Yad Vashem recognizes first American woman

By Mary Korr

PROVIDENCE — Eva Esther Rosemarie Feigl was 14 when she arrived in New York on the SS Excambion, a refugee from Nazi-infested Europe. “Dec. 23, 1940 was a day I will never forget,” she said.

Her escape from Marseilles — over the Pyrenees, to Spain, and then Lisbon, and finally to America — was organized by the late Martha Sharp. In June 2006, Yad Vashem will recognize her as “Righteous Among the Nations.” She is the first American woman to receive this honor.

Feigl spoke at a tribute to her rescuer held Nov. 14 at Brown Hillel. “I proudly stand up before you as one of the children Mrs. Sharp saved,” Feigl, 79, said. “Even as a child, I knew she helped us because she was a fine human being.”

She said six of the nine Jewish children who came over with her are still living, including “the Diamant triplets from Vienna.”

Rabbi Serena Eisenberg, executive director at Hillel, said Sharp became known as the “guardian angel of European children.” She rescued thousands.

Sharp was a 1926 graduate of Brown. She then trained as a social worker in Hull House in Chicago, a program of Northwestern University.

Sharp’s daughter, Martha Sharp Joukowsky, is a professor emerita at Brown.

She said her mother was “noble, brave and without pretense.”

1939

Sharp and her then husband, the late Rev. Waitstill Sharp, a Unitarian minister, first went to Europe in February 1939. They went on a church service mission — he led a congregation in Wellesley Hills, Mass. —  to help refugees flooding into Prague after the Nazi government annexed part of Czechoslovakia.

Yad Vashem has also recognized him  as “Righteous Among the Nations.”

They are only the second and third Americans to be recognized; their names will be inscribed in June on the Wall of Honor in the Garden of Remembrance at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

While in Prague, the Rev. Sharp organized an underground escape route for refugees fleeing Hitler’s regime to what were then considered safer countries. He deposited funds for their use in various English, French and Swiss banks. It was used by Jewish intellectuals, writers, political dissidents and union organizers contacted by the Sharps from a list they had been given before leaving the United States.

In March, the Nazis took over Prague and ordered all foreign refugee assistance offices closed. Mrs. Sharp’s office was vandalized,  and her files rifled through. After the war, she found out the Gestapo had come for her the day after she left the country.

When the Sharps accepted a second mission, this time to Lisbon and Marseilles, in 1940, their greatest pain was in leaving their two children, ages 2 and 6, again. In a letter to her son Hastings, she wrote: “Here in France children do not have enough food or milk…the children are cold and sick…I must give up seeing you until your birthday — and what a celebration it will be…”

Coincidentally, the event at Brown was held on Hastings Sharp’s 65th birthday.

“And what a celebration this is,” Sharp’s daughter said.

Sharp’s grandson, Artemis Joukowsky, and Keene State College filmmakers are shooting a documentary on his grandmother. It is expected to air on PBS this summer.

At the reception, another grandson, Misha Joukowsky, said his grandmother “would march in her high heels right into the internment camps and ask to see the commandant,” he said. “She never gave up.”

Jane Joukowsky, who married into the family, remembered meeting the matriarch of the family. “Her first words to me were: ‘What have you done to save the world today?’ ”