1. Finding Aid (English)
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http://collections.ushmm.org Contact [email protected] for further information about this collection GUIDE Martha and Waitstill Sharp Collection, ca. 1905-2005 Collection processed and described by Sara Sirman, Archivist Alex Rosetti, Intern Susan Conwey, Intern Sarah Kopelman, Intern Directed by Aleksandra Borecka, Chief Cataloger This finding aid contains a descriptive inventory and name indexes in Excel. Processing and digitization of the collection funded by United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Washington D.C. July, 2008 Supervision of the Project Project Manager Henry Mayer Aleksandra Borecka Curator, Chief Archivist Archivist, Chief Cataloger 1 http://collections.ushmm.org http://collections.ushmm.org Contact [email protected] for further information about this collection Martha and Waitstill Sharp Collection, ca. 1905-2005 CONTENTS 1. Acknowledgment 2. Introduction 3. Organization of Collection 2. Administrative Information 3. Inventory 4. Names of Those for Whom Case Files Were Prepared in Martha Sharp’s Office 5. Names of Refugees Appearing on Multiple Lists, and Names of People Waiting for Help 6. Names of Delegates, Officers, and Employees in Czechoslovakia 2 http://collections.ushmm.org http://collections.ushmm.org Contact [email protected] for further information about this collection ACKNOWLEDGMENT It was a privilege and an honor to work with the Martha and Waitstill Sharp Collection. Many people helped me in this daunting project. The collection has a personal significance for me. I was born in Poland during World War II to a mother who already had two small children, and who hid and cared for two Jewish women at a time when the death penalty threatened anyone the Nazis caught helping Jews. Martha Sharp was born in 1905 in America, a free country; just before my mother was born in 1908 in Poland, an occupied and partitioned country. Both led middle-class lives in the interwar period, my mother working as a senator’s assistant and Martha Sharp involving herself in the charitable activities of the Unitarian Church. As my mother in Poland, during the Second World War Sharp helped rescue Jews under the German occupation in Czechoslovakia and France. Both were beautiful young wives with high hopes for their children, and yet both risked their own and their families’ lives to do more than ordinary people did, to save others and so to save the ideal of humanity in terrible times. How would we react under similar circumstances? The records of Martha Sharp will long challenge researchers with this open-ended question. This project never would have gotten off the ground without the support of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Chief Archivist Henry Mayer; Unitarian Universalist Service Committee President Charlie Clements; Martha Sharp’s grandson Artemis Joukowsky; and numerous staff members of the USHMM Collections Division. It was Charlie Clements who introduced me to Artemis Joukowsky, the inheritor of Martha Sharp’s records, and recommended that they be added to the Museum’s collection. Artemis immediately supported the idea of digitizing of the records to facilitating their widest possible accessibility. A project of this scope—the materials occupy sixty boxes— depended upon significant contributions by numerous archivists, interns, and specialists from other Museum divisions. Special thanks are due to Sara Sirman, a master of the archival art, who tirelessly researched and processed fragile materials and complied a comprehensive guide to the collection. Work of this scale could not have been completed 3 http://collections.ushmm.org http://collections.ushmm.org Contact [email protected] for further information about this collection without the help of our interns Susan Conway, Alexandria Rossetti, Walter Karlins, and Sarah Kopelman, who spent hundreds hours organizing and describing photographs, dating varied publications, compiling refugee case files and the names of staff members of the Unitarian offices in Prague and elsewhere into a useable database, and preparing records for microfilming and digitization. The Museum’s Director of Curatorial Affairs, Scott Miller, deserves special thanks for his support of this project. Thanks also go to the Collections registrar Heather Kajic, and the Collections manager Kenneth Kulp, the International Archival Programs Division program assistant Ellen Gerstein, and many others. Finally, I would like to express our gratitude to Artemis Joukowsky and the Joukowsky family for allowing the Museum to duplicate and make available this uniquely valuable collection. Opening this window onto the past—and therefore the present—is the result of their initiative and generosity. Aleksandra Borecka July 2008 4 http://collections.ushmm.org http://collections.ushmm.org Contact [email protected] for further information about this collection INTRODUCTION This collection contains records of the relief work of Martha and Waitstill Sharp, European delegates of the Unitarian Service Committee (USC) in Czechoslovakia, France, Portugal, and Israel before, during, and after WWII. The bulk concern their humanitarian efforts between 1939 and 1944; their assistance to refugees after the war (1944–1950); and Martha Sharp’s postwar life, including her campaign for Congress, her involvement in interfaith efforts to bring Jewish refugee children to Israel, her assistance to charitable organizations, and her service on the board of and in fundraising for the Zionist women’s organization Hadassah (1948–1999). 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 recongize 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 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 the Committee members who selected Martha and Waitstill to represent them in Europe. 5 http://collections.ushmm.org http://collections.ushmm.org Contact [email protected] for further information about this collection 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 antisemitic 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 despatch 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 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 6 http://collections.ushmm.org http://collections.ushmm.org Contact [email protected] for further information about this collection 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.