Rescue and Flight: American Relief Workers Who Defied the Nazis (review)

Three Americans have been honored as Righteous Among the Nations. The first is Varian Fry, well-known ever since his activities were first highlighted in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The other two, Martha and Waitstill Sharp, are a Unitarian couple who defied the Nazis beginning in 1939 and established vital rescue networks under the auspices of the Unitarian Service Committee (USC). The Sharps helped thousands to escape. The author of the work under review, Susan Subak, had a personal reason for choosing her book's topic: her father was rescued by Elizabeth and Robert Dexter, the founders of the Committee. The Dexters issued him an affidavit—the first one they ever wrote—enabling him to emigrate from Austria to the United States before the outbreak of World War II. Their later efforts to bring over the author's grandparents failed when they were unable to negotiate their way through restrictive U.S. policies on immigration.

In 1938, after Robert had become director of foreign relations for the American Unitarian Association, the Dexters visited Austria and Czechoslovakia. The trips were at first intended only to maintain ties with Unitarians in Europe, and not to establish direct aid programs. After witnessing the plight of German, Austrian, and Sudeten German refugees, however, Robert Dexter shifted the association's policies towards fundraising and aid. He lobbied intensely for the creation of a Unitarian Service Committee, its name inspired by the Quakers' American Friends Service Committee. To initiate the assistance policies he recruited Waitstill Sharp, a young Unitarian minister from Massachusetts, and his wife Martha; the couple agreed to leave their congregation and their children in order to set up a Unitarian aid office in Prague. Thus began the story of the Unitarians' refugee work during World War Two—work that extended from Prague to Lisbon and Marseille to Geneva, and created escape routes for hunted people throughout the war years.

In Prague, Martha Sharp helped refugees to emigrate mostly to Britain, but also to other countries. She escorted thirty-five refugees to England, asserting to Germans officials at the border that these people were under U.S. protection. In attempting to find refuge for some 3,500 families on her list, she found most countries unwilling to accept refugees. Britain gave precedence to political refugees; "racial refugees" (i.e. Jews) were not encouraged to apply. Yet just a few weeks before the start of the war Nicholas Winton, a British businessman, was able to find homes in England for 600 refugee children after Martha Sharp provided the required monetary guarantees and travel expenses. Waitstill Sharp traveled widely, distributing money to emigrating refugees and to the Czech Unitarian Church; he was savvy in illegal currency exchange and in preventing Nazi confiscation attempts. At the end of July 1939, the Nazis closed all refugee offices. As Martha was leaving, she reflected in a note to her Unitarian sponsors on the apparent American lack of concern: "Our greatest shame is that this small country, so nearly like our own in ideals and faith in the democratic way, should have had so little help from the United States" (p. 24).

With the Unitarian Service Committee formally established and funded in May 1940, Martha and Waitstill Sharp again established offices in Europe, this time in neutral Lisbon and in Marseille in the unoccupied zone of France. Both cities were flooded with thousands of refugees intent on escaping Europe. In Marseille the Sharps connected with Donald and Helen Lowrie, representatives of the YMCA, and organized a food relief project. In Lisbon the Sharps met Varian Fry, the newly arrived representative of the Emergency Rescue Committee launched to aid in the escape of prominent artists and intellectuals. Fry had a list of 200 prominent people to save. By the time he was expelled from France thirteen months later, he had saved more than 2,000. Waitstill Sharp and Fry agreed to cooperate: the Unitarians in Lisbon would...