Remarks delivered by Artemis Joukowsky III, December 12, 2005, at a ceremony in honor of the selection of his grandparents, Waitstill and Martha Sharp, as Righteous Among the Nations, Wellesley, Mass.

This first public celebration of the legacy of my grandparents, Waitstill and Martha Sharp, gives me and my family great pleasure. It marks the beginning of the American public — and, indeed, the world — learning about not only the faith and courage that led these two extraordinary people to repeatedly face the Nazi menace in Europe, but because their deeds will be forever memorialized in the Museum and Garden of the Yad Vashem, their legacy will be available to inspire future generations.

If you read the Boston Globe this morning, you will know the basics of the story of their heroism. They were New England Yankees, which meant they were modest people. They never published their memoirs, and they seldom told their story in public. Growing up, their gift to me — and one of the reasons we are here tonight — were the quiet moments alone with them when, after great pleading, they would tell me stories about their work with the Unitarian Service Committee in Europe.

I never heard those stories in public. They were never told with Martha as heroine or with Waitstill as the hero. More often than not it was about an entire network of people, each playing a small but interconnected role, which led to the rescue of brave children, brave women, and brave men who were endangered because they had dared speak out against evil or simply because they were Jewish.

My grandparents were unlikely heroes: a Unitarian minister and his wife, a trained social worker, with young children. However, they responded to a call from the American Unitarian Association, which had trouble finding a minister willing to go to Czechoslovakia in 1939 to assist the Unitarian church in Prague, which was being flooded with anti-Nazi dissidents and Jews fleeing Germany and Austria. According to the historical records, they had difficulty identifying anyone willing to go. Many ministers after the hard years of the Depression finally had secure jobs, others didn’t want to leave their families, and still others read about and knew of the dangers enveloping pre-World War II Europe.

Allow me to set a little of the scene. The time between world wars in the United States was a time of disillusion and difficulty for religious liberals. The progressive voices of both Unitarians and Universalists were needed in an era characterized by isolation and intolerance—the “red scare” led to strikers being accused of inciting revolution; miscarriages of justice for immigrants and people of color were the rule rather than an exception; a surge in lynchings by the Ku Klux Klan was accompanied by the overt anti-Semitism of Father Charles Coughlin’s radio broadcasts; the Supreme Court even reversed hard-fought victories of child labor laws.

It was from this milieu that my grandparents departed for Prague, armed only with their faith, determination, and a small amount of money that had been raised to support the newly formed Commission for Service in Czechoslovakia.

They had been in Prague for less than a month when the Nazis invaded, and my grandparents didn’t leave. Even when their office was closed and their furniture thrown into the streets, they didn’t leave. They regarded every life as precious—as they helped obtain travel documents, got people released from prison, secured commitments of employment or acceptance into universities necessary to emigrate, and finally helped people get visas for safer destinations.

When they did leave, it was only a day before the Gestapo intended to arrest Martha Sharp. Seeing the Nazi goons who sat in the front pew on Sundays, they tried to convince their dear friend and outspoken host in Prague, the Rev. Norbert Capek, to leave, but he insisted that he had to remain with his people. He was arrested, tried, and sent to Dachau, where he would perish in 1942.

This was not an adventure. The danger was real and surrounded their every move. They completed their six-month mission and returned to the embrace of their congregation and their two young children: my mother, Martha, who was only two years old when they left and my uncle Hastings, who was only six at the time.

They returned to Wellesley Hills in August of 1939, and in May of 1940, the president of the American Unitarian Association would call upon them again, saying, “We are calling the first meeting [of the newly formed Unitarian Service Committee] for Friday, May 16, and I most earnestly hope that the first act of the committee — after making Robert Dexter the executive director — will be to invite you and Martha to go to France as our ambassadors extraordinary. Then you will have to face a momentous decision. My personal hope is that you will decide to go. There just aren’t words to express my feeling of admiration and deep respect for what you two people have done and for what you are. My dream for the USC centers on you, and it is a very big dream.”

They did face that momentous decision, more momentous because what they were facing was not an abstraction but the very real evil the Nazis represented.

And they more than fulfilled Dexter’s dream for USC.

You’ll hear more about their exploits throughout the evening, so I’m going to spend just a moment discussing their legacy. Their legacy is scattered around the world in all of the countries to which they helped people escape; there are generations of them like Rosemarie Feigl, from whom you’ll hear in a few moments, who would not be alive today if it weren’t for my grandparents.

However, there is another important legacy of my grandparents in that the organization which they helped found—the Unitarian Service Committee, now the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee—carries on their work today in many parts of the world. On the back of the brochure in your seats you can see their mission statement: The Unitarian Universalist Service Committee advances human rights and social justice around the world, partnering with those who confront unjust power structures and mobilizing to challenge oppressive policies. It has been an honor for me and my family to be reconnected to the work of my grandparents through the organization they helped found more than six decades ago.

It has been several years since my brother Micha and I embarked upon this journey to lift the veil of time and distance from the deeds of Martha and Waitstill Sharp. I want to express my gratitude to my mother and father for supporting us through this long journey and for the patience and support of my family as well. Little did Micha and I know how it would transform our own lives. Now that Martha and Waitstill Sharp have been recognized as Righteous Among the Nations their story belongs to people everywhere, and we hope it will help transform other lives, too.

As we celebrate our grandparents’ faith and courage today, we must all ask ourselves, how will our grandchildren celebrate ours tomorrow?

Let the recognition of their heroism stand as a call to action. Let us ask ourselves, “Who are the Righteous Among the Nations today? Who will take risks on behalf of unknown others now? We cannot all take physical risks, but who will take the risk of speaking out? Who will take the risk of bearing witness to the inhumanity of this era?”