Montague nurse and actress Marina Goldman said that when she began helping a Rhode Island friend with a documentary about his grandfather, a former Greenfield minister who devoted years to working with his wife behind the scenes to help hundreds of people trying to flee the Nazis during World War II, she had no idea how timely its release on PBS last fall would be.
“Little did we know when we started researching this film over a decade ago that it would have such relevance today,” said Goldman. “Little did we know that we’d be showing it at The White House last October as the Obama administration hosted a summit on refugees.”
World War II may have produced the largest refugee crisis in history, but according to a United Nations report cited by Goldman, that’s been surpassed by today’s refugee crisis, with more than 65 million people displaced as of last June by conflicts and climate change — with one in 113 people displaced.
Goldman, whose voice was cast along with that of Tom Hanks to portray the Rev. Waitstill Sharp in Ken Burns’ “Defying the Nazis: The Sharps’ War,” told about 125 Franklin County Chamber of Commerce members Friday that few people had heard the story of Sharp, who preached occasionally at All Souls Church after moving to Greenfield in 1972, in part because of his modesty.
“He regretted that he wasn’t able to save more lives,” said Goldman. “He only saved hundreds, and there were millions.”
The Sharps traveled to rescue hundreds of refugees from Czechoslovakia and France in 1939, after the 37-year-old minister in Wellesley received a phone call 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 took control of the country. They 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.
Together, the Sharps helped hundreds of intellectuals, Jews and other at-risk populations flee the country. Both were honored by Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, as members of its Righteous of the Nations in 2005 and 2006.
Goldman — whose own humanitarian work has taken her to Sierra Leone, where she served in the Peace Corps and back again a dozen times to provide heath care — was first invited to work on the film by the couple’s grandson, Artemis Joukowsky III, a Hampshire College alumnus along with her husband, Josh, and eventually helped persuaded Burns to help them with the documentary.
Joukowsky told The Recorder last fall, “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 this country.”
Sharp died in 1984; Martha Sharp died 15 years later.
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