It was the spring of 1939

American couple to be honored as 'Righteous Gentiles'

It was the spring of 1939, and the doors of Europe were about to be slammed shut on the continent's doomed Jews.

But as a six-year darkness began to spread over Nazi-occupied Europe, an American couple working furtively out of Prague were racing against the clock, just one step ahead of the Gestapo.
Weeks earlier, Waitstill Sharp, a young minister from suburban Boston, and his wife Martha, an experienced social worker, agreed to partake on a refugee mission to Czechoslovakia sponsored by the Unitarian Church, which was receiving increasingly alarming reports from Prague over the plight of refugees.

Guided by both their faith and humanity, the determined couple left their two young children in the care of parishioners in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and set sail for war-torn Europe.
In February 1939, the couple, armed with a total of $28,000 in aid money, arrived in Prague - where the largest Unitarian church in the world was based - having set up an underground network of volunteers and agencies that would assist them over the next six months in getting refugees out of Prague.

Bureaucratic hurdles in registering refugees and finding them employment necessary to get emigration visas turned into direct physical peril when the Nazis entered Prague on March 15, 1939.

Undeterred, the Sharps burned their notes and kept no further records, but continued with their work for the next five months, saving both Jews and non-Jews alike, even after the Gestapo shut down their office at the end of July and threw their furniture into the street.
During this time the Sharps managed to smuggle a Czech parliamentarian and outspoken anti-Nazi dissident - one of several prominent anti-Nazi activists they helped escape arrest - out of a hospital in a morgue basket, taking her by train to a port in Sweden.
Despite the ever-looming danger that summer, the couple would crisscross Europe, armed with their American passports and scores of dossiers, pressing embassy officials to get people jobs needed for emigration visas.

In August 1939, following warnings of their imminent arrest by the Gestapo, the couple left Prague separately, one week apart, and headed back to the US. They later learned that they had escaped capture by the Gestapo by one day.

Ten months later, the Sharps returned to Europe on a second mission, setting sail for Lisbon, where they set up a refugee office, focusing their attention on refugees in France.
They eventually made their way to Vichy-controlled France, which had allied itself with Nazi Germany, seeking to find ways to help fugitives and refugees escape.

While in France, they helped an renowned German Jewish author, Lion Feuchtwanger, escape.
In an elaborate plan, which included forged identity cards, bribing French border guards and purchasing first-class tickets, Martha Sharp disguised herself as a native peasant woman and accompanied Feuchtwanger and his wife by train to the French-Spanish border, where her husband was waiting for them. Eventually, the Sharps arranged for the couple to set sail for New York, after Martha Sharp gave up her own ticket to ensure that they would get out.

During their six-month stay in France, the Sharps worked closely with the noted American rescuer Varian Fry from their offices in Marseilles. Martha Sharp managed to get a group of some 29 children - nine of them Jewish - out of France as part of the Kindertransport after pleading for their safety.

In December 1940, after saving around 2,000 people from the clutches of the Nazis through their church's relief organization, the American couple returned to the US, although the institution they put in place in neutral Portugal continued to function even after they left.
After the war, Martha Sharp was involved in many efforts to assist Israel and Jews around the world, becoming an active fund-raiser with Hadassah, the women's Zionist Organization of America.
Over the next five decades, the Sharps spoke little of their heroism to their children and grandchildren.

"The whole issue was very private to them. They were very modest people," their daughter Martha Sharp Joukowsky recalled Monday in an interview with The Jerusalem Post. "They didn't know whether or not we would understand the horrors," Joukowsky, a retired Brown University archeologist, said.

In an interesting twist, Joukowsky, 69, has spent the last decade and a half excavating in Petra, Jordan.

In the meantime, it was only the interest of her son that made her parents' largely unknown story come to light. Artemis Joukowsky III first learned in depth of his grandparents' heroism as a result of a ninth-grade assignment to interview someone of importance for faith. He took a tape-recorder and interviewed his grandmother, later writing a five-page paper on her story.
"This was the first 'A' I got in school," Joukowsky, 45, recalled. "Since then I have been my grandparents' story-teller," he added.

His grandparents would later get divorced, but whenever asked would always talk about their extraordinary joint teamwork as a couple during the war years.
"It was always the same love story," Joukowsky said.

Waitstill Sharp died in 1984, and Martha Sharp in 1999. But their grandchildren's interest in their story only began to grow.

As part of their interest in making a film about their grandparents, as well as to find any children they rescued and to connect with Yad Vashem, the family contacted the New York-based Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, which provides economic assistance to nearly 1,500 Holocaust rescuers in 28 countries.

It later emerged that one of the Jewish children the Sharps had saved, Eva Esther Feigl, 80, has been living in New York City just across the street from where Martha Sharp had lived unbeknownst to either woman.

The organization, which has distributed $15 million to Holocaust rescuers during its two-decade existence, amassed all the documentation needed to have the Sharps recognized as Righteous Gentiles by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority.
"This couple not only had the courage to care, but the courage to act," said Stanlee J. Stahl, executive vice president of the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, who has accompanied the family to Jerusalem for the Tuesday morning ceremony at Yad Vashem.

The Sharps, who will be posthumously honored at Yad Vashem, are only the second and third Americans, after Varian Fry, to receive Yad Vashem's highest honor.