Roy Exum
A quite amazing documentary will debut on your PBS television channel tonight and, while the public has yet to view it, I can already tell you it will be met with rave reviews and great applause. It is the story of a somewhat meek Unitarian minister and his homely wife who, just before World War II, left their two infant children behind with friends in order to enter “The Kingdom of Hell.”
Some 40 years ago, an eighth-grader in Boston -- Artemis Joukowsky – needed to do an important paper for school and his mother, as if to share a secret, suggested he talk to his grandmother. So young Artemis sat with his grandmother Sharp and soon she shared a riveting story with the boy. It is now called, “Defying the Nazis: The Sharps’ War,” and the documentary, 9 p.m. EDT, will leave you just as spellbound as it did an eighth-grader 40 years ago.
Joukowsky, whose muscular dystrophy may confine him to a wheelchair but hardly dampens his spirit (he’s a Paralympic table-tennis player and a successful entrepreneur), has since written a book on his famous grandparents, who smuggled hundreds if not thousands of European Jews to freedom. For several years he tried to produce a documentary, as well, but was falling flat until he asked an old college classmate if he might take a look.
The “classmate” at the small Hampshire College was none other than Ken Burns, the world-famed documentary expert who has turned subjects like the Civil War, baseball, jazz, national parks and other topics into Emmys and Oscars. Burns, as you might suspect, gets hit on a lot for “advice” and fully expected to turn down his friend Artemis.
“I agreed to look at his film, fully expecting that a few minutes in I’d decide that the project wasn’t for me,” he wrote in the foreword to Joukowsky’s book on the Sharps’, also titled “Defying the Nazis,” but, no. “What I saw turned out to be an extraordinary diamond in the rough. The Sharps saw there was a job to be done and, quite simply, did it.”
All Burns needed was to add his magic. For instance, the voice of Tom Hanks is what you will hear as that of pastor Waitstill Sharpe and actress Marina Goldman speaks as Martha, Joukowsky’s grandmother. But the pace is Burns’ best craft, as this except from the website, “The Jewish Week,” explains:
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“There is also a haunting musical score, and dramatic re-enactments. One of them puts into sharp relief the danger the Sharps faced in their rescue mission. As the re-enactment unfolds, it’s a snowy night in 1939 Prague, a few months before the German Army marches into the Czech capital, and a young woman enters a taxicab. Goldman narrates the thoughts of the passenger, Martha Sharp.
“Martha’s mission this night is to bring a “Mr. X” to safety. Sitting in the taxi’s back seat, she notices a man sitting next to the driver. Gestapo, she suspects; her work, along with that of her husband, is known to the Nazis’ secret service. She darts from the vehicle a few blocks from her rendezvous point with Mr. X to see if she is being trailed. She is.
“A violin score heightens the tension. Young Martha, terrified, breathing hard, presses herself against a wall in a dark alley until the Gestapo agent goes away and she is able to walk up the stairs of an apartment building and meet Mr. X — whose life she and Waitstill are able to save.”
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How the amazing story actually became a brilliant part of American history is equally amazing. In January of 1939, Rev. Sharp got a telephone call from Rev. Everett Baker, vice president of the American Unitarian Association, asking if he and his wife might volunteer to provide help to the Jewish refugees trying to escape the crazed Nazis.
It was explained if either were caught it would mean prison, torture and even death because the church would be helpless to come to their aid. The United States public, at the time, had no idea of the Nazi horrors. Waitstill did not hesitate but when he said yes, he learned 17 other ministers had turned the church down.
It was a clandestine mission where the pastor would sell money on the black market, pay bribes, blackmail guards and probably break some of the Ten Commandments. But as you will see tonight at 9 p.m. on PBS, the Sharps’ heroics became of such legend the two are among only five Americans who have been honored as “Righteous Gentiles Among the Nations” at the Holocaust shrine, Yad Vashem in Israel
The mission was expected to last a couple of months but, so successful was “the first intervention against evil by the (Unitarian) denomination to be started immediately overseas,” that the Sharps spent over two terrifying years where they were nearly apprehended several times by the Germans.
“I’m a Christian. I found (the Sharps) incredibly compelling,” Burns told The Jewish Week. “These people left their comfortable lives to go into the ‘Kingdom of Hell.’ The Sharps’ story is one of courage and love and what it means to embrace others in a time of tremendous need.”
Burns was recently quoted in Newsweek about tonight’s movie. “There’s always going to be Waitstill and Martha Sharps, but that means there’s also going to be Hitlers,” he said, explaining that the viewers may ask “the ultimate human questions”: “Could we do this? Could I do this? Could I sacrifice for another life?”
“These are all the wonderful questions that, when human beings are helpless, as they are (right now) in numbers second only to the time of the Second World War, it ought to be brought home to us.”
royexum@aol.com