The Couple Who Fought Genocide

Artemis Joukowsky says his grandfather had such a "Sunday school outlook" that he initially hesitated to break laws, but within a short time he was changing money on the black market and bribing officials.

On March 15, 1939, the day the Germans took Prague, Martha guided an anti-Nazi leader to asylum at the British Embassy. A few days later, Waitstill arranged for a member of the Czech parliament to be smuggled out of a hospital morgue in a body bag.

The Nazis soon closed the Sharps' office and threw their furniture into the street. But the couple stayed another five months and got out just ahead of the Gestapo.

On their second foray to Europe, in mid-1940, they worked in Marseilles and helped smuggle people across the Pyrenees into neutral Portugal. One of their close collaborators was Varian Fry, a 32-year-old New York editor who devoted himself to saving European intellectuals and was the first U.S. citizen placed by Yad Vashem on its "Righteous Among the Nations" honor roll, which includes Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg.

Since the Sharps burned most of their records to keep them out of Nazi hands, no one knows how many lives they saved. Artemis Joukowsky estimates they helped 3,500 refugees in Prague, though it is unclear how many survived. In Marseilles, they pioneered routes that hundreds used to escape.

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The Sharps were honored at Yad Vashem in June. The growing recognition of their heroism has helped their descendants come to terms with the decisions they made.

"Telling the story has gone a long way in healing some of the wounds of the past. My mother and uncle discovering what my parents did has helped them to forgive," Artemis Joukowsky said. When he began compiling evidence about the Sharps, he added, his mother "would never talk about this stuff. Now it's a story she's willing to tell."

Looking back, Martha Sharp Joukowsky said, "The values I hold for myself may not be the same that I held my parents to. I think that sacrifice is something they felt they had to do. I don't make any value judgments. I can't. . . . Is home important? Yes, but it is more important that ideas are put into action. They felt the world was in a crisis, they had to rise to the occasion. Nobody else was."