A family history of wartime heroism
They weren’t personally threatened. They weren’t Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, or any of the other groups targeted by Hitler’s death squads. And yet over a period of two years, 1939–40, Waitstill and Martha Sharp, a Unitarian minister and his wife from Wellesley, Mass., left their children and their safe home several times to save those who were in danger. Using fake documents and at great personal risk, the couple managed to rescue hundreds from the Nazis. Although the Sharps were not celebrated in their lifetimes, their heroism was honored posthumously in 2006, when they were named as “Righteous Among the Nations,” by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Israel, only the second and third Americans of the more than 20,000 non-Jews so honored for risking their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. (Martha is the only American woman.) A new PBS documentary, “Defying the Nazis: The...