateful Mr. X. She learned that her husband had gone to Alice Masaryk’s apartment and was waiting for her there.

While Mr. X’s identity probably never will be known for a certainty, records show that all eight of the people brought in that night eventually got out of Czechoslovakia. British embassy officials were able to obtain permission from the Gestapo for all but Jaksch to immigrate to Britain. The seven left by April 1, and Jaksch, disguised as a workman, left secretly and escaped to London by way of Poland.

Martha caught up with Waitstill before the crackling hearth in Dr. Alice’s drawing room. He struck Martha as being tense but calm. Dr. Alice’s worn expression and nervous manner told the story of her previous twenty-four hours. She would be gone from Prague in early April, ultimately spending the war years in the United States.⁵

But for the time being, Masaryk explained, she realized her place was not under the protection of a foreign embassy, but here inside her own home in Prague. Duty and the Masaryk name demanded it. If Dr. Alice was as frightened as she’d recently seemed, she did not show it.

As the Germans’ eight o’clock curfew drew near, Martha and Waitstill reluctantly departed Dr. Alice’s company, found a free taxi, and headed across the city for their hotel. This time the Nazi minder in the front passenger seat actually served a useful purpose. The bridge crossings were a snap; all the Gestapo man had to do was flash his credentials.

“We entered the hotel just as the clock was striking the hour,” Martha recalled, “and loudspeakers proclaimed, ‘Achtung! Achtung! Anyone on the street will be shot on sight.’”

The lobby and dining room teemed with officers of the Wehrmacht. No tables were immediately available, so the Sharps retreated to their room to freshen up and kill a little time. When they returned to the dining room, there still was no table free. A monocled German officer rose and with a courteous gesture offered to share his table with them.

“Waitstill thanked him,” wrote Martha, “and said that he was sure the officer would understand that ‘we wished to be alone.’ He bowed to me, clicked his heels and with a knowing wink at Waitstill murmured that he did not wish to interfere with a ‘tête-a-tête,’ and sat down once more.” As for the “tête-a-tête”: “When a table was finally free, we had no appetite, and anything we could think to say was so innocuous that we felt perfectly safe in saying it. The weather was vile. The cook looked to be in a temper. We were preoccupied by the problems of the day.”

They retired to their room. There a huge roar from outside drew them to the casements. “Below us,” Martha wrote, “were lines of German military trucks, evidently the ones that had brought the army to Prague that morning.

“I immediately understood the need for the curfew. Tons of food, sugar, wool, machinery, and raw materials were taken away that night in the trucks, and every night thereafter. When they returned to reload, the Czech word for robber frequently was found scrawled on both sides of the vehicles.”

“The looting went on every night for months,” Waitstill recalled, “carrying the goods westward to the Third Reich.”

The looting of Prague soon extended beyond the obvious and easily portable. Iron benches disappeared from parks and other public spaces, as did fences. The Germans even appropriated the brass chains from water closets, replacing them with ropes.

From their morning confrontations with the fear-maddened lawyer and other refugees, to the heartbreaking scene at Starometske Namesti, to their clandestine human rescue work that night, and now this, the vast plundering of Prague, the Sharps were overwhelmed.

“It was not possible for us to understand all at once, either intellectually or emotionally, what was happening,” Martha remembered. They passed a sleepless night discussing the astonishing events of the day, trying to figure out their next move.

CHAPTER FIVE

Einmarsch—The Invasion of Czechoslovakia