INTRODUCTION TO THE MARTHA AND WAITSTILL SHARP COLLECTION BY:
ALEKSANDRA BORECKA
Chief Cataloger, United States Holocaust Museum
--------------------------------------------Martha and Waitstill Sharp originally volunteered for the USC’s relief work in
Czechoslovakia in 1939. Martha had been a social worker, and her husband the Rev.
Waitstill Sharp had been a Minister of the Unitarian Church of Wellesley Hills,
Massachusetts. They had to leave their young children in the care of family, friends, and
congregants because their humanitarian operation would soon take on many features of
a cloak-and-dagger mission. In 2006 Israel’s Holocaust remembrance authority, the Yad
Vashem, would posthumously recognize them as “Righteous Among the Nations.” This
award has been conferred on more than 20, 000 Gentiles who risked their lives to save
Jews, but Martha and Waitstill were only the second and third Americans to receive the
honor, and two of only a handful of non-Europeans; as of this writing Martha is the only
American woman to receive the award. But their opportunity to serve was possible due
only to the friends who cared for their children, Unitarian donors around America who
supported their mission, their fellow Unitarian Service Committee co-founders Robert
and Elizabeth Dexter and Rev. Charles Joy; and the Committee members who selected
Martha and Waitstill to represent them in Europe.
The USC was one of a number of American Christian organizations aiding refugees
during the Nazi period. Although modeled in part on it, the USC differed from the
Quakers’ American Service Committee in its opposition to neutrality and open support
for the Allies. During the war it was active in Europe, North Africa, and Asia, where it
conducted refugee, sanitation, economic, educational, and medical projects. It even lent
support to the armed services and aided reconstruction efforts in devastated cities and
regions. The Committee was the only relief agency in Lisbon aiding illegal refugees.
During the late 1930s the American Unitarian Association (AUA) had sent a number of
senior officials on fact-finding missions in Europe. It was their alarming reports that
motivated AUA president Frederick May Eliot to telegram Secretary of State Cordell Hull
urging larger immigration quotas for Jews. The fact that the Unitarian Church in Prague
was the largest in the world gave them access to detailed knowledge of the escalating
anti-Semitic violence. It was alarm at the prospect of tens of thousands of refugees from
the recently occupied Sudetenland spending the winter in tents that originally prompted
the dispatch of the Sharps to Czechoslovakia. Indeed, the Americans’ first impulse had
been to send money, but Norbert Čapek, the outspoken minister of the church in
Prague, had insisted they send people, as he felt that the presence of Americans could
have an impact.
The Sharps originally agreed to a six-month mission, but the Nazi violation of the
Munich Accords a month after their arrival suggested that their relief and refugee work
was just beginning. During their original six-month stay they started case files for more
than 3,000 refugees (only 300 or so of the files survived). During those same months
the Sharps made six trips to London, Geneva, and Paris seeking visas and jobs for their
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clients. They managed to help more than 300 to escape during this period. Their reports
upon return to America motivated the establishment of the USC, which then sent them
on another six-month mission in Europe. It was during this second stint that they carried
out the rescues for which they were later recognized by Yad Vashem. Martha rescued
twenty-nine children and Waitstill perhaps a half-dozen adults, among them the well
known leftist novelist Lionel Feuchtwanger. More importantly, the organization they set
up at this time continued to function throughout the war.
They set up an office in Lisbon, where they met the future rescuer Varian Fry, who had
recently arrived and was about to undertake his operation in the South of France. The
Sharps’ collaboration with Fry began at this time, helping the latter to get thousands of
refugees out of France via Portugal. The Sharps helped send powdered milk to Fry’s
operation in France for children suffering malnutrition due to German requisitions of
agricultural products. Waitstill was able to share with Fry experience he had garnered in
Prague using the black market to stretch the meager funds available for rescue
activities.
A number of relief organizations legally recognized by the collaborationist Vichy
government set up the so-called Nîmes Committee to exchange information. Among
these were the USC and the Quakers’ American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), as
well as the Jewish organizations Joint and HICEM and others. These could not afford to
be associated with Varian Fry’s Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC), largely because
Fry had become persona non grata and so might endanger their work. Despite this,
collaboration between the USC and the ERC continued, as detailed in some of Martha
and Waitstill’s letters and other documents. One of their joint successes was the flight of
playwright and novelist Franz Werfel and his wife to America; another was that of the
biochemist and Nobel laureate Otto Meyerhoff and his wife (assisted as well by the
Rockefeller Foundation and the AFSC).
Robert and Elisabeth Dexter, the Unitarian leaders who carried out the early fact-finding
missions to Europe in the late 1930s, came to Portugal for two years after the Sharps
returned to the US in 1940, and played an important role in anti-Nazi resistance. Two
Unitarian ministers, Charles Joy and Howard Brooks, played prominent roles. It is
thought that Dexter began working with British intelligence early in the war to help get
Czech and other soldiers off the Continent. The newly formed US Office of Strategic
Services’ (OSS) Swiss office, under Allen Dulles, was quick to recognize the value of
the USC’s organization as an avenue for contact with the underground; though much of
the documentation remains classified, it appears that the OSS also cooperated with
some representatives of the USC from early on.
The Unitarians had hired a man named Noel Field and his wife Herta to coordinate the
work in French internment camps. Field was an American Quaker raised in Geneva who
had attended Harvard and had worked both with the State Department and the League
of Nations. In the latter capacity Field had helped repatriate members of the Republican
International Brigades from Spain after the Civil War ended in 1939.It was during this
period that he met many communists from France, Germany, Italy, and Russia with
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whom he would remain in contact throughout World War II via various resistance
groups. Anticipating that the Nazis would occupy the rest of France, Field transferred
USC office operations to Geneva, Switzerland; when the Germans occupied the
remainder of France following the Allied landings in North Africa, the Fields were just a
few steps ahead of the Gestapo. Throughout the remainder of the war, Field crossed
the French border, funneling money to the Resistance on behalf of the OSS and later
the American War Relief Board (WRB). Representatives of the USC undertook more
significant intelligence-gathering activities for the OSS, though it would appear that the
Sharps never worked with or knew about such activities during this period. After Dexter
resigned as the director of USC operations in Europe in 1944 and Martha returned to
Europe to replace him, she became aware of the intelligence connection. By then the
WRB was funneling large sums of money to resistance groups, much of it through Field,
Dexter, and Joy. Indeed Dexter and Joy worked for the WRB, while Field stayed on with
the USC. Perhaps the future declassification documents by the US will shed more light
on some of these matters.
The end of the war found the USC heavily involved in relief efforts across Europe. In
particular, the medical clinics they had operated in the French camps throughout the
war had earned them respect as an experienced agency staffed by authoritative
veterans such as the Fields. The Service Committee eventually oversaw operations in
Paris, Geneva, Lisbon, Toulouse, Marseilles, Lyon, Prague, Warsaw, Munich, Vienna,
Budapest, and Madrid. Both of the Sharps were in Europe at war’s end, though
documentation of Waitstill’s activities in Czechoslovakia may not have survived. On trips
to America during the war and afterwards, the Sharps worked tirelessly on related
humanitarian issues, speaking, raising money, and serving in various other non-profit
agencies.
Remembering Martha and Waitstill’s faith and courage, we might ask ourselves who
would be the righteous among nations today, who would risk their own safety on behalf
of unknown strangers. But of all the rescuers in World War II–era Europe, the Sharps
stand out because they brought not only courage but also intelligence and effective
organizational abilities to bear on the vast dilemmas posed by the Holocaust—dilemmas
that few of their contemporaries fully understood until it was too late.
-Aleksandra Borecka
Chief Cataloger
United States Holocaust Museum
Washington, DC
Note: Under the care and supervision of Ms. Borecka the Sharp Archive has been
entirely digitized and is currently housed in Washington, DC at the United States
Holocaust Museum. The Sharp Project is deeply indebted to the entire team at the
USHMM who worked on the digitization of the archive including: Aleksandra Borecka,
Henry Mayer, Chief Archivist, Sara Sirman, Archivist, and interns Alex Rosetti, Susan
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Conwey, and Sarah Kopelman. Their care and devotion to the telling of the Sharp story
propelled the project to entirely new heights. Thank you.
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