Bitter as the loss to Joe Martin had been, Martha barely broke stride. By the middle of December 1946, she was back on the lecture circuit, appearing before audiences in Buffalo, Rochester, and Great Neck, New York. When Hadassah offered to send her to Palestine, she readily accepted. The organization wanted to familiarize Martha, one of their top fund-raisers, as well as a leading liaison to the liberal Christian community in the United States, with the programs that her inspirational fund-raising supported. It was also a chance to cement her commitment to Zionism, which began with her work with Hadassah, which Martha theretofore had embraced enthusiastically but mostly in the abstract.
At 7:15 on the evening of January 16, 1947, she boarded a multi-stop, three-day flight to Cairo. After what she had seen in Europe, the idea of a safe homeland for Jews, particularly their children, struck Martha as a solidly sensible and desirable goal. Now she would see the ideal made real. Witnessing the as-yet-unborn state of Israel as it began to flower in the desert had a profound impact on her.
“A great powerful stream of sacrifice and idealism is bringing about the birth of a nation,” she later wrote. “We are witnessing an epic like that of America. The pioneers are giving their lives and are challenging us to share enough to help in time.”
Martha was shown the length and breadth of Palestine, from the Dead Sea, where she bobbed about with the rest of the tourists in the inky, super-buoyant water, to the Syrian border. The tour included, it seemed to her, every kibbutz and Youth Aliyah program that could be crammed into a six-week visit. She also met David Ben-Gurion, who would become Israel’s first prime minister the following year, as well as many other of the nation’s founding leaders. Among these was former Milwaukee schoolteacher Golda Myerson, who would soon become Israel’s first minister of labor. After she Hebraized her name to Golda Meir in 1956, she would eventually serve from 1969 to 1974 as Israel’s first—and to this date only—female prime minister.
There was also a poignant reunion with Yehuda Bacon, a sixteen-year-old Czech she had met in 1945 in Czechoslovakia on her way home from Lisbon. Bacon, then emaciated and haunted looking, was among a group of children recently rescued from Nazi death camps.
Of Bacon’s immediate family, only a younger sister had managed to escape, to Palestine, before the Germans began implementing their so-called Final Solution. In 1942, Yehuda, his parents, and an older sister had been interned first at Terezin, then transported to Auschwitz. His mother and sister later were moved to another concentration camp, where they died two weeks before its liberation. Yehuda’s father was gassed and cremated at Auschwitz.
Yehuda himself was spared by the Nazis to work in the death camp. He remembered hauling wood for the ovens and being told by a guard on one particularly cold day, “If you want, you can warm yourself in the gas chambers.” These were built below ground level. “Not all the boys dared to do it,” Bacon remembered, “but I was a very curious boy.”
He wanted to see where and how his father had been murdered. “I went in and I asked like somebody who goes to a museum, ‘What is this? What is that? What is the purpose of it?’ Somehow I wanted to remember everything and I kept it very sharp in my memory.”
He committed the scenes at Auschwitz to paper, producing numerous drawings that he somehow preserved and kept safe. Some of them later would be introduced as evidence at the 1961 trial in Israel of Adolf Eichmann, a chief architect of the Final Solution. Bacon would also testify personally at Eichmann’s trial. Martha took many of Bacon’s drawings with her back to the United States and shared them with her horrified audiences. In one of the most powerful, the boy depicted his father’s image rising huge above the landscape from one of the crematorium smoke stacks at the camp. There was a common term for this: “human smoke.”
In Czechoslovakia, Bacon had given Martha the yellow Star of David he had worn, the emblem of faith that the Nazis ordered sewn onto the clothes of all Jews. (Martha would preserve the piece of cloth, which survives today.) Bacon told Martha at the time that his single greatest desire was to immigrate to Palestine.
His wish came true in May of 1946, and the following spring, when they met again in Jerusalem, he was studying at the Bezalel art school, laying the foundation for a long and successful career in Israel as an artist and a teacher. At this meeting, he gave her a self-portrait as a token of gratitude.
Thereafter they would remain in touch, mostly by mail. When Yehuda Bacon visited the United States in the 1960s, Martha restored all his artwork to him, including some pieces that are now in the permanent collection at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.
In the spring of 1947, Waitstill’s quest for “rootage” brought him home from Czechoslovakia, where he had administered a $1.5 million relief program, largely for undernourished children. The four Sharps finally were reunited, if only intermittently, at the new house Martha had bought at 18 Eaton Court, which would be Waitstill’s home address for the next two years. Over that time he would work as a freelance consultant, preach on occasion, and travel relatively infrequently.
From July 18 to August 19, the family vacationed for the first time in years at Lake Sunapee, where Martha made curtains and applied two coats of paint to the guest room sashes.
Martha remained the family breadwinner when in September 1947 she signed a yearlong contract with Hadassah. She agreed to combine fund-raising for Youth Aliyah with certain administrative responsibilities for Children to Palestine, an organization she helped found in 1943 along with Waitstill and others. Its goals were to raise funds for the housing and maintenance of Youth Aliyah children, to publicize Zionism in the Christian world, and to forge interfaith links. Much of the activity was directed to Sunday schools, where children were encouraged to fill collection books for new housing. After a speech-making trip Martha made to Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1948, the secretary of the Hadassah chapter there wrote: “The entire Jewish community has been revitalized by her visit and reinspired by her devotion to our cause. In addition, she accomplished worlds of good with our Christian neighbors, most of whom had never heard the story of the concentration camps, let alone of Youth Aliyah or Children to Palestine.”
Not long before she died, Henrietta Szold wrote to Martha commending her on her work toward the advancement of interfaith understanding. “I want to leave you with the impression,” she wrote, “that your Inter-Faith undertaking strengthens faith and consecrates hope.”
Through the efforts of Martha and Gisela Wyzanski, one of her Hadassah friends, Children to Palestine later became Fellowship in Israel for Arab-Jewish Youth, making grants to integrated projects such as a theater-training program at Oranim College in Haifa and Neve Shalom/Wahat al Salam, currently the only integrated Jewish-Muslim-Christian community in Israel.1 After she returned from her first trip to Palestine, Hadassah immediately sent her out on a three-month national tour that paid her twelve hundred dollars per month. She also received one hundred dollars for each appearance she made on a number of local and regional fund-raising forays.
When she resumed her national speaking schedule that autumn, Hadassah began booking her on numerous joint appearances with Eddie Cantor, the popular comedian and singer who had been an early and vociferous opponent of the Nazis. Cantor also campaigned for the National Infantile Paralysis (Polio) Foundation, which was begun in 1938 by FDR, who had come down with polio in 1921 at the age of thirty-nine. Cantor coined the foundation’s informal name, March of Dimes.
Martha made many friends in the entertainment industry, including Murray Silverstone, head of international distribution for 20th Century Fox studios. In November of 1947, Silverstone and his wife, Dorothy, invited Martha to their house in Scarsdale, New York, to celebrate the opening of Gentleman’s Agreement, the Academy Award-winning examination of anti-Semitism based on Laura Z. Hobson’s novel of the same name.
The movie, directed by Elia Kazan, had special resonance for Martha. Its producer, Darryl Zanuck, was moved to pursue the project after Congressman John E. Rankin of Mississippi, a prominent member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, uttered a series of anti-Semitic slurs on the floor of the House. Rankin is mentioned by name as a bigot in the film.
Martha brought eleven-year-old Martha Content with her to the Silverstones’ party, where she danced with the star of Gentleman’s Agreement, Gregory Peck, whom she found to be very shy.
The Sharps all celebrated Thanksgiving in Wellesley Hills on November 27. Two days later, Waitstill and the children cheered along with Martha when the United Nations voted to partition Palestine, paving the way for the birth of Israel the following May 14, as the British Mandate expired.
The first Arab-Israeli War broke out in Palestine immediately after the UN vote. In May of 1948, armies from Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon, and Iraq invaded the new nation. By July, a UN truce was in effect, but bullets were still flying in Jerusalem when Martha arrived in August on her second trip to the area. A bullet almost hit her in the head one night as she walked in the Old City. She stayed only a couple of weeks on this trip. At the request of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), on the way home Martha flew to Casablanca, where for several days she worked in the mellah, or ghetto, to recruit impoverished and disease-ridden Moroccan children for emigration to Israel.