Varian Fry: The American Schindler
By Peter Kross

World War II  | 0 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

On August 4, 1940, eager passengers waited in line to board Pan American Airways’ Boeing 314 Dixie Clipper at New York’s La Guardia airport for the flight to Marseille, France. On board that summer day was an ordinary-looking man of 32, a Harvard intellectual, a loner who shunned the limelight and carried $3,000 strapped to his belt. Along with the money, Varian Fry carried a list of 200 of the brightest names in the fields of art, science, literature and medicine who were trapped in Nazi-occupied France. Fry was about to embark on one of the most dangerous yet least known rescue missions of World War II.

At the time of his flight, Fry was an editor with the Foreign Policy Association’s Headline Books and a member of the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC), which had been established to rescue the most important intellectuals stranded in France, many of whom were just one knock on the door away from being sent to prison camps by the Germans. He was multilingual, speaking both French and German, and anti-Fascist in his politics. Among those on Fry’s rescue list were Marc Chagall, Hannah Arendt, Andr Breton, Marcel Duchamp and the sculptor Jacques Lipschitz. By the time Fry left France a little over a year later, he had managed through clandestine means to rescue more than 2,000 civilians and military personnel.

Fry was born in New York City on October 15, 1907, and grew up in Ridgewood, N.J., in a dysfunctional family. During his youth, his mother spent many months in a hospital with severe emotional problems. He was raised by two of his aunts, who served as surrogate mothers. His father, a stockbroker, was away at work most of the time, and there was little contact between father and son.

A very important person in young Varian’s life was his grandfather Charles, who was active in the Children’s Aid Society. Charles often took Varian along with him on his trips, and the child would spend the summer at his grandfather’s camp for children in Brooklyn.

Fry attended both the Hotchkiss and Taft schools in Connecticut, then moved back to New Jersey, where he attended the Riverdale Country School, not far from his home. Harvard was next, and Fry’s years there were intellectually challenging. With a friend named Lincoln Kirstein, he founded a literary magazine called the Hound & Horn. The opinionated Fry also managed to get himself expelled for rebellious conduct but was eventually allowed back in.

While at Harvard, Fry met and eventually married Eileen Hughes. Shortly before graduation, he wrote on a form what his ideal job would be — "A European representative, preferably in France, Spain, Italy or Greece." He graduated in May 1931 and, now with a young wife, began job hunting in the discouraging Great Depression job market.

The Frys moved to New York, settling in lower Manhattan. Eileen taught school, while Varian began a series of publishing jobs that took him to Scholastic magazine, then The Living Age, a journal that concentrated on foreign affairs. That job gave Fry access to information on what was then going on in Europe.

In May 1935 Fry took a business trip for The Living Age to Germany to see for himself the conditions that he had been hearing about regarding the plight of European Jews. He spent three months in Germany, staying in Berlin. While in the capital, Fry witnessed the first purges in Germany, the systematic rounding up of Berlin’s Jews by the secret police. The horror of that episode left him determined to do something. Upon his return, he wrote an article on what he had seen for The New York Times.

By 1937, Fry had moved on to a job with the Foreign Policy Association’s Headline Books in New York. His new duties allowed him to write several books on foreign affairs, including The Peace That Failed.

As persistent news accounts of Jewish persecution in Europe reached the United States, Fry joined the ERC, dedicated to aiding refugees. Its immediate goal was to raise enough money to rescue a large number of intellectuals then trapped in France. In June 1940, the victorious Nazis divided France into two distinct areas. The Germans occupied northern France, while a French puppet government ruled the south from the city of Vichy. One of Adolf Hitler’s first decrees required that the Vichy regime hand over any person that the Germans demanded without any prior notice. It became painfully obvious that once a person was handed over to the Germans, his or her chances of coming back were virtually nil.

Tags: 20th - 21st Century, People, World War II

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