Varian Fry

Photograph of Varian Fry (1907-1967) taken when he was a child

Varian Fry was born in New York City. His parents were Lillian (Mackey) and Arthur Fry, a manager of the Wall Street firm Carlysle and Mellick. The family moved to Ridgewood, New Jersey in 1910. He grew up in Ridgewood and enjoyed bird-watching and reading. During World War I, at 9 years of age, Fry and friends conducted a fund-raising bazaar for the American Red Cross that included a vaudeville show, ice cream stand and fish pond. He was educated at Hotchkiss School from 1922 to 1924 when he left the school due to hazing rituals. He then attended the Riverdale Country School, graduating in 1926.

An able, multi-lingual student, Fry scored in the top 10% on the entrance exams to Harvard University and, while a Harvard undergraduate, founded Hound & Horn, an influential literary quarterly, in 1927 with Lincoln Kirstein. He was suspended for a prank just before graduation and had to repeat his senior year. Through Kirstein's sister, Mina, he met his future wife, Eileen Avery Hughes, an editor of Atlantic Monthly, who was seven years his senior and had been educated at Roedean School and Oxford University. They married on June 2, 1931.

While working as a foreign correspondent for the American journal The Living Age, Fry visited Berlin in 1935, and personally witnessed Nazi abuse against Jews on more than one occasion, which "turned him into an ardent anti-Nazi". He said in 1945, "I could not remain idle as long as I had any chances at all of saving even a few of its intended victims."

Following his visit to Berlin, Fry wrote about the savage treatment of Jews by Hitler's regime in the New York Times in 1935. He wrote books about foreign affairs for Headline Books, owned by the Foreign Policy Association, including The Peace that Failed. It describes the troubled political climate following World War I, the break-up of Czechoslovakia and the events leading up to World War II.

Greatly disturbed by what he saw, Fry helped raise money to support European anti-Nazi movements. After the invasion of France in June 1940, which the Germans quickly occupied, he went to Marseille in August 1940 as an agent of the newly formed Emergency Rescue Committee in an effort to help persons wishing to flee the Nazis, and circumvent the processes by French authorities who would not issue exit visas. Fry had $3,000 and a short list of refugees under imminent threat of arrest by agents of the Gestapo, mostly Jews. Clamoring at his door came anti-Nazi writers, avant-garde artists, musicians and hundreds of others desperately seeking any chance to escape France.

Some historians later noted it was a miracle that a white American Protestant would risk everything to help the Jews.

Beginning in 1940, in Marseille, despite the watchful eye of the collaborationist Vichy regime, Fry 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 Spain and then to the safety of neutral Portugal from which they made their way to the United States.

Varian Fry and Miriam Davenport, c.1940

Fry helped other exiles 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.

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 anti-Semitism in the State Department and was personally responsible for issuing thousands of visas, both legal and illegal.

From his isolated position in Marseille, Fry relied on the Unitarian Service Committee in Lisbon to help the refugees he sent. This office, staffed by American Unitarians under the direction of Robert Dexter, helped refugees to wait in safety for visas and other necessary papers, and to gain ship passage from Lisbon.

Fry was forced to leave France in September 1941 after officials both of the Vichy government and at the United States State Department had become angered by his covert activities. In 1942, the Emergency Rescue Committee and the American branch of the European-based International Relief Association joined forces under the name the International Relief and Rescue Committee, which was later shortened to the International Rescue Committee (IRC). The IRC is a leading nonsectarian, nongovernmental international relief and development organization that still operates today.

Refugees aided by Fry

Among those Fry aided were:

Fry 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".

Although by 1942 Fry had been terminated from his position at the Emergency Rescue Committee, American private rescuers acknowledged that his program in France had been uniquely effective, and recruited him in 1944 to provide behind-the-scenes guidance to the Roosevelt administration's late-breaking rescue program, the War Refugee Board.

Fry published a book in 1945 about his time in France under the title Surrender on Demand, first published by Random House, 1945. A later edition was published by Johnson Books, in 1997, in conjunction with the U.S. Holocaust Museum. In 1968, the US publisher Scholastic (which markets mainly to children and adolescents) published a paperback edition under the title Assignment: Rescue.

After the war, Fry worked as a journalist, magazine editor and business writer. He also taught college and was in film production. Feeling as if he'd lived the peak of his life in France, he developed ulcers. Fry went into psychoanalysis and said that as time went on, he grew more and more troubled.

Fry and his wife Eileen divorced after he returned from France. She developed cancer and died on May 12, 1948. During her hospital convalescence, Fry visited her and read to her daily. At the end of 1948 or early 1949, Fry met Annette Riley who was 16 years his junior. They married in 1950, had three children together, but were separated in 1966, thought to be due to his irrational behavior, believed to have been manic depression.

Fry died of a cerebral hemorrhage and was found dead in his bed on September 13, 1967 by the Connecticut State Police. He was buried at Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York with his parents.

Fry's papers are held in Columbia University's Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Author

• "A Bibliography of the Writings of Thomas Stearns Eliot". Hound & Horn, 1928.
• Assignment Rescue: An Autobiography. Madison, Wisconsin: Demco, 1992. ISBN 978-0-439-14541-1.
• Bricks Without Mortar: The Story of International Cooperation. New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1938. LCCN 39-2481.
• Headline Books. New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1938.
• Surrender on Demand. New York: Random House, 1945. LCCN 45-3492 OCLC 1315136
• The Peace that Failed: How Europe Sowed the Seeds of War. New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1939. LCCN 40-3702
• To Whom it May Concern. 1947.
• War in China: America's Role in the Far East. New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1938. LCCN 38-27205

Co-author

• Fry, Varian and Emil Herlin. War Atlas: A Handbook of Maps and Facts. New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1940. LCCN 42-11302.
• Goetz, Delia and Varian Fry. The Good Neighbours: The Story of the Two Americas. The Foreign Policy Association, 1939. LCCN 39-7983
• Popper, David H., Shepard Stone and Varian Fry. The puzzle of Palestine. New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1938.
• Wolfe, Henry Cutler, James Frederick Green, Stoyan Pribichevich, Varian Fry, William V. Reed, Elizabeth Ogg and Emil Herlin, Spotlight on the Balkans. New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1940.

Varian Fry street in Berlin

• 1967 - The government of France recognized Fry's contribution to freedom with the Legion of Honor.
• 1980 - Mary Jayne Gold's 1980 book titled Crossroads Marseilles 1940 sparked an interest in Fry and his heroic efforts.
• 1991 - The United States Holocaust Memorial Council awarded Fry the Eisenhower Liberation Medal.
• 1994 - Fry became the first United States citizen to be listed in the Righteous among the Nations at Israel's national Holocaust Memorial, award by Yad Vashem.
• 1997 - Irish film director David Kerr made a documentary entitled Varian Fry: The America's Schindler that was narrated by actor Sean Barrett.
• 1998 - Fry was awarded the "Commemorative Citizenship of the State of Israel" on January 1, 1998.
• 2001 - Fry's story was also told in dramatic form on film in 2001 when as executive producer, Barbra Streisand co-produced with Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex, the made-for-television film, Varian's War, written and directed by Lionel Chetwynd and starring William Hurt and Julia Ormond.
• 2002 - 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.
• 2005 - 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.
• 2005 - A street in his home town of Ridgewood, New Jersey was renamed Varian Fry Way.
• 2007 - On October 15, 2007, the U.S. House of Representatives honored Varian Fry on the 100th anniversary of his birth.