11:00 AM EST on Wednesday, February 1, 2006

It is called The Avenue of the Righteous and is a centerpiece at Yad Vashem, Israel's campus-like memorial to the Holocaust in Jerusalem. There are 21,000 olive and carob trees planted there to honor gentiles who rescued Jews from Hitler -- the kind of thing dramatized by Steven Spielberg in Schindler's List.

Until recently, only one tree was planted for an American. The idea of journeying overseas to so dangerous a place was almost unthinkable.

But in 1939, and again in 1940, a woman from Providence and her husband did exactly that.

This summer, at Yad Vashem, the names of Waitstill and Martha Sharp will posthumously be added to those known as "the Righteous among Nations." The Sharps' families, most of whom live in and around Rhode Island, will bear witness.

In 1939, Waitstill Sharp was a Unitarian minister living in Wellesley, Mass., with his Providence-born wife, Martha, and their two young children. The Sharps embraced a commitment to social justice, and in February of that year, made the bold decision to leave their kids in the care of friends and head to the heart of Europe. Their mission was to help the tens of thousands of refugees then gathering in Prague trying to escape Hitler.

The Sharps worked there for months, helping Jews and other targeted people find refuge in safer countries. They traded money and jewels on the black market, bought and forged passports, and helped refugees over borders to safer countries such as England. Although the Nazis had yet to create the death camps, it was known they were jailing, and even killing, people they deemed enemies or undesirables.

In March 1939, a month after the Sharps arrived, Czechoslovakia fell to the Nazis. The Sharps continued their work using Waitstill's cover as a minister with the Unitarian Mission. Martha's papers allowed her to travel back and forth to England, France and elsewhere, and she was known to take a dozen or more refugees with her on those "visits."

On April 15, 1939, Martha went to the Mission's Prague office and found it rifled, the furniture thrown onto the street. The Nazis had begun to close all foreign refugee offices. But the couple stayed on, working out of private homes. When Waitstill was refused reentry into Czechoslovakia after a summer trip to Switzerland, Martha stayed in Prague anyway, working on her own.

Finally, she left the country on Aug. 30, and later learned it was one day before the Gestapo raided a new office she had set up. They were specifically looking to arrest Martha, who by then was known for her boldness at getting around Nazi rules.

Soon after, the Nazis invaded Poland, marking the start of World War II in Europe.

The Sharps came home to Massachusetts and helped launch what's now known as the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, an organization still active in global human-rights issues, and one taking pride today in the recognition the Sharps are receiving.

That group helped send Waitstill and Martha Sharp back to Europe in 1940, this time through Lisbon to Marseilles, France, ruled then by a local puppet government installed by the Nazis. There, for a half a year, the Sharps continued their work of helping refugees escape.

The Sharps had a special interest in saving refugee children, as well as artists and intellectuals. Altogether, they are said by their family to have helped hundreds of people -- maybe even thousands -- gain freedom. The Unitarian group's records show the Sharps had contact with 3,500 refugees just during their time in Prague.

Finally, at the end of 1940, the couple had to escape Europe themselves for the second time in 18 months.

THE SHARPS' daughter, Martha Sharp Joukowsky, is now a retired Brown University archaeology professor living in Providence with her husband, Artemis, former chancellor of Brown.

"I wish they had been alive to receive this Yad Vashem honor," Martha Joukowsky said. "But they didn't do this for the glory. They didn't expect any medals. They did it because their hearts demanded that somebody do something. They were very much doers."

She added that just as much credit should go to the other 21,000-plus honored in Israel as "righteous."

"Every one of them," she said, "are people of conscience who made a choice to risk their lives to save other people's lives."

I asked what prompted her parents to be among the few leaving America to help.

"The horror of that totalitarian regime," she said. "The horror of Nazism."

She added: "It would have been a lot easier to do nothing."

I spoke to their daughter-in-law Jane Joukowsky, who remembered the first time she met Martha Sharp, the family's matriarch. Martha, still displaying the philosophy that led her to challenge the Nazis years before, asked Jane, "What important thing are you going to do in the world?" Martha was known to ask that of many people she met. Jane said the question always had a powerful effect.

Artemis Joukowsky III, 44 and a Massachusetts businessman, is one of Waitstill's and Martha's grandchildren. Yad Vashem has high standards of proof before granting anyone status as Righteous among Nations, considered one of the great honors in the world. Artemis III, along with his brother Michael, made a mission out of tracking down documentation.

Artemis told me his grandparents' refugee work was all the more remarkable in the context of 1939. America was in an isolationist mood. Few people considered the Nazis a relevant menace to those in the states.

And yet, said Artemis III, Waitstill and Martha chose to risk their lives anyway to help faraway strangers, most of them of a different religion, purely out of humanitarian commitment. Although the Jews were a key target, he explained that Catholics, Russians and many anti-fascist Germans were also Nazi targets, and his grandparents helped them as well.

WAITSTILL SHARP had gone to Harvard and Martha to Pembroke, Brown University's former sister school. That, in part, brought them to focus on saving targeted intellectuals from the Nazis, who were known to have a special interest in trying to destroy the cream of Jewry.

Artemis spoke of the Sharps' rescue of Lion Feuchtwanger, a German writer who was on the Nazis' most-wanted list for having criticized them. Martha Sharp helped sneak him to safety over the Spanish border in late 1940 by dressing both herself and him as French farm women. Around the same time, the couple also helped save a Nobel laureate physicist named Otto Meyerhof.

By then, the Nazis had begun organizing the "final solution" of the Jews.

"There's no question if they had been caught," said Artemis of the writer and the physicist, "they'd have been sent to the gas chambers. There's no question if my grandparents had been caught trying to smuggle them out, they would have been sent to the gas chambers."

Once World War II intensified into a global conflict, Waitstill and Martha Sharp realized it was impossible to return to Europe. They eventually divorced, but continued to do relief work and fundraising with the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. At one point, Martha Sharp ran for Congress, but lost. She died in 1999 at age 95. Waitsill Sharp died in 1984.

Artemis III said his grandparents talked little about having risked so much to save people from the Nazis.

"This is a couple who never wanted to tell their own story because they never wanted to glorify their work," he said. "They were gratified in their own hearts for the work they did at that time."

But recently, the Sharp and Joukowsky families decided it was important to document the saga for history. They wanted to memorialize Waitstill and Martha in the hope others might follow their principles. They also hope the telling of the Sharps' story will highlight the legacy of Unitarian outreach, and show that Americans were indeed involved as rescuers during that dark time.

Among the the most powerful witnesses to the Sharps' work is one of those they rescued -- Rosemarie Feigl, a Jewish woman, now 80 and living in New York, where I reached her by phone.

She grew up in Austria, and after the Nazis marched in, fled with her family to Marseilles, where they were trapped. Rosemarie was 14 at the time.

"They arrested my father as an alien twice," she said of the authorities in Marseilles. "It became very clear we would not survive." She said that although the death camps were still a secret, most Jews suspected that if deported by the Nazis, they would be killed.

"My father went from consulate to consulate, organization to organization, trying to find someone who would help us," Feigl said.

It led him to Martha Sharp.

FEIGL VIVIDLY remembers Martha Sharp as a striking, classy woman wearing a fashionable feathered hat -- and clever enough to use such charms to distract border guards from looking too closely at forged visas and other documents. She said the Sharps lived up to her image of Americans: attractive, powerful and committed to standing against evil.

"They were quite remarkable," Feigl said. "It was so dangerous, because Hitler stopped at nothing. And they continued after the war broke out. It was a heroic thing. I don't know if we realized how heroic it was on her part. We thought Americans were safe because they were rich and powerful. But we now know there were Americans who disappeared because they displeased the authorities."

Soon, Martha Sharp began working on a train ride to safety for 29 trapped children, both Jews and targeted non-Jews. It was an elaborate plan to first get them to Spain, then Lisbon, and finally a boat to America. Rosemarie Feigl was on the list.

"She had a terrible time getting us out," recalled Feigl. Martha Sharp, she said, had to bribe multiple authorities to get travel documents, perhaps forging some of the papers.

Finally, the train made it out, and the boat sailed on Dec. 13, 1940. It arrived in New York 10 days later. The children, including a young Rosemarie Feigl, were saved.

Feigl's parents made it to safety, too, but all four of her grandparents were deported to the Auschwitz death camp, where they were killed.

I ASKED Rosemarie Feigl why she thought the Sharps risked so much for strangers.

"Their moral fiber dictated this," she said. "They could have said, 'This is none of my business, it's over there.' And forgotten about it. But they didn't."

Today, Feigl is aware that the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee is still at it, addressing modern-day crises in places such as Darfur, Sudan.

"We shouldn't forget," Rosemarie Feigl said of the Sharps' heroism, "or these things could happen again. What I like about the Unitarians is they are still doing real work now to stop genocide and neglect all over the world. I think the Unitarians are wonderful."

The tree-planting ceremony for the Sharps will take place at Yad Vashem in June. Fifteen years ago, I was there to witness such a ceremony as a Polish nun named Maria Bochenek was honored as a new member of the Righteous Among Nations. A proud, burly Israeli named Baruch Sharoni spoke on behalf of his country.

"I want you to understand," he said to the gathering as he towered over a shy Maria Bochenek. "People like her did more than a human being could do. I am sure I could not have done what they did. I am sure."

His words speak also for Waitstill and Martha Sharp.

mpatinkin@projo.com / 401-277-7370

On the Web: Mark Patinkin narrates a slideshow of historical photos and news accounts of the Sharps' work, and we invite your comments at

http://www.projo.com/sharps