U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, September 14, 2006

I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul's history
Through corridors of light where the hours are suns
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit clothed from head to foot in song…
What is precious is never to forget...

These are the opening lines of a poem by Stephen Spender, the British man of letters.

So often when we hear the exhortation, "Never forget!", it is the victims of atrocities whose fates are being invoked. But today, with the addition of the names of Martha and Waitstill Sharp to the "Wall of Rescuers," it is two people whose "lips...told of the Spirit clothed from head to foot in sing" that we would have the world remember...and the faith that inspired them to take risks on behalf of unknown others...and the courage that led them to face the Nazis not once, but twice...and a kind of almost incomprehensible determination they exhibited that most of us mortals can only dream of.

The plaque we install today has only 200 words on it, only 200 words in which to tell their story. The documentary short produced by the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, which we will see in a few moments, has only twenty-minutes to make their heroism clear. So it is fitting that the museum is adding to its collection the 8-9,000 pages of documentary evidence that Larry Benequist and Bill Sullivan, the makers of the film, have gathered from attics, from dusty store rooms in Czechoslovakia and France, from carefully preserved Gestapo archives in Berlin, and from collections of personal letters. And fitting that the museum has acquired the hours of interviews with Martha and Waitstill which Ghanda Difiglia taped for UUSC while they were still alive. The museum will no doubt also want to preserve the hours of recollections of people who were rescued by the Sharps, people like Rosemarie Feigl, and of people who knew them like Yehuda Bacon – recollections which Deborah Shaffer is filming. All of these fragments of the story will be preserved here so that scholars, historians, and authors can study them and make more accessible the obligation to remember.

I think continually of those who were truly great...

Today's dedication means that future visitors to this museum will be continually reminded of two of who were truly great – Martha and Waitstill Sharp.

And part of what made them great were the moral choices they made. How many of us would set out from our comfortable homes, leaving our small children behind, to travel to an unstable part of the world where we would match wits with the Gestapo and lead journeys across the Pyrenees.

And yet the fact that they did that means that any one else could have done it if they had decided to, that it was not beyond the bounds of the human imagination. If even one person in a generation makes a moral choice, it leaves the rest of us with less excuse for our ethical torpidity. William Lloyd Garrison founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1831 when the slaveholder Andrew Jackson was president. That removes any hope Jackson or his fellow slaveholders might have had to claim ignorance as a defense for holding other human beings in chains. And Elizabeth Cady Stanton began the fight for women’s equality in 1840 when women were excluded from the world antislavery convention, so after 1840 what was Garrison’s excuse for remaining a misogynist?

But of course not every one of us accurately reads the tides of history. I often ask myself what moral myopia I am subject to at this very moment, something that twenty or forty years from now will seem like unimaginable shortsightedness. And that is what strikes me as most remarkable about the Sharps. They went to Europe in February 1939. February 1939 was less than three months after the Kristallnacht. It was before the Nazis required Jews in Germany to relinquish their silver and gold. It was before the occupation of Czechoslovakia. It was before the German "Pact of Steel" with Italy. It was before the SS St. Louis set out on its fateful voyage to Cuba and before its 900 Jewish refugee passengers were returned to Europe. It was before Germany attacked Poland, before Britain declared war on Germany. It was before the Warsaw Ghetto. And it was before Auschwitz, before "Auschwitz" became the name of anything other than a pretty little town in Poland. It was, in other words, before most of the rest of the world awoke to the true extent of the Nazi peril and the full measure of its threat to the Jewish people. It was in fact five whole years before Adolf Eichmann would offer to trade the lives of one million Jews for 10,000 trucks and the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Lord Moyne, would reject the offer, saying, "But where shall I put them? Whatever would I do with one million Jews?" The Sharps, their sponsors and their colleagues, were gauging the tides and gauging them with astonishing perspicuity. It is easy to feel small and blind in comparison to that.

But that is not the lesson that I suspect the Sharps would have us draw. We honor the Sharps as heroes who saved hundreds of lives. But I am willing to bet that Waitstill and Martha knew that though they and their colleagues, the Dexters and Charles Joy, were the ones risking their lives on the streets of Prague and in the mountains of Spain, they were dependent upon a much larger circle of friends and acquaintances who made their heroism possible. The people who cared for their children. The members of their congregation in Wellesley Hills who maintained their church while they were gone. The supporters of the Unitarian denomination that financed their cause. And, yes, the tailors who darned their clothes, the shoemakers who soled their shoes, the pilot who steered their ship and the housekeeper who kept their rooms.

That, you see, is why we have institutions. Because not every one of us can set out for war-torn Europe. Not every one of us can visit the refugee camps of Darfur or the U.S. detention camps in Iraq or Afghanistan or God knows where else. But every one of us can be a part of the lives of those who do. Every one of us can be a part of institutions that make such heroism possible and in that measure can claim a degree of kinship with the Righteous Among the Nations. That Waitstill and Martha’s work resulted not just in the immediate rescue of hundreds of lives, but in the creation of an institution that came to be known as the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, an institution that multiplied those rescues a thousand fold in the years that followed, is testimony that, acute as their reading of history surely was, they knew that they were but a part of a much larger circle of heroes and heroines who made their enterprise possible and without whom their legacy and the values it embodied could never be sustained across the decades.

Spender’s poem ends:

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields
See how these names are feted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white clouds
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life
Who wore at their hearts the fire's center.
Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their honor.

Thank you for helping us honor two people who wore at their hearts the fire's center and left the vivid air signed with their own honor.

And now, thanks to the perseverance of Martha and Waitstill’s grandsons, Artemis and Misha Joukowsky, we can celebrate the fact that the Sharps' rescue of others has itself been rescued from the fog of history. I'm pleased on behalf of UUSC to present a glimpse of that rescue in this film: Heroes of the Spirit.