From the Publisher
A clear, unpretentious volume that justly celebrates a couple who risked all for others.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Defying the Nazis hooks you, catches you up in the narrative, and pulls you along by all the elements of great storytelling...It reads like a spy novel, but it’s all true.”
—Ken Burns
“This gripping tale of intrigue and courage, of love’s power and its loss, is both entertaining and inspiring. Heroes are often thought to be super-human. But Defying the Nazis proves that true heroes emerge not from the pages of comic books but the halls of everyday life. The common denominator is a stubborn faith in humanity and a conviction that the shape of history is ultimately in each of our hands.”
—William F. Schulz, president of the UUA, 1985–1993; executive director of Amnesty International USA, 1994–2006; and president of the UUSC, 2010–2016
Kirkus Reviews
2016-07-04
Companion volume to the upcoming Ken Burns’ PBS documentary about an American couple who rescued people threatened by the Nazi whirlwind in Europe.Readers familiar with Burns’ documentaries will recognize some of his techniques transferred here into text by writer Joukowsky (co-director of the film), who first approached Burns about this story featuring his grandparents, Waitstill and Martha Sharp, a story Joukowsky had thoroughly researched and already begun to film. There are passages quoted from correspondence between the two, touching intimate moments, mentions of myriads of documents, photographs, and interviews (which readers must wait for PBS to see), and follow-ups on the principals and some supporting players. Waitstill was a Unitarian minister in Massachusetts when, in 1939, the American Unitarian Association recruited the couple to go to Prague to aid those under imminent Nazi threat. The Sharps succeeded in astonishing fashion, helping people slip out of the country, feeding the hungry, avoiding ubiquitous Nazi surveillance, and rescuing children from utter poverty. There were many near misses, and many moments of frustration, fear, and labyrinthine bureaucracy á la Dickens’ Bleak House. There are also some surprises. They helped the son of Thomas Mann escape; Harvard’s Jerome Bruner supported Martha during her subsequent run for Congress. The author generally adopts a neutral narrative tone, though he does blast Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long (“anti-Semitic, xenophobic”), and a couple of times he notes the irony of the Sharps spending so much time away from their own children to go abroad to help others’ children. But the author’s portraits are generally flattering, even when he chronicles the couple’s divorce. True tension, though, is hard to create when we know from the outset that both survived the war. A clear, unpretentious volume that justly celebrates a couple who risked all for others.
