Waitstill Sharp

Early life and education

Sharp was born in Boston on May 1, 1902, son of Grace Hastings and naturalist, author, and professor Dallas Lore Sharp. Through his mother, he is a descendant of Thomas Hastings, who came from the East Anglia region of England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634.

Sharp graduated from Boston University with an undergraduate degree in Economics and English in 1924, from Harvard Law School with a J.D. in 1926, and with an M.A. from Harvard University in 1931.

He was united in marriage by his father on June 13, 1928 in Rye, New Hampshire to Martha Ingham Dickiein holy matrimony. Martha was the daughter of James Ingham and Alice Whalen, both immigrants from England who settled in Rhode Island.

Career

While in his third year of law school he got to know Eugene Shippen, National Director of Religious Education for the American Unitarian Association (AUA), and minister of Second Church in Boston, and later became part-time director of religious education at Second Church. A social worker involved with local internationalist and peace groups, Martha Ingham Dickie, would become his spouse in 1928, and remain his strong ministry partner in his outreach and rescue work in Europe during the Second World War.

Several years later, in 1933 he was ordained a Unitarian minister, and he took the pulpit of a small church in Meadville, Pennsylvania, in 1933. In April 1936, he was appointed pastor at the Unitarian Church of Wellesley Hills in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

World War II rescue work

The Sharps were recruited by Reverend Everett Baker of the American Unitarian Association to accept a posting in Czechoslovakia, as representatives of a new program, initiated by Robert Dexter, to help endangered refugees. He administered relief to hundreds of endangered Jews and other refugees in Prague, with his wife Martha, beginning in 1939.

In the following year, Waitstill and Martha traveled to southern Europe to continue a relief and rescue program for endangered refugees as representatives of the newly formed Unitarian Service Committee. While visiting southern France, Waitstill worked closely with the World YMCA to help Czech servicemen to escape from Vichy France. He also forged a collaboration with Varian Fry to look after Fry's refugee clients in Lisbon. In this capacity, Martha and Waitstill personally escorted the novelist Lion Feuchtwanger from Marseille, France, on his journey to America.

Honors

On 9 September 2005, Martha and Waitstill Sharp were named by Yad Vashem as Righteous among the Nations, the second and third Americans so honored (the first being Varian Fry).

Legacy

An educational curriculum including the Sharps is featured at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The only scholarly book to describe the World War II work of the Sharps, which includes significant information of the context of their work among other relief workers, is a work by Susan Elisabeth Subak, Rescue and Flight, published in 2010.

In popular culture

A Ken Burns documentary film, Defying the Nazis: The Sharps' War, that chronicled the efforts of Waitstill and Martha Sharp, was co-directed by Burns and their grandson, Artemis A.W. Joukowsky, III, of Sherborn, Massachusetts, co-produced by Burns, Joukowsky, and Matthew Justus, and edited by Erik Angra, with the support of PBS (including the WETA station), the Unitarian Universalist community, several well-known foundations, and many individuals.

Personal life

They had two children, Waitstill Hastings, Jr. born in November 1931 and Martha Content born in September 1936. The couple separated after World War II, and were divorced in 1954. He remarried on June 24, 1955 in Chicago, Illinois to Monica Clark. He died in Greenfield, Massachusetts on February 25, 1983.