Two Rescue Missions
Martha and Waitstill Sharp
Waitstill Sharp, a Unitarian minister, and his wife Martha, a social worker, spent six months in Prague in 1939, distributing money and helping intellectuals escape to the United States. After narrowly escaping arrest in Prague and returning to the United States, the couple traveled to Lisbon and southern France to distribute food, and to help Jews and intellectuals escape. Martha organized a transport of children to the United States, which became a model for later transports of child refugees.
In September 1938, Nazi Germany invaded the Sudetenland, an area of northern Czechoslovakia. Thousands of refugees—Jews and others fearing Nazi occupation—fled south, many ending up in Prague.
In the United States, the American Unitarian Association (AUA), affiliated with the Unitarian church, read about the occupation—and then the November 1938 attacks—with great concern. The church had strong ties to Czechoslovakia, which had a small but active Unitarian population.
The AUA asked Waitstill Sharp, a Unitarian minister in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and his wife Martha, a social worker, to travel to Europe to aid refugees. Although Waitstill remembered learning that the Association had approached seventeen other ministers before contacting him, the Sharps did not hesitate and accepted the new challenge. In February 1939, they left their own young children in the care of their church community and departed for Europe.
Reverend Waitstill and Martha Sharp depart for Prague, Czechoslovakia, February 1939.
Brown University Library, Martha and Waitstill Sharp Collection, Providence, RI.
In Czechoslovakia, the Sharps were welcomed by the American embassy, grateful that there were Americans willing to assist with the desperate needs of refugees in the area. Working closely with the British Quakers, Waitstill and Martha Sharp assisted hundreds of refugees by providing money and other humanitarian aid.
Only a few weeks after the Sharps’ arrival, Nazi Germany invaded, occupied, and annexed the remainder of Czechoslovakia, including Prague. The Sharps needed police to help them enter their offices that first morning, and Waitstill had to remind the gathered Jewish refugees that the offices were not American territory, and the Unitarians were not an immigration agency. Yet, the couple decided to start assisting individual immigration cases whenever they could.
The Sharps took risks and faced great danger. In one case, Martha accompanied a group of refugees fleeing Nazi territory on a long train ride towards freedom in Great Britain, managing to prevent their arrests by invoking her protected status as an American citizen. By late summer, with their every move tracked by the Gestapo, it was clear that they could not remain safely in Prague. Waitstill, who had traveled to Switzerland, had his re-entry papers revoked, and Martha narrowly escaped Gestapo arrest to join him there. They returned to the United States at the end of August 1939, just days before World War II broke out.
Martha Sharp (standing, fifth from left) helped secure passage to the United States for 37 refugees in December 1940. She distributed a beige beret to each child before they sailed from France.
Brown University Library, Martha and Waitstill Sharp Collection, Providence, RI.
Less than a year later, the Sharps left their children again and returned to Europe. The American Unitarian Association had created a new agency, the Unitarian Service Committee (USC), specifically to aid refugees. The Sharps planned to open the USC’s offices in France, but before they arrived in Europe, Nazi Germany occupied Paris. Instead, the couple opened an office in Lisbon, since thousands of refugees were flooding neutral Portugal hoping to find safety and a ship to take them to the United States. They focused on aid to political refugees—people who had spoken out against Nazism in Germany or fascism in Spain and whom other organizations were reluctant to help—as well as academics, scientists, and intellectuals.
While Waitstill Sharp spent most of his time in Lisbon, Martha Sharp worked at a new Unitarian Service Committee office in Marseilles, which was the primary port in unoccupied France from which refugees could escape.
During this time, the Unitarian Service Committee worked closely with Varian Fry, an American sent to Europe by the new Emergency Rescue Committee in New York. As refugees escaped with the help of the Emergency Rescue Committee, the USC helped them navigate the French-Spanish border and assisted with travel arrangements and money once the refugees reached Lisbon.
Among those the Sharps directly helped escape was the German Jewish novelist Lion Feuchtwanger. Waitstill Sharp himself sailed with Feuchtwanger to New York—a trip ultimately made possible when Martha Sharp gave up her ticket to ensure passage for Feuchtwanger.
Martha Sharp at a milk distribution center near Marseilles, France, 1940.
Brown University Library, Martha and Waitstill Sharp Collection, Providence, RI.
In Marseilles, Martha focused on milk distribution to French children, and organized a children’s transport to the United States. She doggedly battled numerous bureaucracies to secure exit visas, transit permits, and identity papers for 27 children and ten adults. She sailed from Lisbon with two of the children and four adults in early December 1940. The others followed on a second voyage. Martha’s organization of the children’s transport became a model for the United States Committee for the Care of European Children, which brought several hundred children from France, Spain, and Portugal to the United States during World War II.
Waitstill and Martha Sharp stayed involved with humanitarian organizations after returning to the United States in late 1940. In 2006, after both of their deaths, Martha and Waitstill Sharp were the second and third Americans to be designated as “Righteous Among the Nations,” a title granted by Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the Holocaust, to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.