MetroWest Daily News
Peace Abbey honors Holocaust rescuers
By Jon Brodkin/ Daily News Staff
Sunday, May 14, 2006

SHERBORN -- A Wellesley couple that traveled to Europe during World War II to rescue Holocaust victims was honored posthumously yesterday by the Peace Abbey, which added the couple to its Pacifist Memorial.    

Martha and Waitstill Sharp are credited with saving hundreds, perhaps thousands of Jews and other Holocaust victims when they traveled to Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1939, and then to Portugal during a second trip in 1940.     

They are also being honored this year by Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust museum, which is awarding them the title "Righteous Among the Nations." The designation has been earned by nearly 21,000 non-Jews to who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.     

Now their names will be listed in the Peace Abbey's Pacifist Memorial alongside Mohandas Gandhi, Anne Frank, Jesus Christ, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon and many others.    

"Not only is the family honored, but the family is also very committed to speaking out against genocide today, what's going on in Darfur, what's going on in the world," said Artemis Joukowsky, the Sharps' grandson and a Sherborn resident.     

The couple's daughter, Martha Joukowsky, was born in 1936 and said she was just 2 years old when her parents first went to Europe. Later, her parents came home with refugees who fled Hitler's Europe.    

 "We always had refugees in the house," said Joukowsky, who lives in Providence, R.I. "We had tuberculosis on the third floor and whatever....I can remember having to carry soup up attic stairs. The one thing we knew about TB is they have to be kept away from everybody."     

The Peace Abbey was planning to display the Sharps' plaque at the foot of a Gandhi statue, but rain forced the ceremony inside. Because of a typo on the plaque in the word "Nazism" it will not be displayed permanently until another is made.     

Each plaque includes a quote from the person honored. The Peace Abbey quotes Martha Sharp reflecting on her and her husband's arrival in Prague on Feb. 23, 1939, just before the Nazis stormed the city.     

"We realized that we were living at the front lines against Nazism," it reads. "We had never felt such an urge to act before it was too late -- to serve these brave people, to help them save their world and our own."