Friday morning, July 19, 1940, began with breakfast with Don Lowrie at the Cerbère train station calé. Then all three climbed into the little Matford for the drive north to Perpignan. There, Lowrie introduced Martha and Waitstill to the mayor, who favored them with a “bon,” or permission, to buy gasoline, which was strictly rationed. Then on to Nîmes that same afternoon to see the two-thousand-year-old Roman temple, the Maison Carrée.
The next day Waitstill, Martha, and Lowrie drove on to Marseille and took rooms at the Terminus Hotel, directly adjacent to the Gare de Marseille Saint-Charles, the city’s huge old train station, which soon would figure large in their lives. They also made an appointment for Monday to see Richard Allen, local head of the American Red Cross.
Marseille challenged Waitstill’s sturdy New England rectitude. It was, he pronounced, “one of the most dangerous and picturesque great cities in the world,” whose old main street, the Canebière, was “the stamping ground of drug-pushers, swindlers, prostitutes, gamblers, and men with commission to commit murder—a more diversified gamut of criminals than any other city of the world.” As he also noted, it was the center in France for people fleeing the Nazi juggernaut.1
The rest of the weekend was given over to relaxation. Although food shortages were critical and growing worse all over Vichy France, fish of all sorts were still abundant in Marseille. “Vendors sold a harvest of the Mediterranean catch in stalls along the waterfront,” Martha wrote, “shrimp, oysters and other fish that were strange to us. Don suggested we go to the world-famous Pascal’s for bouillabaisse. Afterward, we walked back to the hotel. All of a sudden, all of the lights went out—our first blackout. With Don’s expert guidance we found our way to the Terminus, and with the aid of candles gratefully went to bed.”
Richard Allen was another acquaintance from Paris in the summer of 1939, not a good friend but a respected colleague with whom the Sharps enjoyed cordial relations. It was therefore a surprise for Waitstill to find the Red Cross man stiff and distant at their meeting that Monday, July 22. They’d known one another by their first names in Paris. Now it was “Mr. Sharp” whenever Allen addressed his old acquaintance.
“I inquired of myself, What is wrong?” Waitstill remembered. “I am not the most sensitive person in the world. But I can discern, I believe, a certain frigidity in the atmosphere.”
Allen evidently registered Waitstill’s unease. “All right,” he said at length. “Mr. Sharp, you might as well know what has happened.” Producing a folder, he said, “I have to tell you, sir—I have no choice—that something has happened that bears upon your work here and particularly bears upon any requests that you would make of me.”
With that, Allen pushed across his desk a letter written on familiar AUA stationery and carrying at its bottom Robert Dexter’s equally familiar signature. According to Waitstill’s memory, the letter read: “This is to inform you that Mr. and Mrs. Waitstill Sharp are shortly arriving, if their plans hold up, in Marseille, as the newly-chosen representatives of the Unitarian Service Committee. I must say to you that they come without any approval from me. In fact, I actively disapproved of their candidacy for this post and their selection to do this work. I regret conveying this word to you, but I have no choice.”
Waitstill’s characterization of the letter, which has been lost, might have been too harsh. Dexter had wired the milk money, albeit with misgivings. Although the United States was not yet in the war, Robert Dexter was. An ardent Anglophile, he unequivocally supported the British sea blockade of Germany and the occupied areas as necessary to defeat the Nazis. Denying the Nazis products or materials they might exploit in their war effort was a point of principle.
Whatever Dexter intended to accomplish with his letter, its effect was to stoke Waitstill’s angry astonishment, precipitating a permanent estrangement. “I have never been more amazed,” Waitstill said almost forty years later, “and I have seen some amazing turns of events. Nor have I ever, at age seventy-six, encountered any denouement like this.”
He kept his remarks brief that day in Allen’s office, explaining that he and Martha had been told by none other than AUA president Dr. Eliot himself that it was their moral obligation to come to France. He would otherwise keep his own counsel until he next met up with Dr. Dexter. “I am not going to let this matter rest here,” he said. “You can be assured of that.”
And he did not. In at least two lengthy written reports to Dexter, Waitstill explained the rationale behind the milk delivery, reminding his colleague that he and Martha were sanctioned to do what they deemed best in whatever circumstances they might encounter.
In their official joint report to the AUA, the Sharps also made it a point not just to justify the milk delivery but also to celebrate it. They emphasized not only the project’s success but also its key importance in establishing their credentials with skeptical French officials, whose vital help included precious and scarce supplies of gasoline. The French officials’ trust, they wrote, would have been “absolutely impossible to gain if we had announced ourselves as interested only in the rescue of distinguished refugee intellectuals.”2
Waitstill told Allen he would gladly answer any questions he had about the matter. “I agree with you that it appears incredible,” Allen answered. “Now each of us can do his best for our common cause, the relief of need and suffering in unoccupied France.”
Hugh Fullerton, the US consul general in Marseille, mentioned at his meeting with the Sharps the next day that he too had heard from Dexter. Fullerton, whose previous posting had been Paris, where he also had been among Waitstill and Martha’s network of friends and contacts, knew their work in detail. More important, Fullerton realized from personal experience how urgently needed their milk program was, especially in view of the Red Cross’s distribution problems. Fullerton was prepared to extend any help he could.
Over the next few days, the Sharps’ relationship with Richard Allen warmed considerably. “Keep in touch,” he told them, “and when you come to the end of your milk shipment I’ll be glad to try to help you get more milk from the International Red Cross.” Allen also issued them both an ordre de mission on Red Cross stationery, a useful document to establishment credibility with wary French officials as well as to gain priority access to gasoline.
With the matter of the milk delivery settled, Waitstill and Martha turned their attention to the welfare of Czech refugees. Don Lowrie introduced them to Vladimir Vochoc. A onetime college professor and former chief of the Czech foreign service’s personnel division, Vochoc had been his country’s consul in Marseille at the time of the Einmarsch. Since then, the ex-diplomat and academic had wittily restyled himself consul of “Czechoslovakia in liquidation,” and in that capacity happily issued precious Czech passports to any and all enemies of the Reich.
They weren’t legal, of course, but they usually worked, and they saved an untold number of lives. When his supply of blanks from Prague ran out, Vochoc had his own passports printed in Bordeaux, in the Occupied Zone.
Of immediate concern to Vochoc—and Don Lowrie, who was local delegate for the American Friends of Czechoslovakia—was a group of about a thousand Czech soldiers and their families, at that moment encamped at Agde, on the Mediterranean coast near Perpignan. When the Nazis had taken Czechoslovakia, these men had all joined the French army. After Paris fell, they were led south by their general, Sergej Ingr, who later became minister of defense of the Czech government in exile in London. Ingr hoped to put them on ships to North Africa, where they might regroup and join the Allied armies. It was critical to evacuate the Czechs. The Nazis considered them deserters, a crime for which the penalty was execution.
In the meantime, the refugee Czechs’ predicament was exacerbated by new, anti-immigrant laws from Vichy that made proof of French birth a requirement for obtaining a work permit. Not even naturalized citizens could legally obtain the vital documents.
Waitstill, Martha, and Lowrie visited the Czech camp at Agde with Vladimir Vochoc on July 25. Martha, who had been given a small amount of discretionary funds by AmRelCzech, found that some of the men’s relatives were staying near the camp. One was Anna Pollakova, trained and experienced as an interpreter and a secretary, who appeared in rags. She told Martha that her brother, a Czech soldier, had escaped to join the British army. Pollakova was down to her last thousand francs, about twenty dollars. Fortunately, she had an address for her brother in Great Britain. Martha agreed to wire him and also arranged for the woman to go to work in Vochoc’s office. AmRelCzech would subsidize her salary.
Ella Adler, whom Martha found in a hospital, also had a brother, named Ladislav, fighting with the British. She was nearly penniless and had been so distraught that she’d slit her wrists. Martha paid her hospital bill and arranged a weekly stipend for her after her release. She also offered to cover Adler’s fare to England, if it were possible for her to reunite with her brother. If not, Vochoc promised to find her useful, remunerative employment of some sort.
“There were many variations of these cases,” Martha wrote.
Most of them could be helped temporarily by a small sum of money and some time spent assisting them with their problems.
Elizabeth Steiner came to me in happy despair. Her husband had just been demobilized. His only clothing was a pair of army pants—not even a shirt to his name! Yet they’d just learned that they both had been granted U.S. visas. Their relatives in Chicago, according to letters they showed us, promised to pay all their expenses for the trip, as well as give them a place to stay until Mr. Steiner found work.
The Steiners’ only problem is that they had no money whatsoever; none for food or clothes or even to get to Marseille to pick up their visas, much less pay for steamship tickets to the U.S.
We joyously gave Mrs. Steiner the money to cover everything. They agreed to return the sum to Vladimir Vochoc when they reached their family in Chicago, thus allowing him to use the money to help another family in need.
In another instance, Martha remembered, “Just before leaving the camp I stopped to talk to a woman carrying her infant child in her arms. The baby was sickly yellow, the mother emaciated. When I asked her what was wrong with the baby, she burst into tears and said, ‘I can’t nurse her! I have no milk. I have no money to buy food for her. We live on scraps from garbage and my husband is lost somewhere in France. My baby is dying in my arms!’ I took mother and child to the army hospital, arranged for medical care and a regular stipend for food and clothing and rent. I also took her husband’s name, and would give it to Don and Vladimir, to see if they could find him.”
On July 27, Martha and Waitstill parted with Lowrie in Marseille and drove to Tarascon to see the aged Madame Saint-René Taillandier, where she awaited word of the Red Cross shipment to which the Amé-Leroys in Lisbon had entrusted her. “Madame’s maid greeted us with the sad news that Madame was ill and could not see us in the salon,” Martha remembered. “However, she would receive us in her bedroom.”
No French queen at her levee could have been more elegant. This indomitable aristocrat, frail and elderly, wearing a lace boudoir cap over her white curls with matching peignoir, and supported by numerous lacy pillows, received us with great dignity. She held out her hand to be kissed. We bowed, introduced ourselves and felt as if we should be kneeling.
Formalities over, her first question was, “Where’s my wagon?”
We gave her letters from the Amé-LeRoys, the bill of lading for “her” wagon and a list of its contents. As she read, tiny tears of joy welled up in her eyes. She looked up and explained to us how a simple pair of work pants would bring dignity to demobilized French soldiers, most of whom were still wearing their tattered old uniforms and blue armbands that denoted their demobilization. These old rags were demoralizing reminders that France had fallen in defeat.
We explained to Madame that the Red Cross car and our car, filled with milk for the babies of Unoccupied France, were attached and stuck somewhere in transit from Lisbon. Waitstill was headed back for Portugal the next day, and [he] would search for the cars on his way. Our question for her was once the cars finally were released, where did Madame wish hers sent?
“Montpellier!” she answered vigorously, then added that the Sharps should advise a Colonel Cros of the French Red Cross in Montpellier of the shipment date. Waitstill agreed to do so and promised to wire her the moment he knew anything firm about arrival dates.
Before they left, the maid served coffee, which was brought on a silver tray with an antique silver pot, sugar bowl, creamer, and fine china, “worthy of a museum,” Martha thought. After coffee, they rose, kissed her hand again, and bade her a speedy recovery.
Martha knew that Madame must have been saving both coffee and sugar for months. As she had so often before in Czechoslovakia and here in France, Martha marveled at the human ability to live “as usual” in the midst of chaos.