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Varian Fry

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Varian Fry and Miriam Davenport, c.1940

Varian Mackey Fry (October 15, 1907 – September 13, 1967) was an American Journalist educated at Hotchkiss and Taft School and Harvard University. Fry ran a rescue network in Vichy France that helped approximately 2,000 to 4,000 anti-Nazi and Jewish refugees to escape Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

Early life

Varian Fry founded Hound & Horn, an influential literary quarterly, in 1927 with Lincoln Kirstein while an undergraduate at Harvard. He married Kirstein's sister, Eileen.He also spent the summer at fat camp. :P

While working as a foreign correspondent for the American journal The Living Age, Fry visited Berlin in 1935 and personally witnessed Nazi savagery against Jews on more than one occasion. He witnessed how terribly the Jews were treated, and he wanted to help.

Greatly disturbed by what he saw, he helped raise money to support European anti-Nazi movements. Following the occupation of France in August 1940 he went to Marseille as an agent of the newly formed Emergency Rescue Committee in an effort to help persons wishing to flee the Nazis.[1][2] Fry had $3,000 and a short list of refugees under imminent threat of arrest by agents of the Gestapo. Clamoring at his door came anti-Nazi writers, avant-garde artists, musicians and hundreds of others desperately seeking any chance to escape France.[3]

Emergency Rescue Committee

Beginning in 1940, in Marseille, despite the watchful eye of the collaborationist Vichy regime, he and a small group of volunteers hid people at the Villa Air-Bel until they could be smuggled out. More than 2,200 people were taken across the border to the safety of neutral Portugal from which they made their way to the United States.

Others he helped escape on ships leaving Marseille for the French colony of Martinique, from which they too could go to the United States. Among Fry's closest associates were Americans Miriam Davenport, a former art student at the Sorbonne, and the heiress Mary Jayne Gold, a lover of the arts and the "good life" who had come to Paris in the early 1930s.

When the Nazis seized France in 1940, Gold went to Marseille, where she worked with Fry and helped finance his operation. Also working with Fry was a young academic named Albert O. Hirschman, who eventually went on to a distinguished career in America.

Especially instrumental in getting Fry the visas he needed for the artists, intellectuals and political dissidents on his list was Hiram Bingham IV, an American Vice Consul in Marseille who fought against State Department anti-Semitism and was personally responsible for issuing thousands of visas, both legal and illegal.

Cotemporaneously to Fry's saving Jewish intellectuals who were predominantly of Ashkenazi (European) descent Turkish diplomats were saving Jews having roots in the Ottoman Empire. Turkey's Ambassador in France, Behic Erkin and diplomat Necdet Kent encouraged all members of the Turkish legation including that in Marseille to do all that was possible to save Jews having some familial connection with Turkey or the Ottoman Empire. They worked night and day risking their careers as this was not sanctioned by their governement in Ankara. At times they even risked their lives. In Ambassador and a Mentsch: The story of a Turkish Diplomat in Vichy France, Arnold Reisman estimates that over 3000 were thus saved.

  1. ^ The Genesis of the Emergency Rescue Committee, Terence Renaud, Boston University, 2005
  2. ^ Karl B. Frank and the Politics of the Emergency Rescue Committee, Terence Renaud, 2008
  3. ^ retrieved online February 15, 2008

See Reisman Arnold Ambassador and a Mentsch: The story of a Turkish Diplomat in Vichy France (Charleston SC: CreateSpace, Forthcoming June 2010)


Among those Fry aided were the following:

Back home in the United States, Fry published his book in 1945 about his time in France under the title, Surrender on Demand. In 1968, the US publisher Scholastic (which, as implied by its name, markets mainly to children and adolescents) published a paperback edition under the title Assignment: Rescue, and subsequent reprints have appeared under both of the above titles.

He wrote and spoke critically against U.S. immigration policies particularly relating to the issue of the fate of Jews in Europe. In a December 1942 issue of The New Republic, he wrote a scathing article titled: "The Massacre of Jews in Europe".

Legacy

In 1967, the government of France recognized his heroic contribution to freedom with the Legion of Honor. Mary Jayne Gold's 1980 book titled Crossroads Marseilles 1940 sparked an interest in Fry and his heroic efforts.

Known as The American Schindler, in 1995 Varian Fry became the first United States citizen to be listed in the Righteous Among the Nations at Israel's national Holocaust Memorial, Yad Vashem (in 2006, fellow Americans Waitstill Sharp and Martha Sharp were added to the list). He was awarded the additional honor of "Commemorative Citizenship of the State of Israel" on 1 January 1998.

On the initiative of Samuel V. Brock, the U.S. Consul General in Marseille from 1999 to 2002, the square in front of the Consulate was renamed Place Varian Fry. A street in the newly reconstructed East/West Berlin Wall area in the Berlin borough of Mitte at Potsdamer Platz was named Varian-Fry-Straße in recognition of his work in the Nazi period. In 2005, a street in his home town of Ridgewood, New Jersey was renamed Varian Fry Way [1]

In 1997 Irish film director David Kerr, made a documentary entitled Varian Fry: The America's Schindler, that was narrated by actor Sean Barrett. Varian Fry's story was also told in dramatic form on film in 2001 when Barbra Streisand co-produced the made-for-television motion picture, Varian's War, written and directed by Lionel Chetwynd and starring William Hurt and Julia Ormond.

See also

Bibliography

  • Varian Fry, Surrender on Demand, first published by Random House, 1945. Later edition published by Johnson Books, in 1997 in conjunction with the U.S. Holocaust Museum.
  • Cynthia Jaffee McCabe, "Wanted by the Gestapo: Saved by America – Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee" 79-91 in Jarrell C. Jackman (editor) and Carla M. Borden (editor) The Musses Flee Hitler: Cultural Transfer and Adaptation 1930-1945 (Smithsonian, 1983)
  • Rosemary Sullivan, Villa Air-Bel, The most comprehensive account of Fry's work set in its political and historical context, published in 2006 by HarperCollins.
  • Sheila Isenberg, "A Hero of Our Own", (Random House 2001), is a comprehensive and well-written biography of Fry's life.
  • Tad Richards, The Virgil Directive, a novel, (Fawcett, 1982) was based on Fry's work in Marseilles.
  • Andy Marino, A Quiet American: The Secret War of Varian Fry,
    • St. Martin’s Press, 1999, 403 pp. (review)
    • Macmillan, 2000, 416 pp., ,ISBN 0312267673

References

  1. ^ Jewish Standard VARIAN FRY: the artists’ Schindler
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