LACONIA — Thanks to Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning movie, the story of Oskar Schindler may be better known than that of Waitstill and Martha Sharp, but the Sharps’ actions in World War II-era Europe preceded Schindler, and their story, too, was made into a film.
The showing of that film, “Defying the Nazis: The Sharps’ War,” was the centerpiece of Saturday’s Yom HaShoah, the Holocaust Remembrance Day, and was presented by the Congregational Church of Laconia, Temple B’nai Israel, the Unitarian Universalist Society of Laconia and the Laconia Human Rights Committee “to promote the importance of speaking out against injustice.”
While the genocide of European Jews by the Nazis began in 1941 and lasted until 1945 — claiming six million innocent lives — the imprisonment, persecution and murder of opponents of those whom the Nazis considered their enemies began soon after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933.
In March 1939, the Nazis seized control of Czechoslovakia. The Sharps were already there, as part of the American Unitarian Association’s relief effort known as the Commission for Service in Czechoslovakia.
The Sharps helped people escape from the country, now the Czech Republic and Slovakia, into other parts of Europe. The couple returned to the United States after World War II formally began on Sept. 1, 1939 when the Nazis invaded Poland, but they returned to Europe in May 1940, and were based in Lisbon, Portugal.
By the time they returned to the U.S. in late 1941, the Sharps, propelled by their faith and a moral courage, had saved thousands of people from the Nazis, which was why their story was so apropos for Saturday’s Yom HaShoah observance at the Congregational Church of Laconia, said Patrick Wood, who is president of the Laconia Human Relations Committee.
The committee, Wood explained, has an “obligation” to ensure that hatred, racism, and bigotry have no place in the City on the Lakes which, in recent years, however, has been blighted with hateful graffiti at the municipal Opechee Park; the former State School property; and at the headquarters of the Belknap County Democratic Committee. No arrests have been made in those incidents.
Larry Benaquist, an emeritus professor of film studies and a founder the Holocaust and Genocide Studies major at Keene State College, said he and a colleague began studying the Sharps decades ago and that their work was produced into a movie in 2016 by Ken Burns and Artemis Joukowsky III, who is a grandson of the Sharps.
Benaquist noted that the Sharps were the first American non-Jews to be honored by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Israel.
“They weren’t Europeans, they (the Sharps) were Americans,” said Benaquist, adding that Waitstill and Martha came from two different worlds.
Waitstill, whose words in “Defying the Nazis: The Sharps’ War,” were voiced by actor Tom Hanks, was a “Boston Brahmin” who graduated from Harvard Law School but chose to instead become a Unitarian minister, said Benaquist.
He married Martha, who was from a poor family in Providence, Rhode Island, said Benaquist, but who earned a degree from Pembroke College at Brown University, and the couple was united in love and their commitment to social justice.
Before the Sharps agreed to leave Wellesley Hills, Mass., to go to Czechoslovakia, 17 other people had turned down the invitation to be part of what Waitstill in the film called “the first intervention against evil” begun by the Unitarian church.
Later in the film, Waitstill, who spent several summers in the 1930s and 1940s with his wife and family in Newbury on Lake Sunapee, told an audience that he was declaring “war” on the Nazis.
His wife, seeing the mistreatment of a Jewish person in Prague by the Nazis, said that “All my life, I hated unfairness.”
Co-founders of the Unitarian Service Committee, the Sharps, according to the website of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, divorced in 1954. They both remarried. He died in 1983 while she died in 1999.
The website said that in 1963, Yad Vashem “established the title of Righteous Among the Nations to honor non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust,” with the Sharps receiving that recognition in 2006.
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