In late August, before her reunion with Waitstill, Martha had composed a letter to Hastings to explain why she would be staying in France a while longer. She was recording, as well, her own rationale for prolonging her absence from him and Martha Content for yet another extended period of time.
“I have some very important news for you,” she wrote.
Here in France today the children do not have enough food. They do not have enough milk. There is not enough soap left to wash the clothes. I have seen no butter since I came here in July. There is no chocolate. There is not enough wool to make them sweaters and there are no more factories making woolen cloth to make trousers and skirts—and there is no coal to heat the houses for the winter.
So the children will be hungry and very cold and some of them will be sick. These children would like to have good food and warm houses. Some families in America are inviting these children to come to spend a year or so with them in their homes. They must come soon before winter, so I am going to wait until I can arrange for them and bring them to America myself. This means that I shall not return home with Dad. I must wait until I can make all the arrangements for the children. So I must give up seeing you until about your birthday! Then what a celebration we will have!
She signed the note, “Lovingly, Mommy.”
The children’s emigration project had seemed well on its way just three days earlier, when Martha was notified that fifty blanket immigration visas, which the US State Department originally had earmarked for British children, had been redesignated for French children and soon would be available to her at the consulate in Marseille.
In fact, the visas would be delayed until November. The second bit of news was more solid. She learned that the US Committee for the Care of European Children had officially agreed to include children of different nationalities in the group, rather than only French as originally had been planned. Brundage’s group would also pay the children’s transportation costs from Lisbon to the United States.
Now all she had to do was find the right candidates, secure their French exit visas as well as exit and entry visas for Spain and Portugal, gather all of them together, then transport the group to Lisbon and onto a ship for New York. Among the few people available to provide her regular, practical assistance was Helen Lowrie, who once again volunteered her services.
Martha did not wait for anyone’s approval to get started. On August 27, two days before her reunion in Toulouse with Waitstill, she visited the internment camp at Recebedoux, near Toulouse, where she encountered a pair of brothers, Joseph and Alexander Strasser, eight and six respectively.
Their father, Paul Strasser, a Viennese physician, had been sent by the Nazis first to Dachau and then to Buchenwald. After two years in the concentration camps—the systematic exterminations hadn’t yet begun—his wife, Madeline, had sold her jewels to purchase Strasser’s freedom. The family had then moved to France where Frau Strasser died of metastatic breast cancer, and her husband and sons were interned.
“We left money with the staff to get the boys photographed,” Martha wrote. “Their father begged us to make it possible for the boys to go.”
Now that the children’s US entry visas and transportation costs were guaranteed, she approached the prefect for the département (state) of Bouches des Rhone, whose office was near Marseille, to ask if he would cooperate in granting the necessary exit visas. “He was most gracious and cooperative,” Martha later recalled, “and expressed himself as delighted by the possibility of this French-American collaboration. He promised me that he would give the exit visas to all the children in his prefecture within 24 hours whenever I gave him the names.”
The one part of her work she knew would be little problem was finding émigré recruits. Since Hyacinthe Loyson had spread word of Martha’s project countrywide in August, Martha had received hundreds of letters and postcards from parents all over France, pleading that she take their children with her to America.
Some were even smuggled south from the Occupied Zone in hay carts, tucked inside midwives’ instrument bags, and even secreted under loaves of bread. All her correspondents wrote that they feared that soon there would not be enough food in France to feed their children, and many openly wrote that they wanted their children to attend schools free of Nazi ideology.
Martha then confidently visited the Portuguese and Spanish consulates in Marseille. Both countries at that point still regularly issued visas. The Portuguese only required a valid US visa and a fully paid ticket from Lisbon to anywhere outside the country. The Spaniards asked for Portuguese and US visas, nothing more.
It all seemed straightforward, but it was deceptively so.
Martha opened a joint office with the Lowries in Marseille. Irina Okounieff came over from Pau to serve as their shared secretary. Before Waitstill left Marseille by train with the Feuchtwangers on the morning of September 18, he had run a lawyerly eye over the registration form Martha was creating, a complex document that needed to address not only the immigration laws of four countries but also potential civil matters, such as lawsuits should any of the children die, be physically injured, or suffer some other sort of harm or disability.
Details were important. Under French law, for example, only a father could legally pass responsibility for a child to another individual. It was therefore of paramount concern to secure the fathers’ signatures.
By September 25, the registration and related documents were completed, and Martha, along with Helen Lowrie, had collected affidavits from the parents or guardians of fifty children, all of whom were ready to emigrate at once.
Then came her first reversal. It was suddenly decreed that exit visas no longer could be issued on a prefect’s sole authority. Permission had to come directly from the top, Vichy.
So instead of taking her list of names to the friendly regional police commissioner, Martha headed instead for the seat of Marshal Pétain’s collaborationist government. She grimly guessed it would take at least three days to secure the proper approvals in Vichy—wildly wishful thinking, as it turned out.
Martha later called Vichy “the city of lost hopes.” Because the old spa lacked proper governmental office space, Pétain operated out of a hotel. So did several of his ministries. The Ministry of Interior, for instance, was headquartered at the abandoned casino. The spa itself was reserved for the Foreign Ministry.
“The former bathing areas, where you could take showers before you went into the swimming pool, were all used as offices,” Martha said. “They all had these spigots on the side and the top and the bottom so that if you happened to touch one of them you would have inundated the person sitting there in front, facing out with the linen curtain pushed back, because it was the shower, you see. You were allowed to sit on something that normally had been the place where people sat when they dressed after they had their shower. It was a sort of bench. It was very interesting because they had a little sign on all of these robinets [faucets] which read, ‘Do Not Touch.’”
She pulled every string she could. In Vichy, Martha called on Robert D. Murphy, the interim US ambassador, who said he would like to help her, but since hers was a private program, not a national one, there wasn’t much he could do.
There ensued a frustrating string of meetings with officials in various Vichy ministries. The routine never varied. Most appointments had to be rescheduled several times. If one of Pétain’s bureaucrats actually was in at the appointed hour, the drill began in the lobby, where Martha would be handed a pencil stub with which to write her name, the identity of the person she wished to see, and a description of her business.
Then, along with everyone else, she waited, sometimes for hours, before a uniformed soldier would walk among the crowd, calling out the names of those who had at last been summoned to their meetings. Martha strained for recognizable syllables.
Most of the “offices” Martha visited were converted bedrooms, minus the beds. Typically, she found an office supplied with some sort of filing cabinet and two or more chairs. Desks seemed to be at a premium. The interviews with Vichy officials invariably concluded with a pronouncement either that her plan was impossible or that she needed to speak to somebody else, often multiple somebodies.
Slow seemed to be the only speed the bureaucrats knew, but they actually did conduct some due diligence. In the Pau municipal archives are several letters written by local officials in October 1940, all in response to Vichy inquiries about Martha and her milk program.
“Her generosity was greatly appreciated,” wrote a welfare inspector to the prefect, who was collecting a dossier on Martha, “as well as her tact, particularly: She met with the various directors of maternal and infant care organizations in the unoccupied zone ... so as to precisely gauge their needs and it is thus, in my humble opinion, that it was possible to assure an equitable and judicious distribution of the milk products (thirteen tons) thanks to American generosity.”
A “special commissioner” under the prefect also remembered Martha with fond respect. “She has not, in any circumstances, manifested any hostile sentiments toward France, and actually seems to have good intentions toward our country,” he reported. “She has thus rendered a real service to the children and has warranted our thanks.”
But the warm reviews did not seem to advance her cause in any substantive way. After eleven days of traipsing around Vichy and getting nowhere, Martha wrote Waitstill, who by then had returned to Wellesley Hills.
My darling Waitstill, I have been thinking of you all day and wishing I were at home to hear that first sermon—and see the church full of friendly faces—greeting you at the door—and tying Martha Content’s ribbons for Sunday School and hearing from Hastings’ new teacher. How dear and familiar it all sounds.
I am still in Vichy—trying to get consent for the visas des sorties. The difficulty seems to be that they don’t want French children to grow up in America, where they will find the life so easy and delightful that they will want to stay. As a matter of principle, they want French families to stay together to take what comes together.
She explained that Vichy also had refused the Argentine and Mexican governments after they offered to take children.
The bureaucrats told Martha they feared that the children would learn English, forget their French, lose touch with their culture, and therefore wouldn’t really be French anymore and would never be able to completely readjust and re-assimilate. They were concerned that British propaganda might even make the children anti-French. They raised the possibility of French boys growing to young manhood in America and then possibly facing conscription into the US armed services. If French boys were to be soldiers, Martha was informed, they would be French soldiers.
She disclosed that she had been reading D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. “The parish would disown me if they knew that book!”
Martha closed the letter, “All my love, Martha,” then resumed writing again: “I couldn’t resist taking another page just to say I love you and miss you dreadfully—really one of us is less than half as efficient alone—at least I feel that way—I need your vitality—either for or against things!”
She went on. “I really must stop and send you my love—and tell you how I wish you were here—or that I was there. I think you made the right decision in August—we must be together—but perhaps we can be sent over here together after the war—at any rate we ought to begin to improve our French from now on. It is important to speak well. Love, again all of it, Martha.”
Over the next two weeks she would continue to battle the Vichy bureaucracy as well as a variety of digestive and respiratory problems. Martha spent October 10 sick in bed with “aches all day in legs and arms,” according to notes in her datebook. Doctors put her on six different medications.
Martha even underwent “fire cupping,” a folk remedy for a number of ailments, in which alcohol-soaked wads of cotton are placed on the skin and set afire. A glass cup is then placed over each burning wad, which is extinguished. As the hot air inside the cup cools, a vacuum is created that allegedly relieves “stagnation” under the patient’s skin. There is no reliable evidence that fire cupping works, as Martha attested, and it can leave ugly marks, as she also discovered. “They draw the blood to the surface and make you look perfectly awful,” she wrote.
Martha soldiered on until October 18, when she at last capitulated to the bureaucrats’ intransigence—or seemed to. “It is with much regret that we write to say that the project for the children invited by American families to stay in the U.S.A. for the duration of the war must be given up,” she announced in a typed memorandum.
The plan was started with definite assurance from French Government officials that the exit visas would be given. Since that time, the regulations have been changed. [Mrs. Sharp] has now been advised by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that the sending of French children to America under present circumstances is contrary to the policy of the French Government.
We are keenly sorry that this link in French American friendship cannot be forged, and that these young ambassadors cannot carry out their mission to keep alive in so many American homes and committees, sympathy and interest for France. We had hoped that the interchange of customs and ideas might still further strengthen the ties between our two countries.
We know that you will share our keen regret—
The unfinished note was meant either as a surrender or a ruse. Whether a finished copy ever was completed is not known. However, the Vichy government soon and suddenly reversed itself. Since the Unoccupied Zone was burdened by thousands of homeless French children—particularly Alsatian children—who’d been driven from their homes by the Nazis and weren’t likely to reunite with their families any time soon, it was decided that Martha would take these children to the United States, as long as she could find relatives there who’d take care of them. In practice, this meant that her best choice would be children with an American parent. One of the children joined his father, a physician, in the United States.
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 replied 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.