Skip Navigation

Professors' Holocaust Research Leads to 'Righteous' Honor for Two Americans

KEENE, N.H. 3/8/06 - Thanks to the detective work of three Keene State College professors and a determined family, a couple who helped hundreds of refugees escape from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia and France have become only the second and third Americans to be named “Righteous Among the Nations.” The title, awarded by Yad Vashem, the Israeli organization responsible for documenting the history of the Jewish people during the Holocaust, honors Gentiles who saved Jews before and during World War II.

The Reverend Waitstill Sharp and Martha Sharp traveled through Europe in the early years of the war to help lead the relief and rescue efforts of the newly formed Unitarian Service Committee. The “Righteous” honor places them with almost 21,000 others, primarily Europeans. The only other American to be named is Varian Fry, credited with saving many cultural and political figures from occupied France. Rev. Sharp died in 1984, Martha Sharp in 1999.

The Sharps were nominated for the award by their family, the Joukowskys of Providence, R.I., and Sherborn, Mass., with information largely provided by Keene State professors conducting research for a documentary film about Martha Sharp.

In December 1999, after seeing her obituary, William Sullivan, professor emeritus of English at Keene State, contacted Larry Benaquist, professor of film studies, with what appeared to be a good idea for a project. The two had collaborated before in the making of “Here Am I, Send Me,” a documentary about the life of slain civil rights worker and Keene, N.H., native Jonathan Daniels.

The two professors approached Artemis Joukowsky III, the Sharps’ grandson, and received his approval and support to begin filming a documentary about Martha’s life. Joukowsky provided them with documents, photographs, letters, and Martha’s unpublished autobiography. He also gave them a biography of Martha, written by Ghanda di Figlia of Harvard University, whose interviews and rigorous archival searches formed the basis for much of the filmmakers’ later efforts.

The Sharps’ first stop in Europe, in February of 1939, was Prague, where they interviewed more than 3,500 endangered people, both Jews and Gentiles, in an attempt to help them emigrate to safety around the world. As part of the effort, Waitstill Sharp initiated an illegal currency exchange operation, which enabled them to assist many more refugees. Waitstill departed Prague in early August, with Martha following on the 15th, the day before she was due to be arrested by the Gestapo.

After a brief period stateside, the Sharps returned to Europe in June 1940, where they helped set up and staff the Unitarian Service Committee’s office in Lisbon, a city serving as a final European refuge for many escaping the Nazi regime.

In 1940, Martha Sharp traveled to the city of Pau, in southern France, where she organized the delivery of 13 tons of milk products to feed starving infants. She also arranged for the transport to the U.S. of 29 European children, nine of them Jewish. All of the Jewish children interviewed by Benaquist and Sullivan credit Martha with saving their lives, adding that most of their family members who remained in Europe perished in the Holocaust.

The Sharps also were instrumental for arranging the perilous escape across the Pyrenees of the Jewish intellectual and novelist Lion Feuchtwanger and his wife, Marta, who were on a Nazi extermination list. Waitstill Sharp personally escorted the Feuchtwangers to safety; on that trip, he also convinced Otto Meyerhof, a Jewish Nobel Prize recipient, to also escape over the Pyrenees. The Feuchtwanger rescue operation played a major role in the granting of the Righteous Among the Nations status.

As they organized their research materials, Sullivan and Benaquist approached their Keene State colleague Thomas Durnford, professor of modern languages, to translate and analyze the wealth of French documents included in the Joukowsky family holdings. Durnford also contacted officials in Pau to arrange for research and filming in the region.

In 2002, with support from Keene State and the college’s Cohen Center for Holocaust Studies, the filmmakers traveled to Pau, where they interviewed historians and locals with memories of the early years of the war. With the aid of a private detective, they found and interviewed many of the surviving “children” - now aged in their 70s and 80s - from the transport Martha Sharp had organized in 1940.

Their research in Pau led the Keene State filmmakers to documents in the city hall - stamped “secret” during the war by the Vichy government - that detailed some of Martha Sharp’s activities. In 2003, Pau officials recognized the humanitarian activities of Martha by posthumously awarding her the city’s Medal of Honor and erecting a plaque in her honor on the house where she had lived. The city hosted the visit of the Joukowsky family in ceremonies broadcast on French television.

In a chance meeting during filming in Pau, the Israeli consul to Marseille, Tamar Samash, suggested to Durnford that the Sharps could be nominated for “Righteous Among the Nations” status. Durnford contacted Yad Vashem in Paris and suggested to Artemis Joukowsky III that they pursue this possibility. With the evidence discovered by the filmmakers to support their case, and with other information the family had uncovered, Artemis and his brother Michael submitted the Sharps’ nomination to Yad Vashem in November 2004. Michael Joukowsky’s assistant, Madeleine Telfeyan, also assisted in the research, and other support came from Paul Vincent, director of KSC’s Cohen Center for Holocaust Studies, who had studied with Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

Waitstill Sharp continued his humanitarian work in the postwar years, delivering aid to war-torn Czechoslovakia. He also worked with civil rights groups in Chicago and eventually returned to the ministry.

After the war, Martha Sharp visited Iraq and Morocco, where she collected information about the mistreatment of Jews, ran unsuccessfully for Congress in Massachusetts, and worked on the National Securities Board in the Truman Administration. She raised money for Hadassah’s Youth Aliyah, a program that sent orphaned Jewish children to Israel. On one mission for that program, a sniper in Jerusalem fired a bullet at her that passed harmlessly through her hat.

Martha Sharp also co-founded an ecumenical Christian group, Children to Palestine, which continued the work of bringing orphaned Jewish children to Israel.

Martha Sharp earned her bachelor’s degree from Brown University and her master’s degree from Radcliffe College. In 1990, the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee declared that her name “will always be associated with the most basic values of dignity, love of freedom, and humanitarianism that inspire our work.”

About “Righteous Among the Nations” From the Yad Vashem web site: In 1963, Yad Vashem embarked upon a worldwide project to grant the title of Righteous Among the Nations to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. To this end, Yad Vashem set up a public committee headed by a retired Supreme Court justice, which is responsible for granting the title. This project is the only one of its kind in the world that honors, using set criteria, the actions of those individuals who rescued Jews during the war. The Righteous program and the trees planted on the Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations have received world coverage, and the concept of Righteous Among the Nations coined in the Yad Vashem Law has become a universal concept and an important symbol. As of January 2005, 20,757 people have been recognized as Righteous Among the Nations. In addition, Yad Vashem has been developing a comprehensive encyclopedia - The Lexicon of the Righteous Among the Nations - that will eventually include the stories of all the Righteous Among the Nations. The Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations, in which marble plaques have been engraved with the names of the rescuers according to country, was inaugurated in 1996. Ceremonies in which the title of Righteous Among the Nations is granted are held in the Garden.

Related Stories

Contact Keene State College

1-800-KSC-1909
229 Main Street
Keene, New Hampshire 03435