ORDINARY HEROES
First Religious Society, Carlisle
12 November, 2006
Charlie Clements, President,
Unitarian Universalist Service Committee
I want to thank Dr. Timothy Jensen and the Social Action Committee for the opportunity to be in this pulpit this morning. It is my privilege to be with you today. I bring you greetings from the Rev. Diane Miller, whose pulpit I shared three weeks ago in Walnut Creek, CA.
It is an honor for me to lead the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee today and to be part of a faith-tradition that has such a distinguished social justice legacy. In the 1980s I was the Director of Human Rights Education at UUSC and led a number of Congressional fact-finding tours to Central America. Fact-finding missions are actually the roots of the Service Committee. In 1937 and 1938, the American Unitarian Association sent fact-finding missions to to Europe. Their reports about what was happening to Jews and anyone who opposed the Nazis were unusual in an America that was xenophobic, anti-immigrant, and for the most part anti-Semitic. The largest Unitarian congregation in the world – Unitaria as it was called was then 3800 strong – in Prague, Czechoslovakia was a haven of safety for anyone who fled the escalating violence directed against Jews in Austria and Germany. Several weeks ago in New York city we filmed an 86-year old Unitarian minister, who was an 18-year Jewish boy at the time, who told me how Norbert Capek, the minister of Unitaria, after the Nazis occupied Prague immediately issued him all the papers to certify that he was a member in good standing of the church. Norbert Capek, the beloved minister of Unitaria was also the reason that Martha and Waitstill Sharp, a Unitarian minister and his wife from Wellesley Hills traveled to Czechoslovakia in February 1939, a month ahead of the Nazis. After Hitler was given a part of Czechoslovakia known as the Sudentenland, tens of thousands of refugees spent that winter in tents and Capek urged the American Unitarian Association to send Americans whose presence he thought would be important.
It was not only Jews who were endangered, but anyone who had spoken out or opposed the Nazis and the first to be targeted were Communists, Socialists, and Social Democrats. Martha’s and Waitstill’s diaries indicated that by the end of the day 600 people clustered in fear outside their office in March 1939 when the Nazis goose-stepped into Prague. Martha was trained as a social worker and organized 3500-case files, most of which were burned to keep them out of the hands of the Gestapo. Several hundred case files survived…perhaps left in Paris, Geneva, or London where they made six journeys trying to help their desperate clients get employment necessary to immigrate at that time. Martha’s handwriting on some of them give insights into their plight…”my husband is a lawyer, who because he was Jewish lost his job six month ago. After four months, we were evicted from our apartment, because we could no longer pay the rent. We spent the winter in a tent and our children are hungry and ill.”
One can only imagine the fear of one group of 35 clients fortunate whom she helped to get visas to England and accompanied as she crossed Germany with them by train. When the Nazis closed their offices and threw their furniture into the streets, the Sharps did not leave, but finally convinced by their friends that the Gestapo was closing in, they left in August 1940.
Barely six months back into the arms of their children and embraced by their congregation, they were asked to return to Europe and continue their relief and rescue work by the newly formed Unitarian Service Committee.
In June last summer when Martha and Waitstill were honored in Israel as ‘Righteous among the Nations by the Yad Vashem authority in Israel, a retired Israeli general, Avner Shalev, is the chairman of the Yad Vashem authority, pointed out during the moving ceremony that when he as a soldier was called upon to go to war, he did so with the full support of his nation, he did so with the massive logistical support that the military always needs, he did so knowing that there were soldiers on either side of him committed to protect him in that fierce loyalty that develops in the brotherhood of arms. He acknowledged that Martha’s and Waitstill’s journey must have been very lonely and required amazing courage as hundreds of thousands of refugees fled the dangers of the war, the Sharps traveled to the war to face the Nazis once more…armed only with their faith and determination.
I wish there were more time to tell some of their story, but I am pleased that after the service today I’ll be able to show a short documentary about their work and some of the people that they rescued. I will leave a copy of the film called “Heroes of the Spirit,” so those of you unable to stay today may have the chance to see it. We will never know the precise numbers, but between the case files that survived Czechoslovakia, the records kept at the Lisbon office of USC, which functioned throughout the war and was staffed by other Unitarians who followed in the footsteps after the couple returned to Wellesley Hills, as well as the refugee records on file at headquarters on 25 Beacon Street, it appears that the Sharps and their colleagues assisted at least two-thousand men, women, and children to escape the Nazi terror.
The Sharps were not only battling the Nazis. Sadly they were battling our own State Department, which after the U.S. entry into the war considered Jewish refugees from Germany as ‘fifth column’ spies in the U.S. In the first five years after Hitler’s ascent to power an estimated 150,000 refugees from Germany emigrated. Between Pearl Harbor and the end of World War II, only 21,000 refugees were allowed into the U.S., which was less than ten percent of the quota for those years. The Sharps and their Unitarian colleagues would struggle mightily against their own government’s stonewalling as they understood each delay would be paid for in human lives. And, indeed, most of the Jewish refugees in France perished in the Holocaust.
The work of the Unitarian Service Committee between 1939 and 1945 was always divided between emigration services and humanitarian services. As Waitstill said years later, “If we were to serve even a fraction of the most acute human needs, we were duty bound to carry on two lines of work: first emergency relief measures with refugees; second emigration case work with those individuals who could escape in time to save their lives and souls in a foreign land.” These words have as much resonance in our world today as they did in his almost seventy years ago.
When I hear the hymn “Come Sing a Song with Me,” I always think of Martha and Waitstill particularly the refrain “I’ll bring you hope where hope is hard to find.” That’s precisely what they were doing. The famous Jewish author Franz Werfel was one of the early Nazi-dissidents to have his citizenship stripped by Hitler. He had fled first from Austria to Czechoslovakia and the to France. He and has wife were hiding in the town of Lourdes, afraid to travel because they were on the Gestapo’s “Surrender on Demand” list, meaning any French official that encountered them was to detain them and turn them over to German authorities. Martha was asked to seek them out and she encouraged them to escape France especially since Roosevelt had approved a new category of visas for accomplished intellectuals and artists. The Werfels, whose wife Alma was Mahler’s widow and carried original manuscripts of the composer over the escape root in the Pyrenees, were smuggled out of France into Spain and then Portugal. Werfel fulfilled the promise he had made to Bernedette in Lourdes that he would write a book about her, if she would help him survive…it became a broadway play, a movie, and the best-selling book “Song of Bernadette.”
Our logo originated in this period, when the Unitarian Service Committee adopted the flaming chalice as its official seal on Apri1 1st, 1941. It was commissioned from Hans Deutsch, a Jewish artist from Paris and refugee, who worked in the Lisbon office of USC for several months before immigrating to the United States. When the Unitarian and Universalist denominations merged in 1961, the flaming chalice became the symbol of Unitarian Universalism. To those who first saw it in the squalid internment camps of France, it always stood for hope in the midst of a great darkness.
Deutsch wrote to the Reverend Charles Joy,
"I am not what you may actually call a believer. But if your kind of life is the profession of your faith---as it is, I feel sure---then religion, ceasing to be magic and mysticism, becomes confession to practical philosophy and---what is more- --to active, really useful social work. And this religion--- with or without a heading---is one to which even a `godless' fellow like myself can say wholeheartedly, Yes!"
Surely that symbol when seen in the refugee camps filled with Nazi and Vichy officials sent a message of hope where hope was hard to find.
Most of the people honored by Yad Vashem as “Righteous” acted as individuals. We know from their correspondence that Waitstill and Martha were aware that although were they were in the streets of Prague and in the mountains of Spain, they depended upon many others, known and unknown, who made their heroism possible. And that’s where the retired Israeli general got it wrong at the Yad Vashem ceremony, because he did not understand they the Sharps were not there as individuals, but they were in Europe representing people of the Unitarian faith. The Sharps left their children in care of others. A minister volunteered to tend to their congregation. There were ordinary Unitarians around the country who sent $1, $2, and $3 to support their rescue efforts. The Sharps were assisted by secretaries in both Czechoslovakia and France, who traveled voluntarily from the United States to help with the overwhelming paperwork. Unitarian ministers repeatedly urged their congregants from their pulpits to fill out affidavits, so refugees like Rosemarie and her parents would have sponsors and could get precious visas.
It is easy to feel small in comparison to Waitstill and Martha Sharp, who were gauging the tides of history with astonishing accuracy. We are all required to scan the moral horizon where dark clouds may be gathering. We as a nation did not, nor did the United Nations, read them well when they were forming over Rwanda a decade ago. That delay like the delays of the U.S. State Department granting visas in Europe in the beginning of World War II cost lives, perhaps hundreds of thousands.
As individuals we cannot possibly know and respond every place where troublesome clouds are gathering.
That is why we have institutions. Because not every one of us can do what the Sharps did. Not every one of us can travel to Guantanamo or Afghanistan or places like Iraq where life and death are unpredictable. But every one of us can be a part of the lives of those who do. Every one of us can be a part of institutions that make such heroism possible and in that measure can claim a degree of kinship with the ‘righteous among the nations.’ Waitstill’s and Martha’s work resulted not just in the immediate rescue of hundreds of lives, but in the creation of an institution that came to be known as the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, an institution that multiplied those rescues a thousand fold in the decades.
When Martha Sharp Joukowsky, the daughter of Waitstill and Martha, accepted the medal at Yad Vashem on behalf of her parents, she pointed out that ‘my mother, trained as a social worker in Hull House in Chicago, and my father, a Sunday school teacher inspired to become a minister and lawyer, would be embarrassed to be called heroes. They were modest and ordinary people, who responded to the suffering and needs around them…as she said they would have expected everyone to do in a similar situation. They never viewed what they did as extraordinary and I like to think of them as ‘ordinary heroes.”
There are ordinary heros in our midst today. I know how you respond to the needs around you, whether is helping immigrants in Lowell or helping to feed hungry families in Carlisle. Thank you. That’s exactly how Martha and Waitstill viewed their work.
Martha Sharp Joukowsky, the daughter of the Sharps, noted in Israel that her parents, if alive, would once again be bearers of moral alarm about dark clouds of genocide in Darfur today. She held up the medal of the ‘Righteous among the Nations’ and said, “Let this celebration about my parents stand as a call to action. They saw the worth and dignity of every person and acted on that belief. For God’s sake, let us do the same.”
And this morning I ask you, “Who are the Righteous among the Nations” today? If we cannot all take physical risks, surely we can take the risk of speaking out. In November of last year Bill Sinkford and I traveled to refugee camps in Chad where refugees from Darfur had just arrived with nothing but the clothes of their backs having fled the ethnic cleansing in Sudan. We heard gut wrenching stories of pillage, rape,and murder; we promised to bear witness to their tragedy, which is on-going -- TODAY. Dr. Atema Elcai, our Director of Programs, recently returned from Darfur and talked about stepping across bodies as children are still dying of disease and malnutrition in the refugee camps. Just as Waitstill Sharp is reported to have declared war against Hitler from his pulpit in Wellesley Hills, I am declaring that we must stop this genocide. Will you stand with us to bear witness against the genocide in Darfur?
These are questions that we must each answer in our own way.
You see these are the historical currents in which are lives are immersed. We can respond in many ways – civil disobedience can be one end of the spectrum and I know it was several years ago for Ernie Huber. In between is all that we do as activists and at the other end of the spectrum perhaps merely discussing an issue with your neighbor, colleague, or even with someone with whom you disagree.
Surely though being aware and informed is a default position that we should all have. It is the least we must do when our lives are too busy, when we are too worn out, when we are simply unable to do more than what is already on our overfull plate, because being informed gives us the possibility of a moral response. As busy as our lives are there are things we can do – we can get in the habit of calling the White House and urging this White House to play a leadership role in ending the genocide. We can put a Save Darfur sign in our yards or see if the congregation would support a banner outside the church. We can call our representatives or senators and I proud to say that our Massachusetts delegation is providing leadership on genocide. I can assure you members of Congress don’t often get thanked for doing the right thing. So don’t hesitate to call them and tell them you’re proud that they are doing the right thing.
I am honored to lead the institution that carries on the legacy of the Reverend Waitstill and Martha Sharp. We can do what we do because of your support. I thank you all who are members of the Service Committee. Again I am grateful for the invitation to share my thoughts with you this morning.
Benediction
I would like to leave you with some words from the Talmud. Words that often help me get through the day.
DO NOT BE DAUNTED BY THE ENORMITY OF THE WORLD’S GRIEF.
WALK HUMBLY NOW.
LOVE MERCY NOW.
DO JUSTLY NOW.
YOU ARE NOT OBLIGATED TO COMPLETE THE WORK, BUT NEITHER ARE YOU FREE TO ABANDON IT.
AMEN.
Reading: On Darfur
by Elie Wiesel
The reading today is excerpted from remarks delivered almost two years ago at the Darfur Emergency Summit in NYC.
Sudan has become today’s world capital of human pain, suffering and agony. There, one part of the population has been – and still is – subjected by another part, the dominating part, to humiliation, hunger and death. For a while, the so-called civilized world knew about it and preferred to look away. Now people know. And so they have no excuse for their passivity bordering on indifference…
… Now its horrors are shown on television screens and on front pages of influential publications. Congressional delegations, special envoys and humanitarian agencies send back or bring back horror-filled reports from the scene. A million human beings, young and old, have been uprooted, deported. Scores of women are being raped every day, children are dying of disease hunger and violence…
How can a citizen of a free country not pay attention? How can anyone, anywhere not feel outraged? How can a person, whether religious or secular, not be moved by compassion? And above all, how can anyone who remembers remain silent?
As a Jew who does not compare any event to the Holocaust, I feel concerned and challenged by the Sudanese tragedy. We must be involved. How can we reproach the indifference of non-Jews to Jewish suffering if we remain indifferent to another people’s plight?
…“Lo taamod al dam réakha” is a Biblical commandment. “Thou shall not stand idly by the shedding of the blood of thy fellow man.” The word is not “akhikha,” thy Jewish brother, but “réakha,” thy fellow human being, be he or she Jewish or not. All are entitled to live with dignity and hope. All are entitled to live without fear and pain.
Not to assist Sudan’s victims today would for me be unworthy of what I have learned from my teachers, my ancestors and my friends, namely that God alone is alone: His creatures must not be.