Defying the Nazis

by Artemis Joukowsky

  Waitstill would meet these “clients” in the safest possible surroundings, often in open fields, removed from the Nazis’ ubiquitous listening devices, and sometimes at Unitaria when time was a problem.

  The first phase was to agree upon an exchange rate for the transaction. As Waitstill recalled,

  My business was to negotiate, even mercilessly, as high a rate as I could. I knew it was illegal, but I did it because I had no other choice. I was beyond the pale of civilization. I owed no ethics to anybody. I owed no honesty to anybody at all if I could save imperiled human lives.

  Everything had to be carried out in my head and as a word of honor. I had never been a good bargainer, but there was an excess of adrenaline [born] of my hatred of the Nazis, and my intention, which may qualify as a Christian intention, to do as much as I could for the welfare of both the refugees and the indigenous populations. I drove the hardest bargains with big farmers and landowners. I felt that I could soak them, did not have to respect their economic needs as much as I might some tailor or schoolmaster or college professor.

  When he later told Martha of the operation, she gently chided him. “And you a minister and a graduate of the Harvard law school!”

  “Yes!” Waitstill rejoined. “And I am proud to refuse to obey those who have taken this country illegally and have no morality!”

  Although Sharp was careful not to retain incriminating evidence of his illicit dealings, a couple of his account sheets, doubtless created outside the protectorate from memory, have survived. One page, styled “CONSOLIDATED ACCOUNT, Receipts in Crowns,” includes a column headed, “Remarks—Clients Classification.” It reveals that a Joseph Krebes qualified for the “social worker rate” of thirty-seven korunas to the dollar. Otto Munz received the “industrialist/lawyer” rate of seventy-five korunas to the dollar. Waitstill negotiated with an individual named Ruzicha for his highest, “merchant” rate of one hundred fifty korunas to the dollar.

  Among familiar names on the sheet, Lydia Busch paid 75 korunas per dollar. Karl Deutsch’s father did a little better at 60. According to Waitstill, the absolutely highest rate he ever charged was 160 korunas per dollar.

  In a June letter to Robert Dexter from London, Waitstill reported that he so far had pledged twenty-one thousand dollars’ worth of calling-card chits in return for nearly two million korunas in cash. Thus the average rate of exchange to that point was about ninety korunas to the dollar.

  Once the dickering was done, Waitstill would stuff the proffered korunas into his handy black bag. Then he would tear a business card in half. As he had told bank officials in several countries to expect, he wrote the agreed-upon dollar sum in pencil on one piece of the card and pocketed the other as his only record. The consolidated sheet indicates that Mr. Krebes cashed his card stub in New York. Ruzicha picked up his money in pounds sterling, in London, as did Otto Munz. Lydia Busch took her card to the Paris branch of a London bank.

  Business was brisk, which created a new problem for Sharp. He was collecting so much Czech currency that its sheer bulk was proving difficult and dangerous to manage. Their room at the Hotel Pariz, which had been searched three times, offered no safe hiding places. “Thus,” he recalled, “I was driven to a desperate act.”

  That was a visit to Irving Linnell to enlist the consul general in his clandestine currency operation. With few words of explanation, Sharp opened his black bag and pulled out approximately two million korunas in thousand-koruna notes, two hefty stacks of illegal cash.

  “He looked at them, almost like a man in shock,” Waitstill remembered, “and said, ‘To put it very mildly, Mr. Sharp, you are in plenty of trouble. I have here on my desk somewhere the legal code of the German occupation, printed in several languages. Do you realize what you have been doing?”’

  “Yes,” Waitstill answered, “I very much realize it, and I am aware that indeed I am in trouble, and the trouble is as near as this black bag.” Reverend Sharp reminded Linnell of all the causes and needs of the Czech people that the little mountain of korunas resting on his desk could help support if only he might deliver the goods.

  The consul general took careful note. “Well, what are you asking of me?”

  Waitstill said he had a simple but pressing dilemma: where could he find a secure hiding place for his stash as he went about his work of gathering more Czech currency and then distributing it? The answer floated in the air between the two men. Waitstill later remembered that Linnell looked steadily at him for a while. “Mr. Sharp,” he said, “I have made some tough decisions before but nothing approaching what I am about to do; that is, set aside a Foreign Service regulation.”

  “I am going to open my own personal safe here in my office,” the consul general continued, “so that you can put that money in it and walk out of here until you get the next lot of this illegal stuff. There will be one other person privy to this arrangement, because there are times when I have to leave the office or am tied up with somebody in the Czech government, what’s left of it.”

  Linnell hit a buzzer to summon his secretary. “Take a good look at Mr. Sharp,” he instructed her, then pointed to the korunas stacked on his desk. “I want you to honor whatever requests Mr. Sharp makes of you for whatever increments of this money.”

  As Waitstill recollected the moment, “Her eyes opened up as big as harvest moons. She was flabbergasted.”

  “Do you understand?” Linnell asked her.

  “Yes, sir,” she replied.

  “Give Mr. Sharp what he asks for, and just keep a ledger here in the safe.”

  Waitstill departed Irving Linnell’s office in high spirits. “Now I was free,” he explained, “to begin the program of financial assistance.”

  His very first stop was the Salvation Army’s soup kitchen at their Prague headquarters. For the several months preceding the Einmarsch, Mrs. C. M. D. Benjamin, a Briton, had operated a refugee feeding operation at Prague’s Labor Temple. After the Nazis shut down that service, the Salvation Army stepped in, trying to fill the relief gap.

  Thousands of Social Democrats still were trapped in Prague, subject to immediate arrest and imprisonment by the Gestapo. Most lived on the streets because they couldn’t risk staying at the same address for more than one or two nights. Others continued to inhabit the giant sewer pipes they’d first colonized in the months before the occupation. They could not take advantage of public relief, such as it was, including medical care. For many, their only hot meals, or food of any sort, were provided by the Salvation Army, which was perilously close to shutting down its daily service for lack of resources.

  Waitstill rescued the soup kitchen with a gift of 129,000 korunas—around $3,500—which provided two hot meals a day to 350 homeless refugees through the spring and summer of 1939. “It was a moving experience,” Waitstill wrote in his official report, “to stand in the dark dining room and to watch these fugitives eating, unaware of the origin of their food.” The whole operation, including the source of the Salvation Army’s funding, had to be kept strictly secret. There was one close call, as Waitstill related: “One day the Gestapo came to our office, lined the refugee men facing the wall, and an officer beat the refugees’ heads with a revolver until they fell senseless in their own blood. The Gestapo was looking for refugees reported to have eaten at the Salvation Army.” Waitstill was happy to note in his official report that 294 of the 350 managed to escape the protectorate by late August.

  Children were always a priority with the Sharps, and Waitstill peeled off another twenty-five of the thousand-koruna notes for the Salvation Army to expand and upgrade a summer country rest house for the poor children of Prague. Located in a pear orchard on the banks of a little stream in the village of Uvaly, the concrete structure could house twenty-five children, who were brought from the city for three-week stays. Waitstill’s donation paid for construction of a so-called American Wing. The three-story addition consisted of a storeroom and lavatory on the ground floor, a sleeping porch and sunroom on
the second, and a waterproof attic as well as a sun-bathing deck on top. The added space made it possible to increase the number of children to fifty or sixty for each three-week session.

  In such grim times, the sudden advent of this free-spending American left staff members at the Uvaly rest house dumbfounded. As Waitstill handed over the money, one of the women who worked there inquired about its source.

  “Don’t ask, madam,” Sharp admonished her. “You don’t catechize Santa Claus.”

  He gave seventy-five thousand korunas to the YMCA and another fifty thousand to the YWCA to expand their summer camp programs. The money also helped underwrite national programs designed to monitor the incidence of deficiency diseases such as rickets among children (which would become more common as the occupation wore on), as well as the health effects of poor diet and restricted exposure to sunlight.

  Waitstill later noted, “Here at the heart of beleaguered Czech culture, the welfare of the children, the health and nervous stability of the inheriting generation, came first. It was a life-long lesson in the devotion of which a wise generation may be capable.”

  Still another initiative he funded, especially remarkable under the circumstances, was reconstruction of the Karel Farsky Refugee Children’s Home, a project of the Czechoslovak National Church that British Unitarians were helping to rebuild. Waitstill donated seventy-five of his thousand-koruna notes to support what he called “a really shining example of institutional reconstruction. Here, forty little refugee orphans were to live the year round—children whose parents had been shot, imprisoned, or lost or who had committed suicide.”1

  Since the children already in residence each owned, at best, one change of clothes and for modesty’s sake were sent to bed on laundry day, Sharp spent another three thousand korunas on clothing for them, and threw in a few extra korunas to raise the house’s matron’s monthly wage.

  One group of beneficiaries was Prague’s small colony of mostly elderly Russians. Waitstill paid about fifteen dollars so an elderly Russian philosopher could have a glaucoma operation to restore his eyesight. Another scholar received a set of false teeth. “We cooperated with the Red Cross,” Sharp remembered, “to pay the boat fare for an aged Russian woman to South America to join her family. We paid the boat fare to England for a Crimean nurse with a fine record and a good future who, because a foreigner, had no other possible source of funds to turn to for a way out of the country. We assigned 2,400 korunas to Dr. Ivan Georgievsky to support needy children of the Russian colony at summer camps in preparation for the winter of privation which we could see ahead for all children whose families could not emigrate from Prague.”

  Waitstill did not neglect the Czechs’ spiritual need. He donated nineteen thousand korunas to the Czechoslovak National Church to start a publishing program with the proviso that there would be an English-language version of whatever they produced. Unitaria was very near his heart. Waitstill contributed seventy-five thousand korunas to the church’s social service committee to help them lay in some increasingly scarce food staples (possibly purchased outside the protectorate) for the coming winter—sugar, flour, powdered milk, chocolate, dried fruit, and the like—as well as bulk wool fabric and some medical supplies. Waitstill helped them hide it all under the church floor: “We lifted up the floor by night. We lifted some of the great tiles by light of lanterns with all the lights turned out and the windows and doors concealed. And we dropped into the open area beneath certain valuable medicaments for the disbursal by ministers of the church during what then seemed certain to be the paralysis of everything by an oncoming European war.”

  The greater gift to Unitaria, however, would be its continued existence, for which Sharp deserved fundamental credit. Unitaria, which faced chronic money problems from the time Norbert Capek founded the church in 1932, needed approximately $1.2 million korunas, and soon, to avoid a forced sale and liquidation.

  Then came two unlikely interventions. The first occurred on March 15 when Otto Schonberger, a Jewish glove manufacturer in Prague, loaned the church about 780,000 korunas in the form of bonds, shares, and currency he left with the Unitarians as he fled to London. In return, Unitaria pledged Schonberger $180 monthly until the loan was retired.

  The second crucial intervention came in the person of Otto Schleim, a blind industrialist. Schleim supplied the several hundred thousand additional korunas that Unitaria required in a clandestine currency swap with Waitstill. The deal was supposed to finance Schleim’s escape from Prague.

  On May 3, 1939, Schleim traded Waitstill 1.25 million korunas at 125 to the dollar (merchant rate) and received his torn business card with the figure “$10,000” scribbled on the back. There is no record of the glove maker’s fate, but it appears that he did not make it. According to Waitstill’s records, in the late autumn of 1939 the ten thousand dollars still awaited Otto Schleim’s claim at Lloyd’s Bank, in London.

  In a letter from London to Parker Marean, the Unitarians’ accountant in Boston, dated June 13, 1939, Waitstill explained the deal, in part, and closed with a stern warning. “Absolutely no word of this arrangement should ever come into the Protectorate,” he wrote. “It certainly would mean my surrender to the Gestapo and in all likelihood my imprisonment, as well as that of Dr. Capek and his son-in-law, Mr. Haspl. Mr. Haspl and I have to handle Dr. Capek’s affairs in this way, as the officers of the Association understand he is not fully dependable in money matters. All the foregoing, with all the irregularities which it introduces into your ordinary procedure, may be some indication of the extraordinary circumstances under which all business has to be conducted in Czecho-Slovakia.”

  In case his missive was not clear, Waitstill appended a postscript: “All of the foregoing is of life and death significance to the persons named herein. If you want to see us back in America please keep this letter in your confidential files, and make no reply to me.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Last Days in the Protectorate

  Occupied Czechoslovakia was a world of predators and prey where among the hunted the paradoxical consequence of surviving today was a reduced likelihood of making it past tomorrow. The strain of coping with such tension and fear took a physical and emotional toll on both Martha and Waitstill.

  Martha in particular was afflicted by depression and anxiety. She had trouble sleeping, and suffered through a succession of chest and head colds.

  Waitstill kept his sights resolutely fixed over the horizon. On June 1 in Geneva, he took time from his work with Marie Ginzburg of the Committee for the Placement of Intellectual Refugees to share some thoughts in a letter to Martha. He blended his optimism over “the coming victory of democracy” with lyrical asides on the Swiss capital’s physical beauty and the suggestion that she quit Prague’s grimness for a few days to join him where “the weather is like wine.”

  In one of her several later attempts to set down her life story, she reproduced this letter from her husband at length, including a passage in which Waitstill compared her to the famous Emily Balch, professor, pacifist, and moving force in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. In 1946 Balch would share in the Nobel Peace Prize.

  “You will be returning from this experience abroad with, I believe, a good deal of prestige,” he wrote, “and some rather steady glances fixed your way.... I see no reason why it is not a laudable ambition to qualify for as influential a post as Emily Balch occupies, or even one higher, in the liberal forces of our country’s life.” He closed the letter, “Ever yours and most gratefully, Waitstill.”

  Martha didn’t require much coaxing to leave Prague’s oppressive atmosphere behind, if only for a brief while.

  Martha and Waitstill’s stay together in Geneva was a working vacation. They met with various contacts in Switzerland, among them John Winant of the International Labour Organization (ILO) and Marie Ginzburg. Ginzburg had with her curricula vitae for 5,700 intellectuals desperate for employment outside the Reich. When Waitstill asked how many of t
he applicants had secured their lifelines to freedom, the answer was 299—about 5 percent of them. Martha had brought with her files on hundreds more Kulturträgers, all also in need of jobs.

  Martha returned to Czechoslovakia by way of Paris, where she met with the Lowries and Malcolm Davis, who passed along some teaching invitations from US colleges. Waitstill traveled from Geneva to London to meet with colleagues and carry back any of the precious documents that might save a young student, a professor, or an artist.

  In the pile of letters awaiting them at the Hotel Pariz, there was one from Aunt Edna, who reassured them that life was proceeding smoothly at home in Wellesley Hills.

  “Hastings brought home his report card today,” Aunt Edna wrote. “Satisfactory in everything except penmanship, unsatisfactory. The report said he can do better in arithmetic and spelling. When I asked why he was not trying to do his best, he replied, ‘But Aunt Edna, yesterday and the day before I was brilliant in both.’”

  Aunt Edna reported that on Mother’s Day she and Martha Content took tea with Marion Niles, the Sharps’ close friend from Wellesley as well as a trustee of Waitstill’s church. Dr. Frederick Eliot and Mrs. Eliot also attended.

  “Martha had a beautiful time,” she wrote. “We christened her new spring coat and bonnet, periwinkle blue. It was a real bargain at $3.97. When we tried it on at Jordan’s, Martha climbed up before the mirror and liked so much what she saw that she wept loudly and copiously when we took the coat off. But she behaved beautifully and enjoyed herself at the party, winding about among the people and smiling at all who greeted her.”