In December 1938, Nicholas Winton visited Czechoslovakia at the invitation of his friend Martin Blake, who was working for the BCRC, Tessa Rowntree and Beatrice Wellington’s organization, with offices near the Sharps at the Central Institute for Refugees in Prague. Without any direct authority from the BCRC, Winton set up a subsidiary “Children’s Section” and began accepting applications from people eager to get their children out of the country to safety.
As he later wrote: “Everybody in Prague said, ‘Look, there is no organization in Prague to deal with refugee children, nobody will let the children go on their own, but if you want to have a go, have a go.’”3
The British Home Office agreed to issue visas to Czech youngsters under eighteen as long as Winton could find them homes, as well as deposit fifty pounds for each child to guarantee his or her eventual return fare home. Then Winton furiously set about raising money and recruiting families who were willing to take in the refugee children. The first twenty were lined up by early March, visas were issued, and Trevor Chadwick was ready to whisk his young charges—one was an infant who would fly in Chadwick’s lap—away to freedom.
Martha ached at the unspoken certainty among all the families gathered to say good-bye to their boys and girls that they were probably saying good-bye forever.
“Each little family was a small island of emotion,” she went on. “The parents had bought sweets or other small gifts using their precious funds to the limit. While saying the mundane things—‘Don’t forget to write. Do what Mr. Chadwick tells you. We’ll be over to join you before you know it.’—the parents seemed to caress the children with their eyes, as if to engrave on their memories how they looked, spoke and walked in this last hour.”
She could not help but think of her own two children far away, and she inwardly shuddered at the idea of standing there like these other parents, saying a final farewell to Hastings or Martha Content in order to save her darlings’ lives.
Martha also found it easy, though painful, to intuit the departing children’s thoughts, and she was acutely sensitive to their inner turmoil. They may have accepted their parents’ decision to send them away, but few were old enough to fully understand it. All they knew at that moment was excitement mixed with fear and confusion.
“Some parents showed their love openly and tenderly and the children responded without embarrassment,” she recalled. “They carefully unpinned wrapped treasures—a photograph, a ring, a watch—and made last-minute presentations. I offered to take their pictures, and they were very pleased, eagerly giving their names and addresses to me to send them copies.” Then, the plane was announced, and “the boys and girls each were given a last hug, [presented with] kisses on both cheeks, and loaded with small parcels” before joining Chadwick in line for departure.
Among the group was eleven-year-old Gerda Stein from Carlsbad in the Sudeten. After Chamberlain’s capitulation at Munich, Gerda’s parents, Arnold and Erna Stein, had fled with her and her older half-sister, Johanna, to Prague where, for nearly six months, the elder Steins trudged from embassy to embassy, searching unsuccessfully for any avenue of escape.4 Some Jews in Czechoslovakia, throughout central Europe, and around the world still refused to believe the Nazis’ violent rhetoric. Not the Steins. They signed Gerda up for the Kindertransport. They would eventually turn to the Sharps in search of help, sending a desperate, typewritten note in broken English that survives in Martha’s files.
“Dear Sir,” it begins. “As I brought you the pictures of the children’s and my little Gerdi’s departures, you have had the amiability of allowing me to apply to you. I never should taken the liberty to write you, if I were not helpless. I have heard that a new action is established from America for the Jewish refugees. I don’t know whether it is true, but having not other acquaintance I beg you politely to inform me about this matter. With many thanks beforehand, I remain yours faithfully, Arnold Stein.”
Erna Stein appended her own scribbled postscript. “I should be very glad,” she wrote, “if you and madam would allow to me to go to see you in your office. But I don’t like to trouble you.” In a separate box in the lower left-hand corner of the page, Frau Stein added: “Today is a great danger for us. Please tell us the time when we may come to see you. Please help us!”
The Steins’ application reveals a couple in their thirties, parents of two daughters, Gerda and Johanna. Arnold Stein ran a knitting shop. Erna was a knitter. They were ordinary people with no connections, and their fight to save themselves and their older daughter—who, at eighteen, was too old for Kindertransport—failed.
Their daughter Gerda, now Gerda Stein Mayer, remembers fragments of that day at the Prague airport. “Trevor Chadwick was there, amusing a three-year-old with a glove puppet,” she says. “My father took photographs, while my mother walked rather pensively, arm in arm, up and down with my sister. My mother also spoke with another mother, who had a girl of my age, a quiet, well-behaved child who, I knew instinctively, was going to be an ‘example’ to me. I loathed her on sight.”
Martha gathered with the Steins and the other families at the enclosure where they could wave a last good-bye to their children.
“As each boy and girl stepped out of the exit they waved at their parents, ran across the snow-covered field, waved again and climbed aboard the plane,” she wrote.
Their parents’ self-control was marvelous. Smiling brightly, eyes brimming with tears, they waved back. Chadwick was the last to board.
Then the door of the plane was slammed shut with a finality that rocked the little group. Suddenly we were all one large and bereft family. A few muffled sobs escaped as the engines warmed up. The children could see us from the windows. The plane was moving. The pilot brought it as close to the enclosure as possible so that all the children on one side could get one last look, and wave; then he turned, wheeled, so that children on the other side had a chance to say goodbye.
Then the engines raced and the plane took off, disappearing at once into the low clouds. I returned to Prague on the airport bus with the parents. We disembarked, exchanged handshakes and bows, and then each of us withdrew into [our] private misery.
Gerda Stein Mayer’s very last memory of the departure was her father running after the airplane with his camera, trying to take one more photo. She would never see him, or her mother, again. They were both interned at Terezin, a concentration camp outside Prague, and later transported to Auschwitz, where they died.5
Gerda and the rest of Trevor Chadwick’s charges—most of whom got airsick—made a refueling stop that day in Holland. When refreshments appeared, she recalls, “We were given the choice of lemonade or milk. We all asked proudly for lemonade, like cowboys calling for whiskey. Only one boy without shame asked for the babyish drink, milk. I looked at him with amazement, awe, contempt. Clearly an individualist.”
The transport landed safely at Croydon that evening.
Vera Gissing, one of the 669 who owed their lives to Nicholas Winton, later wrote a book about him: Nicholas Winton and the Rescued Generation. In it, she describes the tragic attempt to bring out one last group, the eighth train. “The next transport, the largest,” Gissing writes, “was due to leave Prague on 1 September 1939. Hitler had invaded Poland that very day and the borders were closed; 250 children were already at the station, but the train was not allowed to depart. The despair of the parents on hearing this fateful decision is unimaginable. As far as it is known, all these children were later deported to concentration camps where they perished, my two young cousins among them.”6
Nicholas Winton died in July of 2015 at age 106.
The evening of March 14, 1939, the Sharps sat in the Prague National Theatre’s presidential box, ordinarily occupied by Alice Masaryk. With the Gestapo determined to silence her, Masaryk had decided against attending the performance and instead gave her tickets to the Sharps. Both loved opera and were grateful for any respite from the oppressive tension everywhere around them.
Y
et the National Theatre would be no refuge that night. Whispered rumors and endless speculation over President Hacha’s mission to Berlin and Adolf Hitler’s intentions flew through the nervous and distracted audience in the ornate old opera house all evening.
The performance that night, as recalled by both Sharps, was a Dvorak opera. The scene that followed the final curtain was very emotional. The audience rose and in tears sang the national anthem, “Kde domov muj?,” “Where is my country?”7
CHAPTER FIVE
Einmarsch—The Invasion of Czechoslovakia
After the opera performance, on what usually was a ten-minute walk back to the Hotel Atlantic from the National Theatre, the Sharps encountered Nazi thugs roaming the Czech capital, carrying out Berlin’s directive to provoke as much chaos as possible, thereby underscoring the urgent need for authority—the Reich’s ostensibly beneficent, pacifying hand.
They saw one young man under a street lamp wound himself superficially with a pocketknife. As the blood ran, he smeared some on his face, then hurried over to a Czech policeman, complaining in German that he was “a poor German student” who’d been attacked by a young Czech, whom he pointed out in the crowd.
The policeman grabbed the suspect, who protested that he had never touched the German youth. Waitstill jumped into action, charging across the street to inform the cop of what had actually occurred. The potentially violent confrontation quickly cooled into a routine incident, with the policeman instructing everyone to move along, and the young Czech thanking Waitstill in broken English for intervening.
As they approached their favorite kavarna, or coffee house, intent on a quiet nightcap, the Sharps encountered a riot, as Martha put it. “Chairs, dishes and all sort of movable objects were flying out the door.”
The police arrived to restore order. The Sharps asked the owner what had touched off the melee. He told them a group of German students had arrived early that evening and had tried to provoke fights with every Czech student who came in. “Our boys refused to take them up,” he said, “but finally the Nazis went too far. It was a point of honor for the Czechs to defend their country.”
Waitstill and Martha took a taxi the rest of the way to the hotel, each lost in private, sober musings.
“There’s a heaviness in the air,” she said at last. “Do you feel it?”
“Are you afraid?” he replied. “Do you want to go home to Wellesley and let the Czechs fight their own battles?”
Martha didn’t answer at once. But as their cab wound carefully through the increasingly crowded streets—very unusual at that hour in Prague, a city that habitually got its sleep—Martha reflected on their original reasons for coming to Prague and on the Czechs’ clear need for their help.
“I’d like to stay if you want to,” she said in the dark.
“Good!” he answered. “I want to stay too.”
Although it was well past twelve when they finally reached their room, Martha telephoned Alice Masaryk.
Dr. Alice told them that a mob of Nazis had gathered below her apartment windows, shouting threats and insults. At one point the crowd had tried to rush the building’s front door. The Czech police finally broke up the demonstration.
“We’d be happy to come over and stay with you,” Martha offered.
“No,” Masaryk answered, “I think I must undergo this myself. Why should I involve you with my personal problems?”
Before Martha could answer that she and Waitstill were already deeply involved with Dr. Alice’s personal problems—that’s why they were in Prague—Masaryk changed the subject.
“I have heard that some of the embassies are offering asylum,” she said. “If the United States should invite me, I might consider it. I must think about it. Please keep in touch.”
As Martha rang off with Masaryk, there was a knock at the hotel room door.
“Who under the sun is calling at this hour?” Waitstill wondered. He opened the door to discover Jiri Vranek, a Czech diplomat and member of former president Benes’s staff in London. The Sharps had met Vranek in Paris.
“Come in! What a surprise!” said Waitstill. “When did you get in?”
Martha watched as Waitstill practically yanked the Czech into the room.
“Just a couple of hours ago,” Vranek replied. He had brought along some of their mail, and a note from Malcolm Davis, but that was not his reason for calling at such a late hour.
“Have you heard the latest?” he asked.
“What is it?”
The story spilled from Vranek in a torrent.
“Hacha just telephoned from Berlin,” he said. “Hitler has ordered the Nazi army to march into Czechoslovakia at six this morning. They entered one of our frontier barracks at midnight. Our men were outnumbered. Every one of them was killed. Hitler has threatened to wipe out the whole Czech army and to bomb Prague unless all resistance is called off.”
In all, two hundred thousand Wehrmacht infantrymen would pour over the Czech border in the coming hours.
“Hacha told the cabinet that he already has signed an agreement that the Czechs will offer no resistance. He asked for their confirmation. Poor weak Hacha! To save Czech lives he signs their death warrants.”
Vranek slumped in a chair, overwhelmed for a moment. Then he continued: “Dishonor is worse than death. This is the end of the republic. It was too successful. Everyone wanted to grab us.”
Martha stepped forward.
“We are going to stay and keep on working as long as we can, whatever happens,” she told him.
“Thank God!” he said, looking up with a smile. “Some of our friends have guts.”
He advised the Sharps to destroy any incriminating documents and warned that the Nazis were certain to search their files, openly or in secret.
“We set to work to review letters of introduction, commissions to be discharged, and lists of people to be found and helped,” Martha recalled. “Fortunately, many of the projects discussed in these documents were already underway and could be continued without the original paperwork. They made a rather large pile, however.”
“Too many to flush down the toilet?” Vranek asked. “How about burning them? I know the way to the hotel furnace.”
It was by now nearly 4 a.m.
Martha described the somber scene:
Deep under the Hotel Atlantic we came upon a queue of people, all waiting their turn to approach the furnace. It was a silent line. Evidently all of us there understood that from this night on, no one was to be trusted. I watched as they threw their papers in the fire. For a few brilliant moments, the flames illuminated each face, betraying each person’s fear, dejection, pensiveness and hopelessness. As each turned and was swallowed in the darkness, their shoulders seemed to give away something lost in the ashes. Memory? Hope? Honor? Freedom?
The Sharps said good night and good-bye to Jiri Vranek, and returned to their room. From the window, they could see that a snowstorm had driven the crowds indoors. But there was no sleep in Prague. Lights burned in all the buildings along the street, in banks, offices, and apartments, throwing yellow patches on the newly fallen snow.
“Waitstill,” Martha remembered, “was going through his futile nightly ritual of trying to anchor the four-by-six down puff on his bed by tucking a steamer robe around it. He muttered. ‘This barbarous custom! No sheets! No blankets! Arms and legs exposed! You either swelter or freeze! How the Czechs have survived—’”
Martha interrupted her husband’s tirade to help him secure his bedclothes.
“Then I fixed the one on my bed, and snapped off the light,” she said. “But it was not so easy to turn off my mind.”
Two hours later, at 6 a.m. on March 15, 1939, German troops crossed the border into Czechoslovakia, reaching Prague a little more than three hours later. The Einmarsch (invasion) had begun. Waitstill recalled that “every trace of Czechoslovak democracy vanished as the grey troops poured in through the falling snow.”
International condemna
tion quickly followed. Neville Chamberlain, admitting to the failure of appeasement, said, “World opinion has received a sharper shock than has ever been administered to it.”1 In Washington, the acting US secretary of state, Sumner Welles, condemned the invasion. “It is manifest that acts of wanton lawlessness and of arbitrary force are threatening world peace and the very structure of modern civilization,” he said.2 The Soviets called Hitler’s actions “arbitrary, violent, and aggressive.”
Treaty obligations notwithstanding, no government intervened.
The Einmarsch was front-page news everywhere and proof, in case anyone had held lingering doubts, that the Nazis would not be stopped at the negotiating table. On March 17, the British Guardian headline read, “German Rule in Prague, Rounding Up the ‘Harmful’ 10,000 Arrests?” The unsigned article reported:
Prague, a sorrowing Prague, yesterday had its first day of German rule—a day in which the Czechs learned of the details of their subjection to Germany, and in which the Germans began their measures against the Jews and against those people who have “opened their mouths too wide.” Prague’s streets were jammed with silent pedestrians wandering about, looking out of the corners of their eyes at German soldiers carrying guns, at armoured cars, and at other military precautions.... Suicides have begun. The fears of the Jews grow. The funds of the Jewish community have been seized, stopping Jewish relief work. The Prague Bar Council has ordered all its “non-Aryan” members to stop practising at once. The organisation for Jewish emigration has been closed. Hundreds of people stood outside the British Consulate shouting: “We want to get away!” This is only the beginning. According to an official spokesman of the German Foreign Office in Berlin last night, the Gestapo (secret police) will have rounded up hundreds of “harmful characters” within the next few days. So far about fifty to a hundred men have been put in local jails. “There are certain centres of resistance which need to be cleaned up,” said the spokesman. “Also some people open their mouths too wide. Some of them neglected to get out in time. They may total several thousand before we are through. Remember that Prague was a breeding-place for opposition to National Socialism.” The head of the Gestapo in Prague is reported to have been more definite: “We have 10,000 arrests to carry out.” Already, says a Reuters correspondent, everyone seems to have an acquaintance who has disappeared.
Defying the Nazis Page 5
