Trouble instantly erupted. National feelings were running high, and when the British passengers saw the name of the hotel, they refused to enter until they knew whether it was owned by Italians, the Italian government, or other Italian interests. “They said they would rather sleep on the street than in a hotel owned by their enemy,” Martha recalled. The doorman spoke a little French, so the group was able to make him understand that they had to see the manager, who turned out to be a PR man par excellence. He swore up and down that “d’Italia” was just a name like “Britannia.” The British were appeased, and after registering, they got to bed shortly after midnight.
Next day, they took a train into Lisbon to present themselves to US ambassador Herbert Claiborne Pell Jr. “We were beguiled,” said Martha, “by the waving palms, the tropical climate, gaily painted houses, climbing vines and flowers everywhere. From the train windows we could see the bronzed bathers on the beaches, and their gay umbrellas. War seemed very far away”
The spell was shattered once they reached the US embassy, which appeared to be under siege. People were standing in long, slow-moving lines outside nearly every door. The letter that the Sharps carried from Cordell Hull had the intended effect on Ambassador Pell, who greeted them warmly, then led them to his office to brief them on the refugee situation. “Fourteen hundred are registered for ship space,” Pell reported, “four hundred for the Pan Am clipper. The quota is filled until mid-August. The International Police of Portugal are only allowing people with guaranteed rooms in Lisbon to travel south of Oporto.
“In the north, they are sleeping in barns, schools or even on the ground. The English wine merchants have opened shelters in Oporto. We have so many Americans here in Lisbon trying to get home that we are seriously considering hiring a loft and filling it with cots to give them some place to sleep.”1
With plans to open the USC office in Paris indefinitely suspended by the Nazi occupation, Martha and Waitstill had left Boston with AUA instructions to deploy themselves and their limited resources—about ten thousand dollars in bank accounts back in the States—as they saw fit, starting, they had understood, where the Red Cross left off. One of the first familiar faces they saw in Lisbon was that of Malcolm Davis, who had recently arrived from Paris, en route to Switzerland where he was to report on conditions in France to the League of Red Cross Societies, of which Davis was now directeur-adjoint. When the Sharps told him of their open-ended mandate, he didn’t hesitate. Their old friend and mentor told them that the children of Vichy France were in desperate need of milk. Babies were dying. Local cows traditionally were not raised for their milk, Davis said, and what little there was of it was poorly handled, often not pasteurized, and largely unsuitable for consumption by children, especially very young ones.
Most of the French dairy herds, he explained, were in the north. As the Germans consolidated their hold on these regions—principally Brittany and Normandy—the cows were being slaughtered to feed the soldiers. As a consequence, milk shipments to the south had all but ceased. Canned condensed milk was impossible to find. The Vichy government was advising French mothers not to wean their babies but to continue nursing them indefinitely. “There is no milk in France,” Davis told the Sharps over dinner at his hotel, the Avenida Palace. “If you have any funds available, I would advise you to put them into powdered and condensed milk and ship it to the children as fast as you can.”
Several factors complicated the picture. One was the British naval blockade of France. Among the foodstuffs on the British Ministry of Economic Warfare’s restricted list were potatoes, which could be used for distilling alcohol, and milk, because its main protein, casein, was a component in the manufacture of plastic. Also, at the US government’s request, the Red Cross had agreed not to distribute food or clothing anywhere the Germans might appropriate the shipments for their own use.
Morris Troper of the Joint Distribution Committee, another acquaintance from their Czech mission, told them the same story the next night. “He felt that bringing milk to babies in France, where it was so desperately needed, would be the best possible initiation of our mission,” Martha wrote. Troper also asked Martha to visit some of the internment camps in France and report on them.
They received similar advice from the French ambassador to Lisbon, Amé-Leroy, a staunch antifascist who so far had refused to yield his portfolio despite Vichy’s repeated insistence that he do so at once. Madame Manoëlle Amé-Leroy was president of the Portuguese auxiliary of the French Red Cross. At his official residence, Amé-Leroy explained to Waitstill and Martha that the SS McKeesport, a Red Cross transport carrying milk for the children of the south of France, was stuck in Bilbao, Spain, indefinitely delayed by red tape. Moreover, under its agreement with the US government, the Red Cross could not move to distribute the milk into the region without ironclad assurances from the Germans that they would not confiscate it. Such promises so far were not forthcoming.
As the Sharps already knew, it was no longer possible in Europe to act simply out of charity, goodwill, or human kindness.
Madame Amé-Leroy also showed them a letter she’d received from Madame Saint-René Taillandier, one of the presidents of the French Red Cross, who lived in Tarascon, a fishing town on the Rhone, northwest of Marseille, not far from Nimes.
“Tarascon is filled with thousands of refugees,” Madame Taillandier wrote.
They sleep on straw, crowded together under any shelter. Many children and even babies among them are wounded by shrapnel and machine gun bullets. Some of these are without fathers or mothers. It is difficult to get food, even for ourselves. There is no milk for the babies, who are dying as a result. Everyone here applies to me, thinking that because I am President of the Red Cross I am accompanied by a Treasury. Alas, I have nothing to show them but my medal as president.2
The daily commute into Lisbon from Estoril was scenic but time-consuming, so the Sharps found a suite of rooms at the Hotel Metropole in the Portuguese capital, which also would serve as the USC office. As they were gathering their belongings at the Hotel d’Italia, Waitstill and Martha learned from their fellow Clipper passengers why the mysterious “man from Nirosta” had been so distressed, then vanished. It turned out that he was a US citizen who was suspected of working as a Nazi spy. Bad weather had only been a pretext for delivering him into British custody. When detained and questioned in Bermuda, he was found to be carrying certain sensitive documents.
Then still another old acquaintance from their first commission, Dr. Clayton Williams, minister of the American Church in Paris, arrived in Lisbon, bringing with him a carload of Americans eager to head for home. Williams’s vehicle was a Matford, produced in France in the 1930s as a joint venture of the Mathis car manufacturing company and Ford, hence the name. When Waitstill and Martha told him they were planning to go to France, the reverend offered them the Matford, which had an international registration. However, the car’s carnet de passage was set to expire on July 17. In order for the Matford to reenter France, they needed to beat that deadline.
When Williams agreed with everyone else that sustenance was the refugees’ greatest immediate need in the south of France, particularly milk for the babies, no longer was there a question: the Sharps’ first relief mission in France would be to find milk to feed the children.
The likeliest source was the Swiss-based Nestlé Company, which had available supplies of powdered milk, condensed milk, and Nestogen, a fortified baby formula. Madame Amé-Leroy set up a meeting between Waitstill and Jean Lanz, representative of the Nestlé Company in Portugal. She also arranged with the Portuguese and Spanish railroad companies for the train’s free passage to the French border.3
Nestlé made Waitstill a very good bargain: twelve tons of condensed and powdered milk, as well as Nestogen, for about 141,000 Portuguese escudos, or approximately $5,450.
Reverend Williams also passed along the news that Don and Helen Lowrie were now refugees of a sort themselves. Dislodged from Paris by th
e German invasion, they had moved south as part of the mass migration and settled in the town of Pau, not far from the Spanish border, where they’d rented a four-room apartment at 2 Rue Darrichon. Don Lowrie was hard at work, organizing relief for demobilized Czech soldiers. He also was head of a loose federation of relief agencies headquartered in Nimes.
The Sharps were eager to renew their collaboration and friendship with the Lowries. They sent cables to them in Pau and to Malcolm Davis, who was by now in Geneva, informing them that they were assembling a milk shipment for France. Don Lowrie cabled back that he would meet them at the Hotel Belvedere in the Mediterranean sea-coast village of Cerbère, just north of the Spanish border. Another wire went to Bob Dexter in Boston, explaining the reasons they had decided on the milk shipment and requesting five thousand dollars to cover the costs. It seemed a straightforward arrangement but would prove anything but.
In order to drive Clayton Williams’s Matford from Lisbon into France, Martha and Waitstill would need international driver’s licenses, which took them the next morning to the Royal Automobile Club of Portugal, the local issuing agency. Martha remembered standing before a Portuguese clerk at the information window, unable to make herself understood in English and then in French.
At that moment, a beautiful, expensively clothed American came over and introduced herself as Orlena Scoville. She said she was a Connecticut native, was now an expat residing in Portugal, and that she had overheard Martha. Scoville was very curious to know why a pair of Yankees were in Lisbon, heading for France. “Everybody else is going in the opposite direction,” she said. “Why do you want to drive to France?”
There was a long and a short answer to that question. The Sharps settled on a brief personal history and then explained about the milk program. Scoville listened attentively, then said, “I’d like to help you.”
She rose, walked over to a door marked “Private,” and knocked. To the secretary who answered she explained, in Portuguese, that she’d like to introduce two American friends to the director. He soon appeared—“all smiles,” Martha remembered him—and invited the three of them into his office. There, Scoville introduced the Sharps and explained that they needed driver’s licenses for an upcoming trip to France. A secretary was summoned to bring the necessary forms, and it was arranged for them to take their driving tests at four that afternoon.
In a single gesture, Orlena Scoville had lopped hours of frustrating idleness off Waitstill and Martha’s day. She told them that she wanted to do much more. A dinner date was agreed upon for the following evening. Scoville’s car would come at about five, early enough for them to enjoy the lovely fifteen-mile drive to her quinta, or estate, near the village of Azeitao, in full daylight. “I want to discuss your work thoroughly,” she said. “I believe there are ways I can help.”
Lisbon’s tumultuous traffic made Martha’s road test an adventure. “I was so unnerved when I got my turn behind the wheel that I couldn’t seem to remember anything,” she later wrote. “The inspector spoke neither French nor English and simply gestured what he wanted me to do. Watching his directions, the weaving cars, the jay-walking pedestrians, translating the signs from Portuguese and the fear of failure made me break out in a cold sweat. I did everything wrong. The Matford stalled several times in a line of traffic when I had to jam on the brakes to avoid a collision. I drove the wrong way down a one-way street. All the cars blew their horns and the pedestrians gestured that I must be crazy. When the ordeal was over, I knew I had flunked.”
Through it all, her instructor had remained calm and patient, a remarkable feat of self-control. Even more amazing to Martha, when they returned to the Royal Automobile Club, the friendly director was waiting with her brand-new international driver’s license, all filled out and official, signed and stamped, with her photo affixed. There was never a chance that Madame Scoville’s friends would not receive their licenses. The test simply was a formality.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Helping Hands
The following afternoon, Scoville’s driver came for the Sharps at five as planned. Martha was charmed by the drive out to Azeitao, down dirt roads, past farms and vineyards. The Scoville estate was visible from quite a distance, “great walls with Portuguese-type round towers,” as Martha described it, “convoluted like enormous, upside-down water lilies at the corners.”
The driver finally reached the quinta and turned into an imposing entrance, framed with imposing wrought iron gates. He swept the car around an oval planting and stopped at an enormous, hand-carved entrance door. A liveried servant dressed in the ubiquitous Portuguese striped vest appeared and gestured for us to enter a magnificent hall. Orlena came forward to welcome us.
She led us up to the main salon, a great vaulted room, where another servant in livery took our wraps. Then she took us outside through French doors to an enormous covered veranda. An enormous tiled design of four great rivers gushing from huge urns in the arms of giant goddesses covered the two walls. The open side of the veranda faced terraced gardens with formal flower beds and groves of orange and lemon trees that seemed to stretch forever.
At the far end, about a quarter-mile away, was a huge swimming pool and bathhouse that faced the quinta. Orlena was pleased by our astonished delight. When she offered to take us down for a closer inspection we agreed enthusiastically. Down through the sweet-smelling citrus groves we went through the dusk to the bathhouse, where we examined still more tile art. Each room featured illustrated stories from the Bible! Then we returned as the lights came on inside the great house to have drinks and appetizers on the veranda as the setting sun bathed the terraces in a rosy glow.
The sumptuous dinner that followed turned out to be one of the few substantial meals Martha would enjoy for the next four months, when she would lose twenty-five pounds. As a parting gift, Scoville gave the Sharps twenty thousand French francs and several liters of gasoline for their trip to France.
It was now July. With the Matford’s carnet de passage due to expire on July 17, the Sharps made plans to leave Lisbon no later than July 15. There was much to accomplish. As word got around Lisbon’s refugee community that two American relief workers were in town they were besieged with pleas for help. As before in Prague, Waitstill and Martha began taking names and information.
Their food mission also expanded when Ambassador Amé-Leroy and Madame Amé-Leroy announced that they wished to sponsor a second train car, bound for the care of Madame Taillandier in Tarascon, carrying clothing for demobilized French soldiers, as well as food, including an abundant amount of very nutritious Portuguese sardines. They proposed that their car be attached to the Sharps’ at least until they reached the French border.
As these preparations moved ahead, Malcolm Davis called to ask a personal favor. Davis said his friends, Ferdinand Rieser, former director of the famous Schauspielhaus theater in Zurich, and his wife, Marianne, whose brother was the Czech-born, antifascist writer Franz Werfel, were stuck in northern Portugal, unable to enter Lisbon without a confirmed hotel reservation. Since the Sharps seemed to have the right contacts, would they be on the lookout for a room for the Riesers?
A week later, Martha and Waitstill secured a reservation for the Riesers at the Metropole and learned in the process from Marianne Rieser that Franzie, as she called her brother, had gone underground somewhere in the south of France with his extraordinary wife, Alma, whom he had married in 1929. Beautiful, vivacious, and an accomplished musician and composer, Alma had been married to the composer Gustav Mahler and then to the architect Walter Gropius before marrying Werfel.
Werfel, a poet and playwright as well as a novelist, was best known in the United States for two plays, The Goat Song and Juarez and Maximilian, both of which were produced on Broadway. Because he was Jewish and an ardent enemy of the Reich, the Nazis had destroyed all but three of Werfel’s works in the infamous book-burning of 1933. He and Alma had subsequently fled the Anschluss in his adopted city, Vienna, for Paris, where he�
��d suffered a heart attack.
From Paris, Franz and Alma had made their way to the south of France. They had lived since 1938 in Sanary-sur-Mer, a haven for anti-Nazi artists and thinkers, about thirty miles from Marseille. His sister said that Werfel recently had been unreachable, and she was worried. She reported that her brother had not answered multiple telegrams from producers in the United States eager to stage what was then his best-known novel, The 40 Days of Musa Dagh.
The Riesers finally received word from the Werfels a few days later. Marianne learned from Franzie that with the fall of Paris to the Germans on June 14, he and Alma had decided to flee through Spain for Portugal and ultimately the United States. They made it as far as Hendaye, France, on the Spanish border before being forced back. As they fled, Franz Werfel lost most of his manuscripts, some that were originals of which he had no copies. He would only ever recover a few of them.
Franzie and Alma now were hiding in the shrine city of Lourdes, not far from Pau, inexplicably living under the name of Mahler.
“Marianne made me promise to look for them,” Martha remembered. “We gave her the Lowries’ address to use until we knew where we were going to be. She said, ‘Franzie is so impractical! He can write great books, but he can’t even get on a train without someone boosting him from behind. Please, Martha, boost!’”
All portents for the milk mission to France were positive until just before Martha and Waitstill’s departure, when they received a wire from Robert Dexter:
CABLING FIVE THOUSAND, CABLE IMMEDIATELY ASSURANCES MILK WILL REACH STARVING CHILDREN STOP WITHHOLD FURTHER COMMITMENT PENDING ADVICE WHY NOT RED CROSS RESPONSIBILITY.
Defying the Nazis Page 13
