WASHINGTON -- On a white marble wall were emblazoned the words, from Genesis, with which God admonished Cain: "What have you done? Hark, thy brother's blood cries out from the ground."

Across the Hall of Remembrance was a black wall that bore stark metal letters spelling the name of the killing factory: "AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU."

On this spot stood aged survivors of the Holocaust, along with descendants of two of the very few heroes to emerge from the horror.

Old and young, they stooped in the vaulted space yesterday to light candles in memory of the late Martha and Waitstill Sharp -- now revered, in the language of Holocaust remembrance, as "Righteous Among Nations."

The Sharps, a Massachusetts couple with strong Rhode Island connections, were honored at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum for journeying to Europe in 1939 and taking bold risks to help many hundreds of Jews and other targeted people find refuge from the Nazis.

Providence native Martha Sharp, a social worker, and her husband, a Unitarian minister, left their two young children in the Boston suburb of Wellesley on a mission "to save the world, one person at a time," as their grandson Artemis Joukowsky III said during yesterday's ceremonies.

Now the Sharps are among just three Americans honored with a plaque on the museum's Rescuers Wall.

They are also the second and third Americans -- and Martha Sharp is the only American woman -- honored by Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial as "the Righteous Among Nations" for non-Jews who saved Jews. Altogether, about 20,000 non-Jews have received this honor.

The Sharps defied the Nazis during two extended trips to Europe that took them to German-occupied Czechoslovakia, France under the Vichy regime, Portugal and Spain.

To save Jews and others -- including many children -- the Sharps schooled themselves in the dark arts of bribing corrupt officials, forging visas, and spiriting the hunted away from the Nazis through underground coal mines and other perilous routes to safety.

They traded money and jewels on the black market, procured illicit passports, and helped refugees over borders to safer countries such as England. At one point the couple were separated when Waitstill Sharp took a trip to Switzerland and was refused reentry to Czechoslovakia. Martha Sharp stayed on in Prague, working on her own for a time.

The Sharps came home to Massachusetts from their first trip abroad and helped launch what's now known as the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. That organization helped send the Sharps back to Europe in 1940, where they worked another half a year helping refugees escape.

That organization remains active today in global human-rights issues.

Among the 75 people who gathered here to pay them posthumous tribute were their daughter Martha Sharp Joukowsky, a retired Brown University archaeologist, and her sons Misha and Artemis Joukowsky III. All have worked to compile a documentary record of what one speaker after another called the extraordinary deeds of ordinary people.

Members of the Sharp family had a private viewing at the museum of the plaque honoring their forbears. On hand at the ceremony later were Sen. Jack Reed and Rep. James McGovern, D-Mass.

"This is not just a history lesson today," said McGovern, who has worked in Congress to end the genocide in Sudan's Darfur region, in an interview after the ceremony. "We need to do more than just praise the heroics of people like the Sharps. We need to do more than say, 'Never again.' "

Artemis Joukowsky III spoke in an interview after the ceremony about the work of his grandparents and its meaning in today's world.

"When my grandparents did what they did, we lived in a time of tremendous isolationism in the United States," he said.

Some of that isolationism persists today, in the form of ignorance about the current situation in places such as Darfur, he said.

"What my grandparents did in 1939 is something that each of us can do ourselves today," Joukowsky said.

People may not be able to travel to the Sudan, as his grandparents traveled to Eastern Europe, but they can write to their representatives in Congress, donate money to organizations that are making a difference in that part of the world or volunteer in some way to help people in a far-off land, he said.

One of the children the Sharps helped to escape from the Nazis, Rosemarie Feigl, was expected to speak at yesterday's ceremony but could not be there. A Jewish woman in her early 80s, Feigl spoke to The Providence Journal from her home in New York earlier this year.

"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."

jmulligan@belo-dc.com / (202) 661-8423