I remember the moment with absolute clarity.
It was 1976, and I was a freshman attending the Allen-Stevenson School in New York City. One afternoon I casually mentioned to my mother that John Pariseau, my history and social studies teacher, had assigned a class report on the subject of moral courage. He said our papers were to be built around a personal interview.
My mother just as casually suggested that I talk with her parents about their adventures in Europe during World War II. “They played an important role in rescuing Jews and other people from the Nazis,” she said. “Their story would make an interesting paper.”
What? I was momentarily speechless—-rare for me. “Mummy Mummy and Grandpa Sharp?” I blurted. “You’re kidding me!”
“Not at all,” she answered. “Go talk to them. They’ll tell you.”
She might as well have said that my grandparents, Waitstill and Martha Sharp, had conquered polio, invented jazz, or built the Empire State Building. Waitstill—Waitstill Hastings Sharp, a retired Unitarian minister—had never so much as mentioned World War II to me, much less acknowledged that he’d played a role in it. Likewise for Martha, from whom he had been long divorced. It was difficult for me to picture the two of them together under any circumstance, let alone as a dauntless duo carrying out dangerous rescue missions in enemy territory. To think that these unassuming people were heroes of the Holocaust astonished me, and I eagerly looked forward to learning more.
It wasn’t practical to interview both Martha and Waitstill for the paper, so I decided to focus on Mummy Mummy, as we grandchildren had always known her, who lived in an East Eightieth Street brownstone, near the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a short walk from our apartment. Just as my mother suggested, Mummy Mummy said she’d be very happy to talk with me. Days later, I showed up for our first interview. She was seventy-one at the time, slender and graceful, beautiful as she always had been, and one of the warmest people I have ever known. My grandmother had a knack for making you feel you were first in her affections no matter who else was in the room.
She greeted me at the door and showed me to a room where we would sit across a table from one another in a formal interview setting. I set up my audiocassette recorder, turned it on, looked up at her, and said something like, “Well, tell me what you and Grandpa did during the war.”
She gave me one of her radiant smiles and began slowly with a description of the January night in 1939 when she and Grandpa Sharp learned, to their utter surprise, that they’d been invited to undertake the Unitarian Church’s first-ever international relief project, a mission of mercy to the imperiled citizens of Czechoslovakia. Gradually she became more animated, regaling me with amazing tales from her six months together with Waitstill in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Later she would speak of Vichy France, North Africa, Israel, and the Middle East.
Martha told me about the frantic work of securing travel papers for Social Democrats, Jews, artists, philosophers, and the long list of others in Czechoslovakia who faced certain extermination if they couldn’t escape. She described their desperate schemes to pluck these otherwise doomed souls from the Nazis’ grasp: how exhilarating it was to succeed, how heartsick they were when they failed.
She taught me a little spy craft too: secrets of writing codes, watching for tails, dealing with tapped telephones, and gauging who could be trusted and who could not. From time to time it was necessary to remind myself that this was my tender-hearted grandmother talking, not some retired OSS operative.
I was amazed to hear what she and Waitstill had accomplished, and nearly as amazed to have known nothing of their exploits until that moment. I asked her why she had never spoken of it, nor had anyone else in the family. She shrugged it off, as if to say that risking your neck for strangers speaking strange tongues in a strange and hostile world thousands of miles from home didn’t merit discussion, certainly not special recognition.
It was just something that needed to be done.
We spoke together several more times, and out of these conversations came an eight-page document, entitled “A Matter of Faith,” for which Mr. Pariseau gave me the only AI ever received in high school.
I understood, of course, that Martha had confined herself to the highlights of her story. Exciting as it was, I instinctively realized that it was part of a much deeper and broader saga. And the more I reflected on it, the more I realized it would be up to me to tell this important story.
After high school, I entered Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, which is about twenty-five miles from the house where Waitstill then lived in Greenfield. The Reverend Sharp’s life since retirement from the pulpit in 1972 was fairly circumscribed, partially as a consequence of age-related infirmities. He no longer was quite so square-shouldered, strong, and resolute as he always appeared in photos, although he did still wear his signature wire-rimmed spectacles.
Waitstill read the New York Times each morning, watched the news with Walter Cronkite, and read a lot of historical nonfiction and biography, with particular emphasis on World War II and its causes. He was especially interested in books about the rise of Hitler.
Raised on a farm, he also taught me how to compost.
We attended church together on Sundays, and we often discussed religion, faith, and its role in both his public and private life. Though retired, he continued to deliver guest sermons from time to time. I attended a few of them and each had a profound effect on me. Each was fully considered and powerful. If there was an overarching theme to them, it was the importance of finding the joy of serving others. Since it was exactly that search that then occupied much of my time, I listened closely as he spoke.
The past seemed to interest him only insofar as it illuminated the present. He did humor me when I asked about the relief missions to Europe. He filled in a few blanks in Martha’s narrative, told me a tale or two of his own derring-do, and generally agreed that humans rebuffed my admiring suggestions that he and Martha had received insufficient recognition for their remarkable sacrifice.
Like Martha, he saw their deeds as just something that had needed to be done.
I saw the situation otherwise. Of course I was proud of them, proud to be their grandson and certain that their story needed to be told. My purpose, naturally, would be to learn from the example of Martha and Waitstill and their lives, but I also wanted to rescue their example as an object lesson for a new age.
As they both emphasized to me, if the civilized world learned anything from the Holocaust it was that to placate or ignore an evil such as Nazism is morally wrong and practically ensures there will be great suffering as a consequence. They had seen and deeply experienced it for themselves, firsthand.
Yet on the evidence of subsequent experience with the likes of Cambodia’s Pol Pot, Slobodan Milosevic in the Balkans, or the slaughters in Rwanda, Congo, and Darfur, the world’s people must relearn the hard lesson with every generation. What the Sharps demonstrated by example was their fundamental belief that this moral imperative—to confront evil wherever it appears—holds true for the individual as well as society. I can’t think of a more important message for me to carry from their generation to mine and beyond.
Unfortunately Waitstill died before I could begin systematic interviews with him. Martha survived him by sixteen years, but her memory was irretrievably lost to senile dementia before I was able to capture and fully record her story.
There seemed to be no way forward until a short time following her death in 1999, when we discovered among her possessions a trove of documents, photos, and personal artifacts dating back to her school days. The vast and eclectic archive includes everything from personal letters, official reports, and photos to maps, handwritten notes, calendars, datebooks, hotel tabs, ticket stubs, playbills, and other souvenirs of Martha and Waitstill’s travels. There are many deeply touching love notes between them in the collection as well.
In all, more than two hundred thousand of these and other documents discovered in my research are now digitally housed at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Brown University, Harvard University Divinity School library, and the Cohen Center at Keene State College in New Hampshire. Much of this book is drawn from those primary sources, as well as from Martha and Waitstill’s oral histories recorded in 1978; Waitstill’s unpublished autobiography; and several of Martha’s unpublished manuscripts, plus taped and filmed interviews with those who knew them and those whom they rescued.
The Sharps as they emerged from the research were quintessentially American, in the best and truest sense. They were relentless optimists but also realists, fearless but not foolhardy, resourceful and quick-witted, brave, and, more importantly, determined and tireless. They persevered through terror and anger, joy, frustration, privation, tragedy, and innumerable heart-stopping moments when lives hung in the balance. Through it all, they were buoyed by a fullness of spirit that only intensified as the threat of death lurked ever nearer.
For them it all came down to simple truths. I remember a wonderful, provocative question that Martha often asked me through the years: “What are you going to do in your life that’s important?”
I’ve learned to answer that question in many ways, but, as I will always be the Sharps’ grandson, I have taken on a lifetime commitment to make sure that the memory of their work and the legacy of their lives are carried forth. The actions and achievements of Martha and Waitstill deserve to be honored, and their courage and principles deserve to be celebrated so we may build a more just and fair society. The story of the lives of Martha and Waitstill Sharp deserves to be told, and now I’m telling it.
To me, nothing could be more important.
—ARTEMIS JOUKOWSKY
August 2016