Category: United Nations

By Tracey Petersen

26 January 2025 Human Rights

A new book on their work underlines the chaos of the time, and the difficult decisions they had to make, knowing that for every person they saved, many more would be killed.

Saints and Liars, by Debórah Dwork, the Director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity at the City University of New York Graduate Center, tells the stories of rescue workers in five key cities as the situation on the ground grew increasingly dire.

At the launch ahead of the  International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust marked annually on 27 January, Tracey Petersen, the manager of the UN Holocaust Education Outreach Programme, interviewed Debórah Dwork at UN Headquarters, and began by asking her about the book’s title.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length

Debórah Dwork: I called it Saints and Liars because that’s what these people were. They did amazing things, in a non-religious sense. They did miraculous things. They saved people either by helping them to move on, get to sea, find a safe harbour, or by feeding, clothing and sheltering them.

And at the same time, nearly all of them lied. They broke rules and played fast and loose with the truth in order to accomplish their goals.

Tracey Petersen: Why did you write this book?

Debórah Dwork: I wanted to tell the story of Americans who went to Europe when everyone who was worried about danger was trying to go in the opposite direction. Their first idea was relief activities, but their mandate morphed to trying to effect rescue. I wanted to know who they were and what prompted them.

We start in Prague, 1939, before the war was declared and well before the United States entered the war. What prompted Waitstill and Martha Sharp? They were a pair of married Unitarians sent to Czechoslovakia by their church.

The situation grew worse and worse for political opponents of the Nazi regime and for Jews. And yet the Sharps stayed on to help and began to engage in illegal activities in the hope of saving lives.

Tracey Petersen: Did the outside world in general know what was happening in Czechoslovakia at that time?

Debórah Dwork: The loss of the Sudetenland region was part of the Munich Pact, an agreement signed by the major leaders of Europe, who gave away a whole chunk of Czechoslovakia without a single shot being fired.

As you can imagine, this was the stuff of headlines, and it was the Munich Pact which first galvanized the Unitarian leadership in Boston to say “we’ve got to do something: the Germans have taken Sudetenland. Refugees are fleeing into Prague. They need help. They need clothing. They need shelter. They need medical care. They need food”.

Tracey Petersen: How dangerous was the work of these American aid workers?

Debórah Dwork: Waitstill Sharp said that Yankees like to skate on thin ice. Just one of the ways in which his work endangered him was that he did illegal currency transactions, because raising money to pay for the rescue activities was very difficult. But if the regime had learned about this he would have been at least imprisoned and probably tortured.

Tracey Petersen: Why did refugees go to Shanghai and where were they coming from?

Debórah Dwork: Even before the war, Jews and political dissidents in Germany and Nazi-occupied Austria and Czechoslovakia sought desperately to leave Europe and to get to some place of safety.

As it happened, Shanghai was just such a place because no visa was required for them to land there. So, by the time war did break out in January, in September 1939, some 20,000 refugees had collected in Shanghai, which had been under Japanese rule since 1937.

The US State Department and American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) sent Laura Margolis to Shanghai to help them move on to their next destination, but the war intervened, and she ended up staying in a city under occupation with very few resources to help them meet their needs. They needed medical care, food and shelter. The children needed education. Somehow, she had to try to meet the needs of this community that was cut off from the rest of the world

Tracey Petersen: The numbers are staggering. You had women, children, refugees, incredible terror, anxiety, being turned down for visas… did the aid workers reflect on whether they were possibly being swayed by their emotions and maybe helping some people when they should have been helping others? Is there any sense of their turmoil?

Debórah Dwork: Definitely. There were thousands upon thousands of people who needed help. When you wake up in the morning, whose case are you going to attend to? What were the criteria?

The Unitarians did have specific criteria: they wanted to rescue people who would help to reestablish democratic governments after the war was over. Of course, they were mostly male, mostly middle class or upper middle class. Mostly well-educated. That was the idea. But life on the ground had its own dynamic. And in Prague Martha and Waitstill ended up helping all manner of people.

The Quakers, by contrast, had no such calculus. Their goal was to help everyone who required help. This was a sharp and distinct difference between the Unitarians agenda and the Quakers agenda. In fact, they annoyed each other with the Unitarians saying the Quakers had no principles, and the Quakers saying the Unitarians had no principles.

Tracey Petersen: In many ways these stories reveal that a successful rescue is sometimes just a question of luck and timing.

Debórah Dwork: We all know the degree to which the unpredictable and the irrational affect our lives. Luck, timing, fortuitous circumstances, passion, sympathies, antipathies. But when we think about the past, we strip those factors away. We think things happened for a reason. Sometimes they did happen for a reason, but sometimes they happened by accident.

Let’s hope that we can learn from these events and say action is possible, activities are possible, initiative is possible.