8TH GRADER DISCOVERS GRANDPARENTS WERE RIGHTEOUS GENTILES

Righteous Gentiles’ grandson revived the story of their World War II exploits
By Steve Lipman (New York Jewish Week/JTA)

WELLESLEY HILLS, Mass., June 11 (JTA) — Eighth-grader Artemis Joukowsky’s assignment was ordinary: interview a relative. But there was nothing ordinary about “Mommy Mommy.” That was Joukowsky’s nickname for his grandmother, Martha Sharp, whom he decided to interview. Outfitted with a notepad and tape recorder, he sat down with her, expecting to hear stories about serving as a minister’s wife, about raising a family, about divorcing and remarrying.

Instead, Joukowsky heard a story of cloak-and-dagger intrigue, of escaping from Gestapo agents and spiriting refugees away from the Nazis. Martha Sharp, her grandson learned that day three decades ago, had worked with her first husband, the Rev. Waitstill Sharp, a Unitarian minister, to bring endangered Jews and gentiles to safety during the Third Reich. Sharp and his wife, an experienced social worker, had left their safe lives — and their two young children — to rescue strangers in occupied Czechoslovakia and Vichy France.

The number of people they saved is at least several hundred; it may be thousands. No one knows, because the Sharps destroyed their documents the day before the Nazis came to Prague.