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Dr. Charlie Clements, the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, talks with Jerry Fowler about Waitstill and Martha Sharp. On June 13th, 2006, the Sharps will have their names engraved in the Garden of the Righteous at Yad Vashem, where only one other American, Varian Fry, has been honored. The couple risked their lives to save refugees fleeing Nazi Germany, and helped found what is today called the Unitarian Service Committee, dedicated to protecting human rights and promoting social justice.
TRANSCRIPT:
NARRATOR: Welcome to Voices on Genocide Prevention, a podcasting service of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Your host is Jerry Fowler, Director of the Museum’s Committee on Conscience.
JERRY FOWLER: The Israeli Holocaust Memorial, Yad Vashem, recognizes non-Jews who rescued Jews during the Holocaust as “righteous among the nations,” and until now, only one American, Varian Fry, was among the more than 20,000 rescuers honored by Yad Vashem. On June 13th, two more Americans will have their names engraved in the Garden of the Righteous at Yad Vashem, Waitstill and Martha Sharp. They went to Europe in 1939 on behalf of the Unitarian Church to help Jews and other refugees flee Nazism. To discuss the work of the Sharps and what it means for us today, our guest is Dr. Charlie Clements. He is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. He is a renowned figure in the human rights community. In 1984, he published the book, Witness to a War about his experiences in El Salvador and was subsequently the subject of an Academy Award-winning documentary of the same name. He has served as the President of the Board of Physicians for Human Rights and before all of that, he was a distinguished graduate of the United States Air Force Academy and a pilot during the Vietnam War. Charlie, welcome to the program.
CHARLIE CLEMENTS: Thank you Jerry; it is good to be with you today.
JERRY FOWLER: Charlie, let us turn first to the story of the Sharps. They were a couple; he was a Unitarian Minister, and they took off for Europe in 1939 as the war clouds were gathering to help refugees. How did that come about?
CHARLIE CLEMENTS: The Unitarians had had a close relationship with Europe throughout the 30’s, both because they were Unitarian Churches, and Prague—the biggest one in the world—had a membership of about 3,500. There were Unitarian Churches in Great Britain. They were kept abreast of what was going on, and as Jews began to flee Germany in 1933 and 1934, as Hitler came to power and then after Hilter occupied Austria, more refugees, and not only Jews but Social Democrats, Socialists, Communists, they were all targeted specifically by the Nazis, and they began to flee to the very liberal Unitarian Church in Prague. When Sudentland was ceded to Hitler in the Munich Pact, the American Unitarian Association decided to act and sent this young minister and his wife, a trained social worker, to Prague for six months to see how they could be helpful assisting with the influx of refugees.
JERRY FOWLER: My understanding is that when they first arrived in Prague which was of course the capital of Czechoslovakia, the Nazis had occupied part of Czechoslovakia—as you said the Sudetenland—but not all of Czechoslovakia, but then very quickly the Nazis came in to the rest.
CHARLIE CLEMENTS: That is correct, and on that first night, on March 15th, when the Nazis occupied Prague, their diaries describe the widespread looting as German trucks pulled up to stores, and they were taking food out of stores to be sent to German soldiers, there was widespread terror that night, and they had described a very moving scene where people were standing and kneeling in the square of Prague with lit candles as it was snowing lightly, praying and knowing that their lives were changing forever that night.
JERRY FOWLER: It must be one thing to try to help refugees in a country that is close to the Nazis, but a whole nother thing when the Nazis have occupied the place. How did the occupation affect the Sharps’ work?
CHARLIE CLEMENTS: That night they already had about 3,000 case files of families who had requested their help already, and they burned most of those to keep them out of the hands of the Gestapo. Some of those made the journey to London, Paris and Geneva where they were going with these dossiers on families and trying to get them jobs because a job was necessary to emigrate at the time, and we have some of those. The stories are just heart-rending because they said that “My husband was a lawyer, he lost his job six months ago because he was a Jew. We had enough money to pay rent for four months and then we were forced out of our homes. We are homeless. We are refugees now. We do not have enough to eat and we fear for our lives.” The stories in these case files are just heart-rending. They have to get travel documents; many people fled without documents or had ones that were rescinded. They had to get visas, and they had to have the money to travel. There was a list of people that the Nazis were particularly after. Many of those were refugees who had already been there, so the Gestapo records in Berlin today show that they were watching the Germans in exile—the Social Democrats and the Socialists and the Communists—in Czechoslovakia long before they occupied it. Those who were abetting and helping those were also targeted.
JERRY FOWLER: Speaking of some of those cases, could you describe a typical case that they handled, how they would go about rescuing people, what were the steps that they followed?
CHARLIE CLEMENTS: Rescue is a bit of a misleading word because some of the people were protagonist in their own escape from the Nazis, but they might help them to get travel documents of some kind. There was something called a travel document in lieu of a passport that some embassies were offering at the time for people who were stateless. They would take their particulars to a university, say in London and say, “Can you offer this person a faculty job or can you offer this person a place as a student?” They would try to get them accepted and if they did that then get the visa in Great Britain and bring it back. It was a tedious process. They left Prague six times in the six months they were there on journeys to other capitals trying to find jobs and safety for their clients, and they were able to do this because they had a multiple-entry visa that had been issued before the Nazis had actually taken power, and then finally the Gestapo caught on to what was going on and sacked their office, threw their furniture in the street, and about a month later, their friends convinced them that the Gestapo were closing in on them and they left in August of 1939.
JERRY FOWLER: I understand that eventually Waitstill went back to Prague at the end of the war, and the hotelkeeper where they had been staying said that the Gestapo had come for them shortly after they left.
CHARLIE CLEMENTS: Precisely. He came back to the same hotel with a relief mission that he was heading in 1945, went to the same hotel, the Paris Hotel, checked in; the same clerk was at the hotel and he said, “Hello Reverend Sharp,” he said, “You left just in time; the Gestapo arrived a day after you left.”
JERRY FOWLER: Did they have any trouble getting out?
CHARLIE CLEMENTS: They did not apparently have any trouble getting out, but we do not really know all of the details of that story. We do know, that by that time they knew many of the routes, so that we know that there was a part of Czechoslovakia where there were a lot of coal mines. Some of those coal mines actually went underneath the border into Poland, and at that time Poland was considered a safe place so they helped a lot of people get to Poland. There was one woman who was a prominent Social Democrat who was actually helping the German refugees who were from her party, and she had had an appendectomy two days before the Nazis occupied Prague. Her son who was at Harvard at the time wrote to Waitstill Sharp and said, “You have to get my mother out. She is in danger.” They sneaker her out of the hospital room in a morgue basket. That is a basket saved for cadavers, but clearly one that you could breathe in, took her down to the morgue, transferred her then to a train. She went by train to the coast, and then by ferry to Malmo, Sweden, where she recovered from her appendectomy and later immigrated to the United States. They were quite creative in their work, and they were not of course prepared for this. This was kind of a figure out as you go kind of creativity, but they knew that lives were at stake.
JERRY FOWLER: I was going to ask, how is it that they got selected for this mission? Or did they just fall in tier?
CHARLIE CLEMENTS: It is quite interesting because I think that the records of the Unitarian Church show that they had to go to twelve or fourteen different ministers before they found anyone willing to go. It was just after the depression, and ministers who had secure jobs were not willing to give them up. As it turns out, it was not a paying job, so their Church at Wellesley Hills continued to pay their salaries, and another minister volunteered to tend to their Church—a retired minister. A lot of people did not want to leave their families, and it meant leaving their six and two-year-old children behind with friends and family. It also meant leaving their congregation, and a lot of people knew that there were terrible things happening in Europe at that time. Kristallnacht had happened and the persecution of the Jews was no secret, so there was an element of danger involved as well, but Martha Sharp had run a boarding house for young immigrant girls in Chicago after she graduated from Hull House. Many of those young women were from Eastern Europe, and we think that she became very familiar and comfortable with European immigrants from that work and was drawn to the bravery of the courage of people in Prague. I have to say that the minister there, Norbert Capek was a man larger than life, very outspoken. He had grown this Church from nothing to 3,500 members so it was the largest one in the world.
JERRY FOWLER: This is in Prague?
CHARLIE CLEMENTS: This is in Prague, and he was the Minister of the Unitaria Church, and they noticed that there were Nazi goons in the front row of his pews every Sunday, listening to his sermons which were told in parables and which he did not think the Germans would understand. They understood the bravery of the Czechs. As it turns out, they tried to Norbert Capek, whose wife was in the United States at the time to leave and go to the United States with them. He said, “I have to stay with my flock.” He was arrested six months later with his daughter for listening to a radio. Many people do not know, but one of the first things the Nazis did was confiscate radios. He was arrested for that; he was sent to Dachau, and then later when a Nazi official, Heinrich, was assassinated, they just rounded up 1,000 Czechs and executed them all, and he was one of those. He died in 1942; this minister who was a dear friend of theirs.
JERRY FOWLER: I wanted to go back to this idea that you mentioned, or this fact that you mentioned, that they had two children at the time that they first went to Europe, six and two. I wonder, it is one thing for people to take a risk as they did to go help other people, but it must have had an affect on the family?
CHARLIE CLEMENTS: It did. I think that especially the youngest child, Martha, who was only two at the time; I think it was very hard for her to understand. Her mother was actually only gone for six months, but that is a very critical time for her to be gone, and then they came back for about another eight months, and then they would go back to Europe again under the auspices of the newly formed Unitarian Service Committee, and stay another six months, and is the case, and I speak from personal experience here of people who watch a lot of suffering and cannot do too much about it, Martha and Waitstill were haunted by what they could not do, and throughout the war years, they stayed very, very busy raising money, speaking around the country, trying to mobilize people to be involved, so even when they came back, their children did not see lots of them, and I think that Martha Sharp-Joukowsky, her daughter who is now in her 60’s and a professor emeritus at Brown University, a professor of Archeology, has spoken quite poignantly about how for years she did not understand, and as she began to meet—as an adult, and only in recent years—some of the children that her parents rescued who went on to have their own children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, she began to understand that she and her brother were safe and secure; they were with family and friends, they were not starving or in danger, and her parents went there really to save children who were in danger. In fact, one particular mission of Martha’s was to bring twenty-nine children back, a number of whom were Jewish, whose parents were political exiles and threatened, and it is those children now in their late 70’s and early 80’s that Martha has got to know, and I think it has been quite a remarkable circle for her to meet these children whom her parents went off to rescue many years ago.
JERRY FOWLER: Why is it that the Sharps are just being recognized now as righteous, over sixty years later?
CHARLIE CLEMENTS: It is a very interesting question. Varian Fry, whom they worked with very closely—and I should mention that there was a written agreement that we have a number of different letters from Fry to them and from them to Fry, that they staffed the Lisbon-end of his operation. Varian Fry who ran the Emergency Rescue Committee who is noted for rescuing many intellectuals and authors only had offices in Marseilles, and after people escaped across the border into Spain, and then got to Lisbon, they still had to hold their lives together until they could get transport. Births were very, very precious. Visas would expire and then no longer be good. You might get a visa issued for three months, and if you did not use it by the time it expired, it was no good. They cooperated closely with Varian Fry, and when he returned, having only been in Europe about a year himself, he would write three books about his work there. One of the most famous is called, Surrender on Demand, but the Sharps were very modest people, and they never wrote their memoirs. They never wrote books; books were not written about them. It was not until their grandson, Artemis Joukowsky III, was contacted by some filmmakers at Keene State College who saw Martha’s obituary, and said, “This make a great documentary,’ and they began studying, in depth, the files and what happened, and they suggested to Artemis that his grandparents were certainly likely candidates for the Yad Vashem honor. The process began about five years ago.
JERRY FOWLER: One of the things that you are doing in your work today is connecting what the Sharps did with challenges we face today, especially in Darfur. Can you kind of explain how you see that connection?
CHARLIE CLEMENTS: We think it is kind of a natural one, in the sense that we often ask that as the Sharp’s grandchildren celebrate their courage today, how will our grandchildren celebrate what we did in the face of the genocide on our watch? There is certainly this slow genocide taking place in Darfur today. There are people who, like in the 1930’s and 1940’s are not aware of it; if they are aware of it, they think, “It is a distant place; what can I do about it?” and we think it is terribly important. The same values that mobilized people to go to Europe in the late 1930’s or early 1940’s to do what they could for the people fleeing the Nazis need their descendents mobilized today to do what they can to stop the genocide in Darfur. It is stoppable, and I think that the Save Darfur Coalition, which the Committee on Conscience of the U.S Holocaust Memorial Museum helped found, has been a tremendous voice in this effort, and we are trying to add our voices to the effort as well at the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee.
JERRY FOWLER: I am wondering, in your own experience, in terms of acting on conscience, the Sharps basically acted on their conscience and they left their family, and they took these risks to go rescue people. You yourself, back during the Vietnam War were a decorated pilot in the Air Force, a graduate of the Air Force Academy, and then you became a protestor against that war. I take it that was an act of conscience, and I take it that that must not have been very easy?
CHARLIE CLEMENTS: It was an act of conscience; I did not have any political framework. I did not have contact with the anti-war movement, but I began to see what I was doing in Vietnam as immoral. I had a non-combatant role as a C130 pilot but I realized I was greasing the skids that made the war possible. I was being asked to falsify data, I saw how the public was being misled about many, many things, and I finally reached the point where I said, “I do not want to be a part of this any further.” It was not really risk taking in the sense that the Sharps did. I was risking my career, as a matter of fact; I was locked in a psychiatric ward and discharged with a temperate mental disability. I am probably working with the other ninety percent today on the call. It did change careers in the sense that I can no longer be a pilot, but I should comment that later as a physician, concerned about the things unfolding in Central America and having become a Quaker, I decided to bear witness and work as a physician in the midst of the civil war in El Salvador, and Jerry, I ask myself today—Jerry, I have children, eight and ten years old—I am not sure I could have gone to El Salvador if I had a family. I am not sure that I could have put myself in harms way the way that I did. As a single man, it was much easier to do that, but had I had young children, I think it would have been much harder to do so. I have all the more admiration for the Sharps, and I know you have young children as well, and can you imagine yourself leaving them to go to a distant land to stand up for justice and really risk your life?
JERRY FOWLER: I think it is a remarkable decision that they made and I often ponder, “Where do the depths of that commitment come from, and how do you balance the responsibility that you have to your own children with the responsibility that you have to humanity?”
CHARLIE CLEMENTS: I think that part of it comes from the fact that we know, in retrospect, the full measure of the Nazi horror, but at the time, no one knew. The Holocaust really had not started. In 1939 and 1940, the Nazis were still trying to get rid of Jews; they were trying to export them, to push them away, and they would begin to put them in concentration camps and begin to kill them about a year later. In some ways they knew that there were horrible things happenings, but I do not think that the ovens had started yet; I do not think that what we know as the Holocaust had quite started yet. Still, the risks that they took were remarkable, and there was nothing to keep the Nazis from arresting, and actually some few Americans, and British and others who were working in those circumstances disappeared. A man working closely with Varian Fry, Leon Vaul who led people across the border simply disappeared one day and nobody ever knew what happened to him. It was not without risk even though it would get far more dangerous in 1941, 1942, 1943, and 1944, so that many of the people honored righteous among nations—Poles who took a Jewish child or two into their home—were risking their lives of their entire family because the Nazis made it very clear that they would execute people who did that.
JERRY FOWLER: I have been speaking to Dr. Charlie Clements who is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. Charlie, thanks for being with us.
CHARLIE CLEMENTS: Nice to be with you Jerry.
NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, a podcasting service of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about the Museum’s Committee on Conscience, visit our website at www.committeeonconscience.org.
