Checking Jews’ IDs in Krakow, Poland, 1941 ‘Saints and Liars’: Stories of U.S. Aid Workers Who Aided Jews During the Holocaust Peace & Security
Long before the United States entered World War II in December 1941, American aid workers were performing a vital mission in Axis-occupied territory, helping Jews escape persecution.
The stories of these people are told in the book Saints and Liars by Deborah Dwork, director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity at the City University of New York Graduate Center. At the presentation, which took place ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Tracy Petersen, manager of the United Nations Holocaust Education Program, interviewed Deborah Dwork at UN Headquarters.
Deborah Dwork: I called my book Saints and Liars because that’s what these people were like. They did amazing things. In fact, they performed miracles. They saved people, helped them find safe haven, or fed them, clothed them, and gave them shelter. At the same time, almost all of them lied. They broke laws and manipulated facts to achieve their goals.
Tracy Petersen: Why Are You Interested in This Topic?
DD: I wanted to tell the story of the Americans who went to Europe when everyone who was worried about their safety was heading in the opposite direction. Their primary mission was to provide humanitarian aid, but they ended up conducting rescue operations at their own risk. I wanted to know who they were and what motivated them.
The story begins in Prague in 1939, before the war began and long before the United States entered it. What motivated Waitstill and Martha Sharp? They were a married couple sent to Czechoslovakia by their Unitarian church. The situation in the country at that time was getting worse and worse – both for political opponents of the Nazi regime and for Jews. And yet the Sharps stayed and began to engage in illegal activities at that time in the hope of saving human lives.
TP: Did the world know what was happening in Czechoslovakia at that time?
ДД: The annexation of the Sudetenland was part of the Munich Pact, an agreement signed by Europe’s greatest leaders that gave Germany a whole chunk of Czechoslovakia without firing a shot. It was the Munich Pact that prompted the Unitarian Church in Boston to say, “We’ve got to do something: The Germans have taken the Sudetenland, people are fleeing to Prague, they need help. They need clothes. They need shelter. They need food and medical care.”
TP: How dangerous was the work of American humanitarian workers in those years?
DD: As Waitstill Sharp said, the Yankees like to skate on thin ice. He ran illegal currency transactions to raise money to pay for rescue missions. If the Nazi regime had found out about this, he would have been imprisoned and possibly tortured at the very least.
Deborah Dwork, author of Saints and Liars.
TP: Why Refugees Tried to Get to Shanghai?
DD: Even before the war, Jews and political dissidents in Germany and Nazi-occupied Austria and Czechoslovakia were desperate to leave Europe for safety. Shanghai was such a place because it did not require a visa. When the war began in September 1939, Shanghai, which had been under Japanese rule since 1937, was already home to some 20,000 refugees.
The U.S. State Department and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) sent Laura Margolis on a mission that included a layover in Shanghai. But the war intervened, and Laura ended up staying in the occupied city. With very limited resources, she helped refugees in need of medical care, food, and shelter. The children needed somewhere to study…
TP: It was a time of incredible horror and anxiety, people were being denied visas… Did the aid workers think about what they were doing? Did they have the feeling that they were helping some people when they should be helping others?
DD: Of course, they couldn’t help but think about it. There were thousands and thousands of people in need of help.
The Unitarian missionaries had certain criteria: first of all, they wanted to save people who would help rebuild democratic institutions after the war. They were mostly men, middle or upper middle class, well educated. That was the idea. But in reality, life had its own dynamics. Marta and Whitestill ended up helping all sorts of people in Prague.
The Quakers (a Protestant Christian movement – editor’s note), on the contrary, had no pre-set principles. They helped everyone who needed help. This was the main difference between the agenda of the Unitarians and the Quakers. They even feuded: the Unitarians claimed that the Quakers had no principles, and the Quakers said that the Unitarians had no principles.
Jews from Carpathian Ruthenia are selected for Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland.
TP: Many stories in your book show that a successful rescue mission often depends on simple luck and timing.
DD: We all know very well to what extent our lives are influenced by unpredictable and irrational events, as well as factors such as luck, passion, sympathy, antipathy… But when we think about the past, we discard these factors. We tend to believe that everything happens for a reason.
Let’s hope that we can learn lessons from those terrible events. Human will, loyalty to principles, initiative – all these are very important, effective things.