Ella Adler, whom Martha found in a hospital, also had a brother, named Ladislav, fighting with the British. She was nearly penniless and had been so distraught that she’d slit her wrists. Martha paid her hospital bill and arranged a weekly stipend for her after her release. She also offered to cover Adler’s fare to England, if it were possible for her to reunite with her brother. If not, Vochoc promised to find her useful, remunerative employment of some sort.
“There were many variations of these cases,” Martha wrote.
Most of them could be helped temporarily by a small sum of money and some time spent assisting them with their problems.
Elizabeth Steiner came to me in happy despair. Her husband had just been demobilized. His only clothing was a pair of army pants—not even a shirt to his name! Yet they’d just learned that they both had been granted U.S. visas. Their relatives in Chicago, according to letters they showed us, promised to pay all their expenses for the trip, as well as give them a place to stay until Mr. Steiner found work.
The Steiners’ only problem is that they had no money whatsoever; none for food or clothes or even to get to Marseille to pick up their visas, much less pay for steamship tickets to the U.S.
We joyously gave Mrs. Steiner the money to cover everything. They agreed to return the sum to Vladimir Vochoc when they reached their family in Chicago, thus allowing him to use the money to help another family in need.
In another instance, Martha remembered, “Just before leaving the camp I stopped to talk to a woman carrying her infant child in her arms. The baby was sickly yellow, the mother emaciated. When I asked her what was wrong with the baby, she burst into tears and said, ‘I can’t nurse her! I have no milk. I have no money to buy food for her. We live on scraps from garbage and my husband is lost somewhere in France. My baby is dying in my arms!’ I took mother and child to the army hospital, arranged for medical care and a regular stipend for food and clothing and rent. I also took her husband’s name, and would give it to Don and Vladimir, to see if they could find him.”
On July 27, Martha and Waitstill parted with Lowrie in Marseille and drove to Tarascon to see the aged Madame Saint-René Taillandier, where she awaited word of the Red Cross shipment to which the Amé-Leroys in Lisbon had entrusted her. “Madame’s maid greeted us with the sad news that Madame was ill and could not see us in the salon,” Martha remembered. “However, she would receive us in her bedroom.”
No French queen at her levee could have been more elegant. This indomitable aristocrat, frail and elderly, wearing a lace boudoir cap over her white curls with matching peignoir, and supported by numerous lacy pillows, received us with great dignity. She held out her hand to be kissed. We bowed, introduced ourselves and felt as if we should be kneeling.
Formalities over, her first question was, “Where’s my wagon?”
We gave her letters from the Amé-LeRoys, the bill of lading for “her” wagon and a list of its contents. As she read, tiny tears of joy welled up in her eyes. She looked up and explained to us how a simple pair of work pants would bring dignity to demobilized French soldiers, most of whom were still wearing their tattered old uniforms and blue armbands that denoted their demobilization. These old rags were demoralizing reminders that France had fallen in defeat.
We explained to Madame that the Red Cross car and our car, filled with milk for the babies of Unoccupied France, were attached and stuck somewhere in transit from Lisbon. Waitstill was headed back for Portugal the next day, and [he] would search for the cars on his way. Our question for her was once the cars finally were released, where did Madame wish hers sent?
“Montpellier!” she answered vigorously, then added that the Sharps should advise a Colonel Cros of the French Red Cross in Montpellier of the shipment date. Waitstill agreed to do so and promised to wire her the moment he knew anything firm about arrival dates.
Before they left, the maid served coffee, which was brought on a silver tray with an antique silver pot, sugar bowl, creamer, and fine china, “worthy of a museum,” Martha thought. After coffee, they rose, kissed her hand again, and bade her a speedy recovery.
Martha knew that Madame must have been saving both coffee and sugar for months. As she had so often before in Czechoslovakia and here in France, Martha marveled at the human ability to live “as usual” in the midst of chaos.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Dividing Forces
Waitstill departed for Lisbon from Perpignan on Monday, July 29, 1940. As they had in Czechoslovakia, he and Martha would divide their responsibilities. She continued onto Pau with Donald Lowrie to organize the milk distribution, while Waitstill returned to Lisbon to check on the progress of the milk train, begin the immigration work, and help get the Czech soldiers out of Agde.
“I miss you dreadfully already,” Martha wrote him two days later. “It seems a shame to be separated when all these new things are happening, but I suppose it multiplies the family experience and is more efficient. With all my love to the dearest boy in the world, Martha.”
Martha and Don Lowrie set out together in the Matford. Lowrie didn’t drive, so with Martha at the wheel they headed for the Lowries’ apartment at 2 Rue Darrichon in Pau. Ordinarily a community of about forty thousand, Pau had swollen to twice that population or more with refugees and demobilized soldiers. Accommodations at the Lowries’ apartment were cramped. During the day, all four rooms were used as offices. At night, Don and Helen shared the premises with Irina Okunieff, his secretary, who also had fled Paris, plus Irina’s husband, Alexis; their son, Nicholas; and Irina’s mother, Madame Stepanova. To Martha’s deep delight and gratitude, the Lowries found her a room of her own, with a bath, nearby.
Helen Lowrie happily surprised her by volunteering to help with the complicated work of figuring out how many babies there were to feed and how best to get the milk to them. She would prove an able and amiable compatriot for the next four months and an important part of the USC enterprise.
The necessary first steps were to visit the surrounding towns and villages of the Basses-Pyrenees in the Lowries’ Peugeot. Martha and Helen Lowrie met and conferred with local officials, as well as medical and health workers, especially midwives. Now that most doctors and nurses were away at war, midwives were often the only locals with any medical training at all.
Word of the mission spread quickly. In the village of Lembeye, the women were greeted by the town crier, who played a flute, banged on a drum, and loudly announced the arrival of the American “Humanitarian Service Committee.” Martha decided not to correct him. It is not such a bad thing, she thought, for “Unitarian” and “humanitarian” to be confused.
On one of those forays, Martha and Helen reached the town of Nay, about ten miles from Lourdes. Martha took advantage of its proximity to search for Franz and Alma Werfel, as she had promised Werfel’s sister, Marianne Rieser, she would.
The Werfels indeed were in Lourdes, famous for a series of miraculous apparitions of the Virgin Mary in 1858. The Virgin is said to have appeared fully eighteen times at a local grotto before a fourteen-year-old French girl named Bernadette Soubirous, who reported that Mary spoke to her. The site became one of Christendom’s most popular pilgrimages. Waters from the grotto are believed to have supernatural healing powers.
“I was quite surprised to see Franz Werfel,” Martha said. The nervous, disoriented Werfel, forty-nine, was “a short plump man with sort of a lot of wild grey hair,” she recalled. “He was wearing a sweater, and his pockets were stuffed with telegrams.”
Martha asked, “Why didn’t you answer all those telegrams?”
“I couldn’t decide what I should do,” Werfel replied.
Martha found Frau Werfel, sixty, to be “an ample perky blonde” with an extraordinary thirst for crème de menthe, as well as another cordial, Benedictine, which she consumed from huge containers called carboys.
The Werfels registered at their Lourdes hotel as Herr and Frau Gustav Mahler, an odd choice if their intent was to avoi
d attention. Martha explained to Werfel that he and Alma needed to go to Marseille, where she would try to get them visas. Martha thought that he seemed confused; she wasn’t sure he was taking anything in.
Then Werfel turned to her and asked, “Have you seen the grotto?” No, she hadn’t.
“Come, I’ll show it to you.” he said.
So we walked out arm in arm. Mrs. Werfel and Helen followed us, and we walked down to see the grotto, the place where Bernadette had her vision. Hanging around the statue of the Virgin were little arms and legs made of gold or silver, according to the wealth of the person who’d received the miraculous healing power of the Virgin.
Werfel recounted Bernadette’s story to Martha, then purchased for her a cupful of grotto water from a nearby vendor.
“Drink and anything that’s wrong with you will be cured,” he said.
I went over every part of my body. I couldn’t think of anything that was wrong, but I drank the water. I never tasted anything so terrible in my life. Then we watched people being brought before the statue of the Virgin in the grotto, on stretchers and in wheelchairs, all of them praying with the most amazing expression of faith and hope. Others were crawling on their knees at the steps of the church, hoping and praying for the indulgence of the Lady for them, and the cessation of their illness.
I then looked at Werfel’s face and I realized that he believed. I knew he was Jewish. “You believe this really happened, don’t you?” I asked.
“Oh, of course,” he answered. “I believe in miracles, don’t you?”
In less than two years, Werfel was to become well known in the United States for his book on the miracle at Lourdes, Song of Bernadette, which became a popular film the following year. In the preface he wrote, “I vowed that if I escaped from this desperate situation and reached the saving shores of America, I would put off all other tasks and sing, as best I could, the song of Bernadette.” He sent Martha a signed copy of the first edition.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Emergency Rescue Committee
As Martha continued preparations for distributing the shipment of milk, Waitstill made two stops on his way back to Lisbon, meeting with US and British military attachés in Barcelona and Madrid to share some ideas that he and Don Lowrie had worked out with Vohoc for rescuing the Czech troops at Agde. The soldiers had been slipping out in small groups on French fishing boats to Spain, from where they had to find their way to Portugal and then Britain. Some had escaped by foot over the Pyrenees. To exfiltrate them in greater numbers, Lowrie had proposed two plans. The first would be to commission about a dozen French fishing boats that would each take twenty men to meet up with a British destroyer. The second, more ambitious plan would put six hundred soldiers on a Yugoslav ship, then in the harbor at Marseille, for transport to North Africa. Because Yugoslavia was neutral at that time, the Czechs could reasonably expect that the inspection of a ship from a neutral country would be perfunctory. The harbor inspectors agreed to the deal provided Lowrie could get authorization from Vichy. After weeks of negotiation, he was able to get authorization, but within hours of the ship’s planned departure, the Petain government changed the rules. Henceforth, ships leaving Mediterranean ports would have to be inspected by French, German, and Italian officials.
While the trickle of escapes continued—about four hundred of the soldiers eventually made their way out—a significant number of the rest melted into the surrounding countryside to work abandoned farms. Some of them trained members of the French resistance in the use of firearms.1 It is not known how many survived the war.
As he retraced the milk shipment’s route from Lisbon, Waitstill discovered that the two railroad cars had been halted at the Portuguese-Spanish border because the shipment Madame Amé-LeRoy had facilitated lacked a full and detailed manifest, as the law demanded. Back in Lisbon, when (with not a small amount of annoyance) he gave the news to the embarrassed woman, she immediately set about correcting that oversight.
It was time to set up the Unitarian Service Committee refugee office, and after three weeks away, Waitstill found a mountain of cable traffic awaiting his attention. A selection of the messages from individuals and organizations such as the USC, AmRelCzech, and the Joint Distribution Committee suggests the breadth of problems and issues that the would-be émigrés faced and aid workers such as Waitstill tried to solve:
KINDLY LOOK FOR LOTTE BRAUN WITH SON EIGHT YEAR.
UNITARIAN SERVICE COMMITTEE REQUEST DELIVERY FIFTY DOLLARS GEORGE POPPER PALAIS DU FOIRE LYON OR AMERICAN CONSUL LYON AND ARRANGE TRANSIT LISBON AFFIDAVITS SECURED QUOTA NUMBER UP.
WATCH FOR OTTO BOSTROM SWEDISH PASSPORT FURTHER INFORMATION FOLLOWS DEXTER.
To help with the ever-increasing paperwork, Waitstill hired Ninon Tallon, an actress and a refugee from the south of France. She was the niece of Édouard Herriot, leader of France’s Radical Party, who served three terms as France’s prime minister. Waitstill found her efficient and intelligent.
In the pile of correspondence was a wire from Marion Niles, their friend and a member of the church in Wellesley Hills who was writing to inform them that Martha Content had developed a bad strep infection. Dr. Lyman Richards, the family physician, recommended that Martha Content’s tonsils be removed at once. Waitstill cabled back authorization for Richards to immediately perform the procedure and sent a copy of the correspondence on to Martha. In truth, their daughter also had contracted pneumonia and was in far more serious condition than Waitstill knew. What he did know, however, was that her condition was further indication that a potential war zone was no place for a couple with responsibility for young children. As he later wrote to Frederick May Eliot, only childless people should be considered for future overseas work.
There was, as well, a note from Frank Kingdon, president of the University of Newark. It would profoundly impact Waitstill’s work. Kingdon was executive director of the newly organized Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC). Formed at a June 1940 meeting in New York City’s Commodore Hotel just after the French capitulated to Germany, the ERC proposed to rescue anti-Nazi artists, writers, and political and labor leaders who were trapped in unoccupied France. Erika Mann, daughter of novelist Thomas Mann and wife of poet W. H. Auden, was a founding member. ERC’s sponsors included distinguished public figures such as journalist Dorothy Thompson, writer Elmer Davis, Commonweal editor George Shuster, and three college presidents besides Kingdon.
The committee’s first steps were to solicit names of the imperiled in southern France and then compile dossiers that included identifying information, such as occupation, place of origin, and, most important, the individual’s last known address in France. This effort had the strong support of Eleanor Roosevelt, Interior Secretary Ickes, and others in the Roosevelt administration.
Unfortunately, all visa applications for potential rescues required approval of the anti-Semitic, xenophobic Breckinridge Long, an assistant secretary of state whose self-appointed task was to keep Jews and anyone who might, because of nationality, be a Nazi spy or sympathizer, out of the United States.
Kingdon, with whom Martha and Waitstill were acquainted, informed Waitstill that the ERC’s new representative, thirty-two-year-old Varian Fry, would arrive in Lisbon from the United States on August 6 and that the ERC would appreciate any assistance Waitstill could extend him since Fry had no experience in relief work.
Fresh off the Pan Am Clipper from New York, with a list of two hundred people who, Breckinridge Long notwithstanding, had been given emergency visitors’ visas, Fry was much in need of mentoring by seasoned veterans of the work, which would have included members of the Joint Distribution Committee, the Quakers, and HICEM, a Jewish refugee aid organization.
As Waitstill explained in a letter, “For three days I tried to teach Fry the fundamentals of finding people in hiding without exposing them, and how important it was for a refugee worker to keep a low profile. I tried to help Fry work out a plan to find and help each of his intellectuals to escape
. I also gave him introductions to Richard Allen, Hugh Fullerton and Don Lowrie.”
Waitstill told Fry of the milk shipment for the children of Pau.
“Sharp asked me to follow it up, and I agreed,” Fry later wrote. “He gave me letters to the shipping and forwarding agents all along the line and a card making me a delegate pro tem of the Unitarian Service Committee. I was glad to get those credentials: they promised to be useful camouflage to my real activities, more useful by far than my other letters.”2
In addition, Waitstill taught Fry about Spanish and French money regulations and the intricacies of moving cash across international borders. In Spain, Fry would have to declare every cent of foreign exchange that he took into the country and account for it all when he left. It would all be written down in his passport. If he left the country with more foreign exchange than when he had entered, he’d be arrested at the frontier.
The French, Waitstill advised, would confiscate Fry’s money at the border, then reimburse him several weeks later with francs pegged artificially high at forty-three and a half to the dollar. The only solution was to ask the French chargé d’affaires in Lisbon for special permission to take his money into France for relief work.
“I sat up all night that night writing my last reports to New York and making a list of harmless pseudonyms for every one of the refugees on my long list,” Fry wrote. “I left one copy under Sharp’s door and mailed another to New York. The third I folded in a tight wad and put in the little front pocket under the belt of my trousers. Now I could safely cable from France without letting the Gestapo know I was trying to save the men and women it was looking for.”3
On August 20, 1940, five days after he first arrived in Marseille from Lisbon, Fry sent Waitstill a note on Hotel Splendide stationery. The hand-delivered message arrived five days later back in Lisbon. “Dear Sharp,” it read, “I followed the milk through, and am glad to be able to tell you that it crossed the French frontier last week and ought by this time to have reached its destination. I telegraphed Mrs. Lowrie as soon as I was sure both wagons were over the border.”
Defying the Nazis Page 15
