The heroic story of Waitstill Sharp, a Unitarian-Universalist minister who preached in Greenfield’s All Souls Church in the 1970s after retiring from the pulpit, will be the subject, along with his wife, Martha, of a Ken Burns documentary previewing Monday at the White House, before its Sept. 20 PBS airing.
“Defying the Nazis: The Sharps’ War” features Montague resident Marina Goldman and Tom Hanks as the voices of Martha and Waitstill Sharp, who traveled to rescue hundreds of refugees from Czechoslovakia and France in 1939, on the brink of war.
Both were honored by Yad Vashem as members of its Righteous of the Nations in 2005 and 2006.
Built on a 2012 documentary researched by the couple’s grandson, Artemis Joukowsky III, a Hampshire College alumnus whose book about them was published Wednesday by Beacon Press, the Burns documentary is also being shown Monday evening at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. following the White House special screening as part of the Obama administration’s focus on the Syrian refugee crisis.
Joukowsky said, “This is our watershed moment. It’s unbelievable how relevant it is. I think PBS has chosen this film very specifically to make a statement about humanizing the face of refugees and saying every one of them is a human being, every one deserves everything that we believe in in this country.
“We’ve got a big two weeks in front of us,” said Goldman, who plans to attend the White House and Holocaust Memorial screenings as well as a ceremony and screening next week at New York’s 92nd Street Y to award the Foundation for Refugees’ second Martha Sharp Award for “ordinary people who do extraordinary things” to a couple who has traveled to Greece to work with Syrian and Afghan refugees.
She said a special screening, including a “talkback” with Burns, is planned for this fall at the Academy of Music in Northampton.
“The story of the Sharps reads like a spy novel, but it’s all true,” writes Burns in his forward to Joukowsky’s 255-page book. … (It) explores that rare level of character — selfless sacrifice for the greater good — that we have always admired and celebrated in this country. … The Sharps saw there was a job to be done and, quite simply, did it. Their objective was to rescue enemies and victims of the Nazis. Personal glory wasn’t the point. It was just the right thing to do.”
Unitarians in Greenfield — where Sharp moved with his second wife, Monica, to High Street in 1972 after serving parishes in Iowa, Michigan and then Petersham — never heard the story of his earlier adventure, according to Ann Howard, whose husband, Stephen, was then All Souls minister. Sharp did occasional services at the church.
“He was never famous when he was with us,” she said. “It was in the background.”
Sharp died in 1984.
Even Joukowsky — who explains that his grandfather “viewed the story as divulging the secrets of rescue” and “was very angry about others who were kind of bragging about their exploits” — didn’t learn about it until, as a high school freshmen assigned to write a social studies paper on “moral courage” was advised by his mother that her parents had a story to tell.
Sharp, then a 37-year-old minister at the Wellesley Hills Unitarian Society, and his 33-year-old wife, Martha, a social worker who’d worked at Chicago’s Hull House, were involved in social and political issues at the church when they received a phone call in January 1939 from the head of the American Unitarian Association asking them to travel to Czechoslovakia to lead an emergency relief mission.
Leaving their two young children behind safely in Wellesley, the Sharps arrived in Prague the following month, just a few weeks before Germany, which had annexed part of Czechoslovakia in 1938, took control of the capital and the rest of the country. They interviewed more than 3,500 endangered Jews and gentiles, according to Keene State College, where three professors played a role in researching the film.
Over the next seven months, Sharp also organized an underground escape path for funds to various English, French and Swiss banks that would aid the Jewish intellectuals, writers, political dissidents and union organizers they had contacted. The couple helped individuals and families by giving them money that allowed them to survive in a country where they had no work, no family and few assets, and they helped refugees escape the country by connecting them with employers and sponsors abroad.
Followed by Nazi police and Gestapo patrols, the Sharps had their offices ransacked, faced arrest for aiding refugees and left Prague in August of 1939, the day after they heard their arrest was imminent. The couple escaped with the Nazis at their heels.
After a brief return to Wellesley, they accepted a mission from the newly formed Unitarian Service Committee to return to war-torn Europe in June 1940. They helped set up and staff the Unitarian Service Committee’s office in Lisbon, a final European refuge city for many escaping the Nazi regime.
They spent most of 1940 working in Vichy-controlled France, where Martha organized delivery of 13 tons of milk products to feed starving infants and arranged for transport of 29 European children to this country. Together, the Sharps helped hundreds of intellectuals, Jews and other at-risk populations flee the country.
“The Sharps’ work was divided, as it would be for the following six years, between relief and emigration assistance,” according to the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee website.
“Much of their activity involved individual cases, but on one occasion Martha escorted 35 refugees — among them journalists, political leaders, and two children whose parents had committed suicide — to England, and on another arranged for a group of children to leave in cooperation with the organization British Kinderaction. On the night the Nazis entered Prague in early March 1939, the Sharps burned their notes and kept no further records. Their personal peril increased when the Gestapo closed down their office at the end of July, but the Sharps were committed to completing their mission. Waitstill left Prague in early August for a conference in Switzerland but was prevented from returning to Czechoslovakia. Martha departed from Prague alone a week later, learning only afterward that she had escaped capture by the Gestapo by one day.”
The intense danger of their work is reflected in an account by Martha Sharp in the UUSC site:
“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 (and walked) around the corner, hiding in the first doorway to watch and see whether I was being followed. The ‘companion’ came around the same corner, looked up the street, down an alley or two and then walked along the street. The driver honked. My heart raced as I realized that my 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.”
The Yad Vashem website describes how the Sharps, who sought ways to help Jewish and non-Jewish fugitives escape, learned that the world-famous German-Jewish anti-Nazi author Lion Feuchtwanger needed to be helped out of France immediately with his wife, both of whom were on a Nazi extermination list. In addition to personally escorting the couple to safety across the Pyrenees, Sharp also convinced Otto Meyerhof, a Jewish Nobel Prize recipient, to escape.
Throughout the long trip to the Spanish-Portuguese border, Waitstill watched over Feuchtwanger, keeping inquisitive travelers at a safe distance, to lessen the danger of his disclosure by the Spanish police and the risk of his being returned to Vichy French hands.
The only other American before the Sharps among 21,000 non-Jews who has been so honored is Emergency Rescue Committee head Varian Fry, who worked closely with the Sharps and has been described as “The American Schindler,” a reference to Oskar Schindler, the “Schindler’s List” namesake who is also an honoree. There are now five American honorees.
“It was the greatest episode of my life,” Sharp told Recorder reporter Irmarie Jones of that wartime era in a 1976 interview. “I had a ringside seat to history.”
Goldman, a Montague nurse practitioner who appears in local theater productions, including an Eggtooth Production of Shakespeare at the Arts Block this month, fell into doing the voiceover for the new documentary through her husband, Josh, who was Joukowsky’s Hampshire College roommate in the 1980s.
Joukowsky had begun researching his grandmother’s papers soon after her death in 1999 — first the people the Sharps had been unable to rescue, since those relating to the people rescued had been burned to avoid leaving a trace.
“At first we started to archive them,” he said, “then we worked with the Unitarian-Universalist Service Committee … and before you knew it, we had this amazing history of American rescue during the Holocaust, which no one ever knew anything about.”
The papers were used to document the Sharps’ nomination for Yad Vashem, and its acceptance in 2006 led him to begin work on his own documentary, “Two Who Dared,” with Marina — who’d heard the heroic story years earlier from Joukowsky’s mother — cast as Martha, reading from her memoir.
Joukowsky began working with the educational organization Facing History and Ourselves to circulate the Sharps’ story to schools to convey the importance of humanitarian work. But to reach a wider audience, Joukowsky sought out Burns, who’d graduated from Hampshire College a decade earlier, in 1975, and whom he knew from fund-raising at the college.
Burns originally rejected Joukowsky’s request to “help get this ready for PBS,” said Goldman, “but Artemis, being the persistent, pragmatic person he is, kept trying, and we sat with him in Walpole (N.H.), and watched it together. And Ken said, ‘Oh my God — I’m going to work on this with you.”
Burns, who went from being an adviser to a producer to director on the film, made changes throughout.
“It was a different film, with many of the same interviews,” Joukowsky said. “He used all the best parts of the old film, but we changed everything. What you learn working with Ken Burns is that filmmaking is all in the editing room. We’ve really allowed Martha and Waitstill to narrate their own stories. One thing Ken did was really make it a human story, a love story, not just a story of rescues, but the personal lives in the rescues.”
Burns also recruited Hanks to redo voiceovers for Waitstill Sharp. Meryl Streep was asked to read the part of Martha Sharp to replace Goldman, and when she became too busy, Laura Linney was offered the role, but then also became too busy.
Goldman said she had to re-record Martha’s voice to match Hanks’ tone.
“Can you believe that?” said Goldman, who never got to meet Hanks. “It was great to have him in my headset, reading me love letters.”
Most exciting, Joukowsky said, is that on Sept. 20, as the film airs on PBS, President Obama is scheduled to speak at the United Nations on the global refugee crisis.
“We hope there will be some real synergy that happens between world leaders getting together to talk about this issue and this film,” he said. “One of the most exciting things to me is that it’s not just focusing on the Sharps, or the Unitarians, per se, but it looks at the networks of all the underground organizations they worked with.”
Erwin Staub, the University of Massachusetts emeritus psychology professor who recently authored “The Roots of Goodness and Resistance to Evil,” said the Sharps’ story “represents great moral courage, but in addition, great determination and the willingness to make very substantial sacrifices leaving their children behind. We seem now to be in a variety of ways on a downward course, with people getting more and more critical of each other (with) expressions of hostility … towards various other groups, and here were these people willing to put themselves out so intensely for the other. They saw the humanity in the other and the great danger to the other and were willing to do whatever was within their power to protect people and save lives. We desperately need this. It would transform the public domain if many people engaged in ‘active bystandership at various levels, and this film can be an inspiration for that, at many levels.”
Goldman, who said that one of the best parts of working on the film has been meeting the half dozen remaining surviving refugees helped by the Sharps, who will be at the White House screening.
“We all just carry Martha’s and Waitstill’s seed,” she said. “Especially now, with the things going on in the world today. Everybody does their part.”
“One can only manage a miracle every so often,” Martha Sharp wrote in her memoir. “But a series of miracles can happen when many people become concerned and are willing to act at the right time.”
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