Television Critics Association

Ken Burns chronicles heroes in PBS' 'Defying the Nazis'

Bill Keveney

USA TODAY

Martha and Waitstill Sharp helped dissidents and refugees escape during the Nazi occupation of Europe.

BEVERLY HILLS — Artemis Joukowsky didn't learn about his grandparents' heroism until a high-school assignment that required him to interview someone of moral courage.

That led him to the story of his grandparents, Waitstill and Martha Sharp, a Massachusetts Unitarian minister and his wife, who went on life-endangering missions to help save political dissidents and Jewish refugees during the Nazi occupation of Europe. Their story is the subject of Defying The Nazis: The Sharps' War (Sept. 20), a PBS documentary he co-directed with acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns.

Joukowsky and Burns spoke Thursday at the Television Critics Association summer press tour.

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Interviews with those whom the Sharps helped transport them to the U.S. as children before and during World War II help tell the story of the couple's heroism while "also bumping up against the greatest cataclysm in human history," Burns said, referring to the 6 million lives lost in the Holocaust and the 60 million who perished as a result of World War II.

The Sharps' story involves secret missions and the risk of torture and death as they traveled to Europe to save children.

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Joukowsky said his family didn't talk much about his parents' activities before he spoke to his grandmother.

'Defying the Nazis' details the heroic work of Waitstill and Martha Sharp.

"My parents suffered from all the people they couldn't help," he said. "A lot of people from that generation didn't want to talk" about the war.

From his conversation with his grandmother, who was divorced, "I could see in her life an arc of feminism, of empowerment, of claiming her own place and purpose. There was a sense of loving others and giving to others."

Joukowsky said his mother gained a feeling of involvement with her parents' work when she met someone her parents had helped at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial. When his mother said she was only 2 at the time, the woman said, "You were strong enough that they thought they could go help me."

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