Take it away, Deborah.

[gentle music] Marjorie and Ross McClelland stumbled into refugee relief work.

Ross, a doctoral student in comparative literature at Columbia University, had been awarded a fellowship run by the Quakers' American Friends Service Committee to conduct archival research in Geneva.

It was a wonderful opportunity that came at the wrong time.

In late spring 1940, after the German invasion of Poland and Western Europe, the US government no longer issued passports to travel to Europe for academic study.

The AFSC, the service arm of a Protestant denomination dedicated to pacifism, promptly repurposed the fellowship and suggested that Ross take over their refugee relief office in Rome.

Marjorie, a child psychologist with an undergraduate degree from Stanford University, gave up her position as director of the Manhattanville Day Nursery in Harlem to join her husband.

Take it away, Deborah.

Panic-stricken German and Austrian Jews clutched at hope and set sail for the open city of Shanghai, knowing that upon arrival they would face an utterly strange metropolis that promised nothing but the most destitute and temporary refuge from persecution.

There, they were joined by some 3,000 Polish and Lithuanian Jews, bringing the total refugee community to about 20,000.

No one expected that they would remain.

The sole solution lay in emigration elsewhere, and the JDC leadership tapped social worker Laura Margolis to expedite the process.

"If I'd been a man, I would've joined the Navy and seen the world, but since I am a woman, I joined the JDC," Laura reflected years later.

Her brief was clear.

Take it away, Deborah.

[dramatic music] Established in 1914, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee had grown into a robust philanthropic organization by the time Germany invaded Poland from the west and the Soviet Union from the east, thus triggering World War II.

[bombs exploding] [siren blaring] Moses Beckelman had recently joined the JDC staff, and the New York office promptly dispatched him to Lithuania, now a neutral country bordering both German and Soviet-occupied Poland.

[dramatic music] A trained social worker with an accountancy degree, Beckelman needed every skill and competency he had accrued to manage the tasks he now faced.

No sooner had he arrived in Lithuania than what had been a thin stream of Jewish refugees from Poland turned into a robust wave.

Jews living in the east of Poland feared the communist Soviet Union's actions against their religious community.

Jews in the west of Poland feared Nazi Germany's actions against Jews.

Take it away, Deborah.

Martha and Waitstill Sharp stepped off a train into Prague's Wilson Station on a cold February day in 1939.

Selected by the Unitarian leadership in Boston to travel to Czechoslovakia, they were charged with aiding the 250,000 refugees who had fled from the Czech border district of Sudetenland into the Czech heartland of Bohemia and Moravia as a result of the Munich Pact.

That agreement had given Sudetenland to Nazi Germany without a shot fired.

Waitstill was a Unitarian minister with a pulpit in Wellesley Hills.

The mission appealed to him.

Unitarianism, a liberal Protestant denomination, emphasizes individual freedom of belief and reason, both inherently anti-Nazi.

Let's return to the story.