Garden of Righteous
April 22 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Honoring Waitstill and Martha Sharp from the United States
Please join us as we honor Waitstill and Martha Sharp from the United States. This year we will welcome their grandson, Artemis Joukowsky III, to tell the story of his grandparents’ courageous and dangerous missions to Europe in 1939 and 1940 to save Jews and other refugees.
Waitstill Sharp was a minister in the Unitarian Church in Wellesley, Mass., and his wife Martha, a noted social worker. In January 1939, the Sharps accepted an invitation from the American Unitarian Association, associated with the Unitarian Church, to travel to Czechoslovakia to help provide relief to people trying to escape Nazi persecution. They left their two small children in the care of close friends in the congregation and on February 4, 1939, set sail for Europe. Less than a month after the Sharps arrived, the Nazis invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia. What began as an operation to distribute food and provide aid to refugees soon turned into a rescue mission. Over two dangerous years Waitstill and Martha Sharp helped to save hundreds of Jews, refugees, and dissidents escape the expanding Nazi threat in Europe.
The story of the Sharps’ World War II heroism was little known outside their own circle until their grandson, Artemis Joukowsky, began sifting through thousands of documents across Europe and the United States and tracked down refugees whom his grandparents had rescued.
In 2006, after both of their deaths, Martha and Waitstill Sharp were the second and third Americans to be designated as “Righteous Among the Nations,” a title granted by Yad Vashem to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.
Watch the PBS re-broadcast of the documentary film, Defying the Nazis: The Sharps’ War, on April 13. The film, co-directed by Artemis Joukowsky III and legendary filmmaker Ken Burns, premiered in 2016, along with a companion book of the same name. Learn more about the film at: defyingthenazis.org.