Grandson uncovers Righteous Gentiles’ story

By Steve Lipman · November 30, 1999

WELLESLEY HILLS, Mass., June 11 (JTA) — Eighth-grader Artemis Joukowsky’s assignment was ordinary: interview a relative. But there was nothing ordinary about “Mommy Mommy.” That was Joukowsky’s nickname for his grandmother, Martha Sharp, whom he decided to interview. Outfitted with a notepad and tape recorder, he sat down with her, expecting to hear stories about serving as a minister’s wife, about raising a family, about divorcing and remarrying. Instead, Joukowsky heard a story of cloak-and-dagger intrigue, of escaping from Gestapo agents and spiriting refugees away from the Nazis. Martha Sharp, her grandson learned that day three decades ago, had worked with her first husband, the Rev. Waitstill Sharp, a Unitarian minister, to bring endangered Jews and gentiles to safety during the Third Reich. Sharp and his wife, an experienced social worker, had left their safe lives — and their two young children — to rescue strangers in occupied Czechoslovakia and Vichy France. The number of people they saved is at least several hundred; it may be thousands. No one knows, because the Sharps destroyed their documents the day before the Nazis came to Prague. “It blew me away,” says Joukowsky, now 45. It was the first time he had heard his grandmother’s story. His family had never talked about the Sharps’ exploits. Fascinated, Joukowsky, an entrepreneur, became his grandparents’ chronicler, recording their life story, commissioning a biography, underwriting a documentary and, finally, proposing them for selection by Yad Vashem as Righteous Gentiles, the Holocaust memorial center’s designation for non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. His work — eight months of interviews and archive research — paid off. The Sharps were slated to be posthumously honored this week in Jerusalem in a ceremony that will be attended by 50 members of the Sharp family and members of the Unitarian community, a representative of the American government and at least one Jew rescued by the couple. The Sharps are the second and third Americans among some 21,000 people honored as Righteous Gentiles by Yad Vashem. The first was Varian Fry, the wartime representative in France of the Emergency Rescue Committee. The Sharps were “motivated by their faith and their moral courage,” according to the Web site of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “They were good people. They were very brave courageous people,” Stanlee Stahl, executive vice president of the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, says of the Sharps. “They went into a war zone. They stood up. They did what most people did not do. They not only had the courage to care but the courage to act.” Stahl’s organization, which publicizes the heroism of Righteous Gentiles and supports some financially, helped Joukowsky and his brother Misha prepare their presentation to Yad Vashem. Stahl says she had not heard about the Sharps until the Joukowskys approached her two years ago. “It was very clear that they had done a great deal of rescue work that was gender-blind, that was religion-blind,” she says, adding that the Sharps were part of a wider assistance campaign. “It was a group effort.” Bribing Border Guards, Forging Passports Rev. Sharp, a graduate of Harvard Law School with both Unitarian ordination and an interest in foreign service, was a new pastor at the Unitarian Church of Wellesley Hills, a 19th-century stone building in the Boston suburb. After the 1938 Munich Pact that gave Nazi Germany the Sudetenland territory of Czechoslovakia in return for a pledge of peace, the Sharps led a discussion at the church on “The Rape of Czechoslovakia.” From the pulpit, the Rev. Sharp “declared war on Hitler,” Joukowsky says. This was at a time when the U.S. government was still neutral and isolationism was dominant. The Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, the church’s outreach branch that had close ties to Unitarian churches in Czechoslovakia, was concerned, foreseeing widespread human rights violations. The organization asked the couple to go to Prague to serve as “commissioners,” to help the nascent relief effort and carry the Unitarian witness to the Czech people. The Sharps agreed. They left their two children — Hastings, 3, and newborn Martha — in the care of friends. Rev. Sharp was 37; his wife, 33. Two “greenhorns,” in Martha Sharp’s words. Their voyage across the Atlantic took them through U-boat-infested waters. They arrived in Prague in February 1939, a month before the German army occupied the country. They stayed until the end of August; Germany invaded Poland, starting World War II, on Sept. 1. During their six months in Czechoslovakia, they worked with other human rights organizations to help political refugees — academics, scientists, intellectuals, mostly Jews — escape. To minimize the chances of detection, they wrote their notes in a hard-to-decipher shorthand. Cutting through red tape, they registered refugees, found scholarships or employment that were necessary for emigration, secured release from prisons, arranged travel to safety in London, Paris and Geneva — and sometimes personally escorted the refugees out of Czechoslovakia. “There was a sudden [burst] of adrenaline borne of my hatred of the Nazis, and my intention, which may qualify as a Christian intention, to do as much as I could for the welfare of children and mothers, both refugee and indigenous populations,” Rev. Sharp testified years later. The Sharps returned to the U.S., then, at the request of the Unitarians, went back to Europe in June 1940, basing their operations in Vichy France’s Marseilles, the primary port in unoccupied France and a haven for refugees. During a stopover on the way in neutral Lisbon, they connected with Varian Fry, and agreed to act as his liaisons in France. They remained in Marseilles until autumn 1940, when they returned home to care for their children — but on brief trips out of the country, they resumed the life-saving, risky activities they had done in Prague, taking people to asylum, trading money on the black market, bribing border guards, and buying and forging passports. With a special interest in the condition of children, they coordinated the distribution of fresh milk, a project implemented by Martha Sharp. Among the individuals the Sharps helped shepherd out of danger were Nobel laureate physicist Otto Meyerhoff and several prominent writers, including Heinrich Mann, Franz Werfel and Lion Feuchtwanger. Tailed By The Gestapo Though the couple will be honored by Yad Vashem for their work in France — where, a Holocaust survivor now living in New York City was able to verify, they had risked their own lives for Jewish lives — their time in Czechoslovakia was more dangerous, “more heroic,” Joukowsky says. In Prague, he says, the Gestapo trailed the Sharps, threatened them and finally closed their office, rifling the space and throwing the furniture onto the street. Displaced, the Sharps continued their work out of private homes. Near the end of their time in Prague, Rev. Sharp left for a meeting in Switzerland and was refused reentry into Czechoslovakia; Martha Sharp continued working by herself. Years later, she wrote down her memories of those days. On one mission, she remembered, “I found a taxi in the early darkness, and noting that the driver had a companion in the front seat, gave an address which was near but not actually the one which was my destination. The ‘extra cargo’ tried to engage me in conversation, but I parried his questions. Arriving at the place, I hastily paid the driver.” She walked around the corner and hid in a doorway to see if she was being followed. She was. “The ‘companion’ came around the same corner, looked up the street, down an alley or two and then walked along the street,” Sharp wrote. “The driver honked. My heart raced as I realized that the follower must be a Gestapo agent. I flattened myself against the entrance and, in the darkness, he walked right by and then headed back toward the cab.” On the night of March 14-15, 1939, the day before German troops marched into the Czech capital, the Sharps burned their notes, and they stopped maintaining records. Until then, they later said, they had assisted some 3,500 people. Martha Sharp took part in the escape of Feuchtwanger — an anti-Nazi German-Jewish novelist sought by the Third Reich as “Enemy of the State No. 1” — and his wife Marta by dressing as a French farmer and accompanying the couple on the train ride to the French-Spanish border, where she distracted the guards. She gave her ship ticket to the Feuchtwangers; leaving from Lisbon, the Rev. Sharp escorted them to the United States. Feuchtwanger gave the Sharps credit for his escape, Stahl says. “He very clearly said ‘I owe my life to the Sharps.’ “ Providentially, the Rev. Sharp was in Switzerland at a conference when his wife decided to leave Prague in August 1939; she left, she eventually learned, a day before the Gestapo had planned to arrest her. What would the Sharps’ fate have been if captured by the Nazis? Death, Joukowsky says. Why were the Sharps so successful in their rescue mission? Martha Sharp, a beautiful woman, “had a charismatic personality,” Joukowsky says. “She was able to negotiate her way out of tremendously complicated situations.” Her husband was more clinical. “He was able to get things done in a very organized kind of way. “They made a great team,” Joukowsky says, adding that they had a “tremendous sense of justice.” Rev. Sharp “was offended by that terrible man,” he said, referring to Hitler. Their work in Europe was an expression of their Universalist faith, a liberal religion that rejects the Christian Trinity but accepts the beliefs of many religions, their grandson says. He tells of a conversation on the ship to the U.S., in which Feuchtwanger asked the Rev. Sharp about the couple’s motivation. “You must have been paid for this,” Feuchtwanger said. “This is not for money,” the pastor answered. “Are you kidding me?” the writer asked. “They were threatened many times,” Joukowsky says. “I don’t think they had any idea of the danger they were facing. They were more worried about the children” they were protecting. Saving Rosemarie Feigl Rosemarie Feigl, a 13-year-old refugee from Vienna who had spent more than a year with her parents in Italy and France, met Martha Sharp in Marseilles in 1940, when her parents said they were sending her, without them, to safety. An only child, she was among the 39 people, including 29 children, that Martha Sharp met at the Marseilles train station. Feigl, who has lived on the Upper West Side for 60 years and testified to Yad Vashem about Sharp’s bravery, remembers her as a well-dressed woman with a “very big feather” in her hat. “I thought she was a very pretty, rich American — sweet, gentle, motherly.” Sharp took the refugees across France to Spain. They were divided into two groups; she escorted one group from Lisbon across the ocean, then was at the Hoboken, N.J. dock in December 1940 when Feigl’s group arrived several days later. “That was the last time I saw her,” Feigl says. Placed temporarily in out-of-state foster homes, Feigl was “busy trying to learn English and adjusting to a whole new world.” She became an artist, now “mostly retired.” Two years ago, a private investigator hired by Joukowsky located her. Would she be willing to testify about her experiences with Martha Sharp? “I was delighted,” she said. “If they hadn’t fished me out,” she says, “I would not be here. I was one of the lucky children.” Feigl, who has told her story at several schools, mostly in the Boston area, will join the Sharps’ group at the Yad Vashem ceremony next week — it will be her first time in Israel. Though the Sharps will be honored together, they divorced in 1952, each later remarrying. Their work in Nazi Europe “transformed” their lives, Joukowsky says. The Rev. Sharp, who returned initially to the ministry, later worked with the U.N. Relief and Rehabilitation Agency’s Displaced Persons Division, then became a civil rights and anti-war activist. He died in 1984. Martha Sharp, who married David Cogan, a wealthy Jewish businessman from New York, devoted her life to public service, investigating the living conditions of Japanese-Americans interned in this country during World War II, and serving on the board of the Girls Clubs of America. She became a passionate defender of Israel — a board member of Hadassah and a speaker for Youth Aliyah. She died in 1999. After the war, the Sharps were honored by France, Portugal and Czechoslovakia, and in recent weeks, such institutions as Brown University, and a Peace Abbey near Wellesley Hills, have held ceremonies devoted to the couple, says Joukowsky, who frequently speaks about his grandparents at schools and synagogues in his area. Nevertheless, he says, few people know what they did. Their story deserves to be known, he says. “I’m not doing this for honor,” Joukowsky says of the decision to seek recognition by Yad Vashem. “I’m doing this to tell the story.” Hollywood is said to be contemplating a feature film on the Sharps. Joukowsky has told his children about their great-grandparents. “I wanted them to know about service and sacrifice,” he says. Last year his sixth-grade daughter, Alexandra, had an assignment in a public speaking course. She had to speak about some aspect of the Holocaust. “She chose her great-grandmother,” Joukowsky says. “She knew the story.”

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Grandson uncovers Righteous Gentiles’ story

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