[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 124 (Thursday, September 28, 2006)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1866-E1867]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




 REV. WILLIAM SCHULTZ REMARKS AT CEREMONY TO HONOR WAITSTILL SHARP AND 
             MARTHA SHARP, AMERICAN HEROES OF THE HOLOCAUST

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. TOM LANTOS

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                     Wednesday, September 27, 2006

  Mr. LANTOS. Mr. Speaker, a few weeks ago a very moving ceremony was 
held at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and a plaque was 
placed to honor the Reverend Waitstill Sharp and his wife, Martha, true 
heroes of the Holocaust who risked their lives to save Jews from the 
atrocities of the Nazi regime.
  On June 13, 2006, the Yad Vashem Holocaust Remembrance Authority in 
Israel honored the Sharps posthumously as ``Righteous Among the 
Nations'' for risking their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. 
They are only the second and third Americans to be so honored. Varian 
Fry, with whom the Sharps worked, was the first American.
  The Sharps' incredible story is a powerful reminder that all of us 
have the moral obligation to do all we can to end violence and genocide 
where ever and when ever such atrocities occur. They, along with those 
who helped to make their work possible, deserve our gratitude and 
admiration. Each of us should make every effort to learn more about the 
atrocities and genocidal actions occurring around the globe today, 
strive to have the foresight and courage shown by the Sharps, and act 
with resolve to do everything we can to stop these horrors.
  Our colleagues in the Senate passed a resolution on September 8 of 
this year honoring the courageous service of the Sharps. Representative 
James McGovern, my colleague from Massachusetts, where the Sharps once 
lived, and I are introducing similar legislation in the House 
remembering the Sharps and their heroism.
  Mr. Speaker, the Reverend William Schultz made particularly 
outstanding remarks at this ceremony honoring the Sharps at the U.S. 
Holocaust Museum. I urge my colleagues to ponder his comments and learn 
more about this brave, selfless couple and their amazing deeds.

Remarks delivered by Rev. William Schulz U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum 
                           September 14, 2006

     I think continually of those who were truly great.
     Who, from the womb, remembered the soul's history
     Through corridors of light where the hours are suns

[[Page E1867]]

     Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
     Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
     Should tell of the Spirit clothed from head to foot in song . 
           . .
     What is precious is never to forget . . .

  These are the opening lines of a poem by Stephen Spender, the British 
man of letters.
  So often when we hear the exhortation, ``Never forget!'', it is the 
victims of atrocities whose fates are being invoked. But today, with 
the addition of the names of Martha and Waitstill Sharp to the ``Wall 
of Rescuers,'' it is two people whose ``lips . . . told of the Spirit 
clothed from head to foot in song'' that we would have the world 
remember and the faith that inspired them to take risks on behalf of 
unknown others and the courage that led them to face the Nazis not 
once, but twice and a kind of almost incomprehensible determination 
they exhibited that most of us mortals can only dream of.
  The plaque we install today has only 100 words on it, only 100 words 
in which to tell their story. The documentary short produced by the 
Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, which we will see in a few 
moments, has only twenty-minutes to make their heroism clear. So it is 
fitting that the museum is adding to its collection the 8-9,000 pages 
of documentary evidence that Larry Benequist and Bill Sullivan, the 
makers of the film, have gathered from attics, from dusty store rooms 
in Czechoslovakia and France, from carefully preserved Gestapo archives 
in Berlin, and from collections of personal letters. And it is fitting 
that the museum has acquired the hours of interviews with Martha and 
Waitstill which Ghanda Difiglia taped for UUSC while they were still 
alive. The museum will no doubt also want to preserve the hours of 
recollections of people who were rescued by the Sharps, people like 
Rosemarie Fiegl, and of people who knew them like Yehuda Bacon 
recollections which Deborah Shaffer is filming. All of these fragments 
of the story will be preserved here so that scholars, historians, and 
authors can study them and make more accessible the obligation to 
remember.
  Today's dedication means that future visitors to this museum will be 
continually reminded of two of who were truly great--Martha and 
Waitstill Sharp.
  And part of what made them great were the moral choices they made. 
How many of us would set out from our comfortable homes, leaving our 
small children behind, to travel to an unstable part of the world where 
we would match wits with the Gestapo and lead journeys across the 
Pyrenees?
  And yet the fact that they did that means that any one else could 
have done it if they had decided to, that it was not beyond the bounds 
of the human imagination. If even one person in a generation makes a 
moral choice, it leaves the rest of us with less excuse for our ethical 
torpidity. William Lloyd Garrison founded the New England Anti-Slavery 
Society in 1831 when the slaveholder Andrew Jackson was President. That 
removes any hope Jackson or his fellow slaveholders might have had to 
claim ignorance as a defense for holding other human beings in chains. 
And Elizabeth Cady Stanton began the fight for women's equality in 1840 
when women were excluded from the world antislavery convention, so 
after 1840 what was Garrison's excuse for remaining a misogynist?
  But of course not every one of us accurately reads the tides of 
history. I often ask myself what moral myopia I am subject to at this 
very moment, something that twenty or forty years from now will seem 
like unimaginable shortsightedness. And that is what strikes me as most 
remarkable about the Sharps. They went to Europe in February, 1939. 
February, 1939 was less than three months after the Kristallnacht. It 
was before the Nazis required Jews in Germany to relinquish their 
silver and gold. It was before the occupation of Czechoslovakia. It was 
before the German ``Pact of Steel'' with Italy. It was before the SS 
St. Louis set out on its fateful voyage to Cuba and before its 900 
Jewish refugee passengers were returned to Europe. It was before 
Germany attacked Poland, before Britain declared war on Germany. It was 
before the Warsaw Ghetto. And it was before Auschwitz, before 
``Auschwitz'' became the name of anything other than a pretty little 
town in Poland. It was, in other words, before most of the rest of the 
world awoke to the true extent of the Nazi peril and the full measure 
of its threat to the Jewish people. It was in fact five whole years 
before Adolf Eichmann would offer to trade the lives of one million 
Jews for 10,000 trucks and the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Lord 
Moyne, would reject the offer, saying, ``But where shall I put them? 
Whatever would I do with one million Jews? '' The Sharps, their 
sponsors and their colleagues, were gauging the tides and gauging them 
with astonishing perspicuity. It is easy to feel small and blind in 
comparison to that.
  But that is not the lesson that I suspect the Sharps would have us 
draw. We honor the Sharps as heroes who saved hundreds of lives. But I 
am willing to bet that Waitstill and Martha knew that though they and 
their colleagues, the Dexters and Charles Joy, were the ones risking 
their lives on the streets of Prague and in the mountains of Spain, 
they were dependent upon a much larger circle of friends and 
acquaintances who made their heroism possible: the people who cared for 
their children, the members of their congregation in Wellesley Hills 
who maintained their church while they were gone, the supporters of the 
Unitarian denomination that financed their cause. And, yes, the tailors 
who darned their clothes, the shoemakers who soled their shoes, the 
pilot who steered their ship and the housekeeper who kept their rooms.
  That, you see, is why we have institutions. Because not every one of 
us can set out for war-torn Europe. Not every one of us can visit the 
refugee camps of Darfur or the US detention camps in Iraq or 
Afghanistan or God knows where else. But every one of us can be a part 
of the lives of those who do. Every one of us can be a part of 
institutions that make such heroism possible and in that measure can 
claim a degree of kinship with the righteous among the nations. That 
Waitstill and Martha's work resulted not just in the immediate rescue 
of hundreds of lives, but in the creation of an institution that came 
to be known as the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, an 
institution that multiplied those rescues a thousand fold in the years 
that followed, is testimony that, acute as their reading of history 
surely was, they knew that they were but a part of a much larger circle 
of heroes and heroines who made their enterprise possible and without 
whom their legacy and the values it embodied could never be sustained 
across the decades.
  Spender's poem ends:

     Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields
     See how these names are feted by the waving grass
     And by the streamers of white clouds
     And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
     The names of those who in their lives fought for life
     Who wore at their hearts the fire's center.
     Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun,
     And left the vivid air signed with their honor.

       Thank you for helping us honor two people who wore at their 
     hearts the fire's center and left the vivid air signed with 
     their own honor.

                          ____________________