The Couple Who Fought Genocide

"They clamped a balloon filled with ether over my mouth, and I remember struggling against that balloon," Sharp Joukowsky said. "My doll was next to me, and I remember thinking, 'Why are they doing this to me and not to my doll?' "

Sharp Joukowsky credits Marion Niles and a local Unitarian doctor with saving her life. Her parents were not around for the illness or the long convalescence, much of it in Aunt Marion's garden.

"Did I resent my parents for leaving? I don't know, I don't think so," she said. "I had parishioners taking care of me who were loving and kind, who did everything they could to see that I had the requisite clothes, I had a bicycle. I was actually very privileged."

Sharp Joukowsky thinks the emotional toll was greater on her older brother, Hastings.

"All those years, our father never threw a ball to him," she said.

Hastings Sharp, 75, who lives near his sister in Providence, has this to say about his parents: "They were incredible people, but we had to fend for ourselves."

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In his grandparents' defense, Artemis Joukowsky says there was no single moment when they were able to make a grand moral calculation. Such equations may be possible in hindsight. But in real time, the Sharps were caught up in "a growing series of moral imperatives they could not possibly foresee," he said.

When they set out for Europe in January 1939, Germany had seized the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia and refugees were flowing across the continent. The American Unitarian Association asked numerous ministers to go to Europe before Waitstill, 37, and his social-worker wife, Martha, 33, agreed.

Prague was home to one of the world's largest Unitarian congregations, which was helping refugees of all stripes -- Jews, trade unionists, political dissenters.

The Sharps arrived to lend a hand in February. A month later, the city was occupied.

"Once they saw what was happening, they became obsessed with the refugees and could not bring themselves to leave," said author Susan Subak, who is writing a book about the Unitarian rescue effort.