Rescue and Flight: American Relief Workers Who Defied the Nazis

2. Marseille and Lisbon, 1940

2 Marseille and Lisbon, 1940 the Summer of 1939 hAd PASSed PleASAntly for eliSAbeth and Robert Dexter on the south shore of Boston. Robert was the visiting minister at the Unitarian church at the seaside community of South Duxbury, Massachusetts.They had a comfortable house for their own use and a large garden, which they had set up for their favorite hobby—croquet—but Robert Dexter went into the office most days to check on any news from the Sharps in Czechoslovakia and to keep his fundraising letters circulating. In July, Hans Subak had arrived at the dock in NewYork City.After waiting in Riga, Latvia, for nine months, sheltered by a local Jewish family, his papers had come through and he had made his way to London and then boarded a boat to New York. Robert and Elisabeth Dexter went up to Boston to meet him when he arrived there, and Hans Subak then spent some of his first days in the United States in South Duxbury looking out at the ocean that he had recently crossed and playing croquet. When the Sharps returned from Czechoslovakia that August of 1939, they were greeted as returning heroes among the small circle of Unitarians and refugee support organizations. They were deeply concerned, however, over what they had seen in Europe.The misery in the shelters and on the streets of Prague was extreme, and there was no improvement in sight for refugees. On the contrary, at the end of the month, the German blitzkrieg pounded Poland, and most of Europe was now at war. Nazi policies had stripped the Jews of central Europe of their resources and rights of citizenship. As Germany expected, countries in the West did not open their gates to these newly impoverished people, and those now at war were sealing their borders. On the ship 26 | mArSeille And liSbon, 1940 journey returning home, Martha was laid low by depression, which for her was unusual—she hated wallowing. But when she arrived back in Boston, she put together a compelling speech about her experiences in Czechoslovakia and threw herself into a heavy schedule of public addresses, as did Waitstill. In October 1939 the American Unitarian Association decided to create the new refugee rescue organization that they had been talking about over the past year, and to call it the Unitarian Service Committee. The name resembled the American Friends Service Committee, the Quaker organization that the Dexters and other Unitarian officers had long admired.The association gave the founding of the service committee a high profile in its publications, and some of the most prominent New England Unitarians put themselves forward to join the board of directors. The board chair was William Emerson, tall and patrician in appearance and the emeritus dean of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s School of Architecture. Robert Dexter, who had gotten the idea off the ground during his 1938 visits to Prague andVienna, was made executive director. The next senior hire was the Rev. Charles Joy. Enigmatic but productive, Joy had made a bid for the association presidency two years earlier. He had withdrawn his candidacy after coming to terms with the popularity of the other candidate—Frederick May Eliot—but Joy indisputably had a following of his own, and the Dexters would have to accept him on the committee. In January 1940 the Dexters went on another fact-finding trip, this time to many countries in western and southern Europe.The mere news of their travel plans was considered sufficiently important to the editors of the Boston Evening Globe to win placement on the front page. The article reported that the Dexters were going “on a mercy mission . . . to set up bureaus for refugees.” The photograph with the story showed the middle-aged couple sitting in their living room; the man, chin down, gazed deferentially at his wife, who appeared to be knitting.The article noted that they were the first couple from the Boston area known to be venturing into Europe since the war started, and that they were packing gas masks for their trip, which would be fraught with danger.1 The Dexters’ travels, in fact, were safely outside the war zones, and their actions fell short of actually setting up “bureaus for refugees,” mArSeille And liSbon, 1940 | 27 but, being among the few Americans abroad, they had a unique vantage point on the unfolding crisis. When they...