Defying the Nazis

by Artemis Joukowsky

  Martha caught up with Waitstill before the crackling hearth in Dr. Alice’s drawing room. He struck Martha as being tense but calm. Dr. Alice’s worn expression and nervous manner told the story of her previous twenty-four hours. She would be gone from Prague in early April, ultimately spending the war years in the United States.5

  But for the time being, Masaryk explained, she realized her place was not under the protection of a foreign embassy, but here inside her own home in Prague. Duty and the Masaryk name demanded it. If Dr. Alice was as frightened as she’d recently seemed, she did not show it.

  As the Germans’ eight o’clock curfew drew near, Martha and Waitstill reluctantly departed Dr. Alice’s company, found a free taxi, and headed across the city for their hotel. This time the Nazi minder in the front passenger seat actually served a useful purpose. The bridge crossings were a snap; all the Gestapo man had to do was flash his credentials.

  “We entered the hotel just as the clock was striking the hour,” Martha recalled, “and loudspeakers proclaimed, ‘Achtung! Achtung! Anyone on the street will be shot on sight.’”

  The lobby and dining room teemed with officers of the Wehrmacht. No tables were immediately available, so the Sharps retreated to their room to freshen up and kill a little time. When they returned to the dining room, there still was no table free. A monocled German officer rose and with a courteous gesture offered to share his table with them.

  “Waitstill thanked him,” wrote Martha, “and said that he was sure the officer would understand that ‘we wished to be alone.’ He bowed to me, clicked his heels and with a knowing wink at Waitstill murmured that he did not wish to interfere with a ‘tête-a-tête,’ and sat down once more.” As for the “tête-a-tête”: “When a table was finally free, we had no appetite, and anything we could think to say was so innocuous that we felt perfectly safe in saying it. The weather was vile. The cook looked to be in a temper. We were preoccupied by the problems of the day.”

  They retired to their room. There a huge roar from outside drew them to the casements. “Below us,” Martha wrote, “were lines of German military trucks, evidently the ones that had brought the army to Prague that morning.

  “I immediately understood the need for the curfew. Tons of food, sugar, wool, machinery, and raw materials were taken away that night in the trucks, and every night thereafter. When they returned to reload, the Czech word for robber frequently was found scrawled on both sides of the vehicles.”

  “The looting went on every night for months,” Waitstill recalled, “carrying the goods westward to the Third Reich.”

  The looting of Prague soon extended beyond the obvious and easily portable. Iron benches disappeared from parks and other public spaces, as did fences. The Germans even appropriated the brass chains from water closets, replacing them with ropes.

  From their morning confrontations with the fear-maddened lawyer and other refugees, to the heartbreaking scene at Starometske Namesti, to their clandestine human rescue work that night, and now this, the vast plundering of Prague, the Sharps were overwhelmed.

  “It was not possible for us to understand all at once, either intellectually or emotionally, what was happening,” Martha remembered. They passed a sleepless night discussing the astonishing events of the day, trying to figure out their next move.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Under the Swastika

  Next morning, Martha and Waitstill tuned in to the BBC as usual, only to hear a harsh buzz. The Nazis already were jamming the radio waves. At breakfast there was no morning newspaper, no mail. They learned that no trains or planes were entering or leaving the country The only officially sanctioned news was of Hitler’s address, scheduled for eleven that morning, March 16.

  The Führer arrived in Prague at about dusk the previous day, after a train ride from Berlin to the Czech border, and then a motorcade to the capital, where he was driven up to ancient Hradschin Castle and escorted to the suite of rooms that Tomas Masaryk had once occupied. It was exactly one year plus a day from the moment Hitler had entered Vienna after the Anschluss. In a further imperial affront to the Czech people and their government, his personal, gold-edged swastika was hoisted overhead, visible for miles around.

  According to a story that went around the capital that morning, Tomas Masaryk’s ghost visited Hitler in Masaryk’s old bedroom in the night, and harassed him till dawn.

  “So,” Martha remembered, “at eleven a.m. we stood in Hradcany Square and saw Hitler standing in the window from which pronouncements of importance always had been made to the people throughout the centuries. I thought, He sounds even wilder than the broadcasts we’ve heard on the radio. But he looks just as he does in all those pictures. He was jubilant.”

  “I now proclaim this state the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia!” Hitler shouted. He touched on a favorite theme, lebensraum—literally, living space—the lands surrounding the Fatherland that according to Nazi doctrine shared primordial kinship with the German people and thus were intrinsic parts of the German Reich. Bohemia and Moravia had been part of that greater Germanic family for a thousand years, he said.

  Hitler returned to the canard of civil unrest and persecution of ethnic Germans as the cause for the invasion. The German Reich, no longer able to tolerate disturbances on its borders, would restore order and discipline to central Europe.

  Hitler announced the men he had selected as leaders of the new protectorate: Konstantin von Neurath, protector; Karl Hermann Frank, secretary of state; and Konrad Henlein, leader of the Sudeten German Party, gauleiter, or Nazi party chief, in Sudeten. Von Neurath was an aging member of the upper Nazi hierarchy who had served in the foreign ministry. Though ruthless even by Hitler’s standards, the sixty-six-year-old von Neurath would have trouble suppressing the Czech underground, and he was removed in 1941. His successor, Reinhard Heydrich, would be assassinated by the resistance the following year.

  Frank and Henlein were typical Nazi thugs who’d worked together in the Sudeten to foment the troubles Hitler used as his pretext for annexing the region. Frank, a protégé of the SS and Gestapo head Heinrich Himmler, was characterized by Irving Linnell as “the perfect image of the German Halbgebildeter [half-educated individual] whom National Socialism has raised to power.”1

  Frank was most famously hated among Czechs for carrying out Hitler’s order to avenge Heydrich’s death. Besides the execution of Norbert Capek, an estimated thirteen hundred men, women, and children died either directly or in concentration camps. Among the slaughtered were all the men and many of the women and children in the village of Lidice, northwest of Prague. A few of the surviving children were given to German families, but the rest, along with the surviving women, died in concentration camps. Lidice was reduced to ashes. The Nazis triumphantly proclaimed that the village was forever erased from human memory.

  After the war, Lidice would become a national memorial. Homes were built nearby in the early 1950s and a rose garden planted with twenty-nine thousand roses donated by thirty-two countries.2

  Martha felt a chill up her spine at the prospect of Konstantin von Neurath, aided by gangsters such as Frank and Henlein, assuming dictatorial control of all Czech governmental and security affairs. Waitstill squeezed her hand and whispered “Courage!” in the square as the crowd began to break up.

  March 16, the day after the Einmarsch, was a busy one. The Sharps had appointments with at least ten people that day, most of whom were identified in Martha’s datebook only by their initials. Among them was Ambassador Carr. Neither Martha nor Waitstill recorded the substance of that meeting, but certainly they asserted that the Einmarsch had not shaken their determination to carry on their work in Czechoslovakia, a decision that Waitstill later downplayed in his official report to the denomination as one that “any other American in our position” would choose.

  Martha had a lunch appointment with Ruzena Palantova. After the two women found every restaurant overflowing with German military, they retreated to Palantov
a’s office in the city department of social welfare and ordered in their meal.

  “I was glad,” Martha remembered, “because we never would have had a chance to talk about the events of the day so freely if we were in a public place. She showed me the directives her division had received that morning from the Nazis. They were printed in Czech and German. She was ordered to post them on all bulletin boards. Palantova also was personally summoned to a meeting with her new German overseer, where the new order was spelled out in more detail.

  He instructed her that for the time being all direct financial support to non-Jewish indigents would continue, except that each welfare check henceforth would bear the legend “Gift of the German Reich.” He said that the source of the funds, of course, would remain the same, the national treasury, newly renamed the Treasury of the Protectorate. Soon, she was told, subvention policy toward the “unproductive” aged would be amended to give the unemployed elderly a chance to support themselves through unspecified, “useful work.” Palantova asked what the Reich intended to do about the Jews. “Our police are rounding up all the Jews on refugee rolls,” he said, “and will send them back to their countries of origin. After the problem of the German, Austrian, and Sudeten Jews is disposed of, we shall attack the problem of the resident Czech Jews.”

  Over the coming days, the Sharps would look on in horror and grim amazement as the Nazi python first crushed Czechoslovakia and then methodically proceeded to swallow it. “The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia,” Martha wrote, “was sealed off from the outside world. Each day our lives grew more restricted, and nobody had any idea how long this period would continue.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Changing the Rules

  The Nazis’ continued hold on Czechoslovakia was firm.

  “All radio broadcasts were jammed, except for propaganda messages,” Martha later wrote. The free press vanished at once, leaving a shaken nation at the mercy of the rumor mill’s fantastic distortions. “I remember,” Martha wrote, “it was confidently believed that the Chamberlain government in Great Britain had fallen, and that Sir Anthony Eden was now Prime Minister. Wishful thought!”

  The Sharps tried to restrict their daily conversations to the few key people whose information generally was reliable. “It was time-consuming but necessary, not only in order to keep up with the refugee picture, but to stay current with the whole life of the Protectorate,” Martha explained.

  Unfortunately, the Nazis soon caught on. They dispatched special patrols that quickly separated any two people they discovered in earnest conversation, then questioned them separately. If the two individuals’ versions of the discussion topic did not match, both were taken off to prison as “dangerous conspirators.”

  Therefore, we began each such meeting with, “What shall we discuss?” We then quickly got down to cases. Also, we noticed that the patrols tended to follow the same route each day, like beat cops in big US cities. So we adjusted for that, as well. The time and place of the next day’s conversation was always the last thing we discussed.

  I found myself so disturbed by the pressures and the potentially-serious consequences of making the slightest mistake that I changed from a rather naïve, friendly and outgoing person who trusted everyone into a self-contained, reserved and increasingly wary individual. I weighed every word and watched where it was spoken, how and to whom. I recall that the safest place to talk in those days was inside a private car as you drove along a back country road. Since that was rarely practical, most of our conversations were held in a hotel or office room in the city.

  There were immediate shortages of food and many consumer goods, a consequence of the systematic looting and the appetites of the German occupation troops coming off months on short rations. Since by decree the “liberators” were to be served first in all cafés and restaurants, there was less remaining for other customers. Martha and Waitstill grew accustomed to soup and dumplings for dinner every night.

  The eight o’clock curfew put an end to trips to the opera and symphony. A prohibition against all public gatherings of a dozen or more people effectively did away with most other sources of entertainment or relaxation. Churches became the only places people could come together in numbers; attendance skyrocketed accordingly. The many Czech clergy who were fiercely defiant of the occupation delivered coded sermons from their pulpits, exhorting their parishioners via allegory and other devices to resist the Nazis and to assist one another.

  The spirit of Good Soldier Svejk was abroad as well. Svejk, the inspired comic creation of Czech novelist Jaroslav Hasek, was a hapless fool who bumbled his way across four volumes of one of the most acclaimed satires ever written. But despite his manifest shortcomings—Svejk was not only stupid but also a fat, bald, middle-aged cipher—he survived, even thrived in the face of constant misadventure by dint of a very carefully camouflaged shrewdness. Although the novel was banned by the Czech army in 1925, Svejk was widely known and admired in the country. With the advent of occupation, he became a role model too.

  “Svejk,” Martha wrote, “was not created in vain.”

  Czech civil servants, without previous collusion or direction, stopped working. Everyone found some valid reason why he could not understand, and had to have the new regulations explained to him, again and again. From the very first day the Czechs exhibited a patience, resourcefulness and originality behind a bland mask of incompetence that continued to vex their German masters despite all threats, persecution or blandishments.

  One of the intended results was to seriously undermine German plans for Czech industrial and agricultural production, a key component of their overall war strategy. Since it was impossible for the Nazis to detect whether Czech workers could, or could not, understand a directive, their frustrated German masters could only rewrite and rewrite, and explain and explain. Meanwhile, the famously organized and highly efficient administration of the rich little republic slowly fell to pieces, as if struck by some mysterious internal dry rot.

  The effects of fear and deprivation, compounded by a claustrophobic sense of absolute isolation during the occupation’s first few days, formed the backdrop of dread against which Martha coped with her deepest anxiety of all—the Nazis’ plans for the Jews. Before coming to Czechoslovakia, she was well aware of National Socialism’s anti-Semitic agenda. But from the remoteness of Wellesley Hills, the disease was more of an abstraction, like some dire tropical malady that posed no peril in suburban Massachusetts. In Prague, however, the fate of the Jews was very much a local matter, one in which Martha would take a personal stake. The Sharps had hired a group of eight young Jews from the Sudeten as office staff. They were all bright and hardworking, spoke German and Czech among other languages, and skillfully bridged the inevitable cultural divide between central European refugees and a pair of earnest American relief workers.

  Among these office helpers was a young woman named Lisl. “Lisl was the lovely blond wife of a former industrialist from the Sudeten, whose chemical plants had been seized by the Nazis,” Martha remembered. “She had maturity and charm as well as linguistic ability and had become a real asset. She told me, ‘I am so happy to be working here. I get so absorbed in other people’s troubles, I forget my own! I usually find that most people are worse off than I am!’ The small amount we could pay her allowed Lisl and her otherwise destitute family to escape the unheated loft where they, and hundreds of other Sudeten refugees, had been housed.”

  On the morning of March 17, Lisl showed up for work with her arm in a sling, her face marred by a burn that left her practically unrecognizable. She explained to Martha that just before curfew the night before, she, her husband, David, and her brother, Friedl, had been enjoying an after-dinner coffee at the Kavarna Artia, a café popular with Jews from the Sudeten. Suddenly a live hand grenade flew through the window and landed at Lisl’s feet. Her brother grabbed it to toss it back into the street, but it had exploded in his hand, killing him instantly.

  “I was burned
by some of the fragments,” she said. “David grabbed my arm before I could bend over Friedl. ‘Come, we get out of here,’ he said. ‘Friedl is beyond our help.’” David tried the front door, but it was barred shut. Through the kavarna window, they could see German soldiers with their weapons trained on the door, ready to shoot anyone who came through it. So her husband pulled Lisl with him to the back entrance, up a staircase and over the roof to the building next door, where they descended a second staircase and escaped through a back door into the alley. Besides her brother, two other customers had been killed by the grenade, and several more were badly burned.

  Lisl’s experience and the persecution of Czechoslovakia’s Jewish population brought a dimension of concern that would stay with Martha forever. “Nazi discrimination against a whole people because of their religion challenged every crusading corpuscle in my being,” she wrote. “I had read reports of the persecution of the Jews in Germany. But the printed pages of The New York Times never got under my skin the way that seeing indignities heaped upon innocent people did.” She labeled anti-Semitism “Christianity’s greatest sin.” Within four years, she would be deeply involved in Jewish-Christian interfaith relations and, later, in the resettlement of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in Palestine.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Helping the Kulturträgers

  The few days that the Sharps had spent in Czechoslovakia prior to the Einmarsch had mainly been devoted to reconnaissance and consultation. According to their commission, their role was to scout out worthy projects—particularly government-sponsored refugee relocation programs for Nicholas Butler’s group, AmRelCzech—and, as representatives of the Unitarian Association, “to assist the people of Czechoslovakia in making adjustments to the new order in their land, and in all ways to render constructive friendly service.”