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Varian Mackey Fry (October 15, 1907 – September 13, 1967) was an American journalist. Fry ran a rescue network in Vichy France from August 1940 to September 1941 that helped 2,000 anti-Nazi and refugees, mostly artists and intellectuals, escape from persecution by Nazi Germany during World War II.
Fry spent "thirteen months directing a bold, high-risk, and much celebrated refugee-smuggling operation in the south of France that included an all-star cast of Kulturträger culture, among them artists Marc Chagall and Max Ernst, and writer André Breton and philosopher Hannah Arendt." (2025). 9780807071830, Beacon Press. ISBN 9780807071830 His activities, illegal under the laws of Vichy France, contrary to the policies of the United States government, and opposed by many of the other refugee relief organizations in France resulted in his expulsion and the severing of ties with him by his organization, the Emergency Rescue Committee.
He was the first of five Americans to be recognized as "Righteous Among the Nations", an honorific given by the State of Israel to non-Jews who saved the lives of many Jews and anti-Nazi refugees during World War II.
An able and multilingual student, Fry scored in the top 10% of the Harvard University entrance exams. In 1927, as a Harvard undergraduate, he founded Hound & Horn, an influential literary quarterly, in collaboration with Lincoln Kirstein. He was suspended for a prank just before graduation and had to repeat his senior year.Gewen, Barry. "For the American Schindler, writers and artists first." Literature of the Holocaust, August 6, 2004. Retrieved: March 25, 2016 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. Although Fry was a closeted homosexual, according to his son James, they married on 2 June 1931.
Following his visit to Berlin, in 1935 Fry wrote about the savage treatment of Jews by Hitler's regime in The New York Times. He wrote books about foreign affairs for Headline Books, owned by the Foreign Policy Association, including The Peace that Failed.Fry, Varian. The Peace that Failed: How Europe Sowed the Seeds of War. The Foreign Policy Association, 1939. It describes the troubled political climate following World War I, the break-up of Czechoslovakia and the events leading up to World War II. "Varian Fry - Bibliography." United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved: March 25, 2016.
On June 25, 1940, two hundred prominent people met at the Hotel Commodore in New York City and founded the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC). They raised $3,500 in contributions and in mid-July began looking for a representative to serve in Marseille. When none of the candidates seemed viable or willing, Fry volunteered and was accepted, albeit with reservations.
Fry was given three tasks for what was projected to be a three-week visit to France: (1) report on conditions impacting refugees; (2), help people identified as in danger from the Nazis escape to Portugal or Morocco; and (3) identify people who would work with the ERC. The emphasis would be on rescuing the elite intellectuals and artists trapped in Vichy France. Fry remained in France for thirteen months.
Fry was an unlikely choice as ERC's representative. One of the founders of the ERC, Karl Frank, said, "Send him to France, and he's dead." That being said, Fry was probably not in great danger in France. At that time, "an American passport gave most Americans abroad a reasonably justified sense of invulnerability." A biographer, Andy Marino, called Fry a "Neurasthenia intellectual and expert on the ancient Greeks." His advantages were that he was an American and thus from a neutral country, spoke some French language and German language, would be unknown to the German Gestapo, and might be seen by them as just-another "high-minded dumb Yank." Eleanor Roosevelt supported the ERC; her husband Franklin, President of the United States, less so. He had an election to win in 1940 and refugees were not his priority. Moreover, the mood of the country was contrary to the admission of more refugees. A 1938 Roper Poll indicated that only 8.7 percent of the American populace wanted the United States to increase the number of refugees permitted to enter the U.S. beyond the number in the immigration quota. Another poll taken after the anti-Jewish Kristallnacht riots in Germany, found that only 21 percent of Americans wanted more Jewish immigrants to be admitted to the U.S. Department of State officials in charge of approving entry visas to refugees were often accused of being anti-Semitic and anti-refugee, but they reflected the views of the U.S. government and its people.
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 has continued into the 21st century as a nonsectarian, nongovernmental international relief and development organization.
Initially, Fry relied on the experienced Waitstill Sharp of the Unitarian Service Committee to help him. Sharp said he spent three days orienting Fry on the techniques of semi-clandestine life.Horn, Dara. "The Rescuer." Tablet Magazine, January 17, 2012. Retrieved: March 25, 2016. Fry's first major operation in September 1940 was in cooperation with Sharp. Four of the refugees in Marseille most likely to be deported to Nazi Germany were novelists Lion Feuchtwanger and Heinrich Mann, Golo Mann, the son of novelist Thomas Mann, and writer Franz Werfel, plus their family members and a few others. Determined to take the refugees to Spain and hence get them to the United States, Fry and Sharp accompanied the group to the Spanish border, and Sharp continued on with them to Lisbon. An American named Leon "Dick" Ball guided them via smugglers' foot trails across the Pyrenees to an illegal entry into Spain. Sharp was less than complimentary about Alma Werfel who crossed the border in a white flowing dress that could be seen for miles. Her "legendary appeal" was lost on him. All the party of refugees made it to the United States.
Back in Marseille, despite the watchful eye of the collaborationist Vichy regime,Brown, Nancy. "No longer a haven: Varian Fry and the refugees of France." Yad Vashem: The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, October 13, 1999. Retrieved: March 25, 2016. Fry and a small group of volunteers hid people at the Villa Air-Bel until they could be smuggled out through neutral Spain and then to the relative safety of neutral Portugal where they took ships, mostly to the United States. Some of the exiles escaped on ships leaving Marseille for the French Caribbean colony of Martinique, from where they might also go to the United States.Subak 2010, p. 91.
Fry's most important associate was a young French Protestant named Daniel Bénédite who functioned as his Chef de Cabinet and often his eyes and ears. Bénédite was briefly imprisoned by the French for his activities with ERC, but released through the intervention of one of the American diplomats in Marseille. American Charles Fernley Fawcett was the security guard, responsible for policing the long line of refugees waiting to be interviewed at Fry's headquarters. Fawcett also secured the release of several interned woman by claiming to be married to them. Among Fry's closest associates were Americans Miriam Davenport, a former art student at the Sorbonne, and Chicago heiress Mary Jayne Gold, a lover of the arts and the "good life" who had come to Paris in the early 1930s. Gold was wealthy and financed many of the operations of the ERC.Moulin 2007, p. 174.Riding, Alan. "Mary Jayne Gold, 88, heiress who helped artists flee Nazis." The New York Times. October 8, 1997. Retrieved: March 25, 2016. Especially instrumental in getting Fry the U.S. visas he needed for the artists, intellectuals and political dissidents on his list was Hiram Bingham IV, an American Vice Consul in Marseille. Bingham was personally responsible for issuing thousands of visas, many not in accordance with U.S. immigration policies.Riding 2010, p. PT106.Schwertfeger 2012, p. 64. Another diplomat in Marseille was Mexican Gilberto Bosques Saldívar who is credited with giving visas to 40,000 persons, mostly Jews, to emigrate to Mexico. The Unitarianism office in Lisbon, under the direction of Charles Joy and, later, Robert Dexter, helped refugees to wait in safety for visas and other necessary papers, and to gain passage by sea from Lisbon.Subak 2010, pp. 59, 103, 112, 148, 229–230. The YMCA representative in Marseille, Donald A. Lowrie was the leader of an advocacy group for refugees of 25 aid organizations in Vichy France. Lowrie obtained false passports from Czech diplomat Vladamir Vochoc for Czech refugees, including many Jews, and passed them on to Fry. In the United States, helping to secure visas for refugees, was Alfred Barr, Director of the Museum of Modern Art, and his wife Margaret Scolari Barr, an art historian also working at the MoMA.
The Centre Americain de Secours office in Marseille continued to function after Fry's departure in September 1941, getting an additional 300 people out of France. The Vichy government ordered the office closed in June 1942.
The priority of the United States in Vichy France was not facilitating the emigration of refugees to the U.S. John Hurley, a diplomat at the U.S. Consulate in Marseille, advised Fry to return home and the ERC in New York called him back. He responded by justifying his program and saying that he needed to stay in Marseille until a replacement arrived. He stayed another year. To Fry, the other refugee organizations were too law abiding, while they regarded him as a threat to their refugee aid programs and their attempts to build a working relationship with the American diplomats and Vichy officials to obtain visas and exit permits. HICEM, the well-funded and large Jewish organization, was wary of Fry as he was of them. He considered HICEM too sectarian. Apparently referring to Fry and the atmosphere at the Villa Air-Bel, Unitarian Charles Joy, said caustically that "working with refugees was not a parlor game."
Fry was forced to leave France in September 1941 after officials of both the Vichy government and the State Department objected to his covert activities. He then spent more than a month in Lisbon before returning to the United States in October. In January 1942, the ERC fired him. "Unfortunately, your attitude since returning to this country have made it inadvisable for us to continue your connection with the Committee," read the dismissal letter.
Charlie Fawcett, one of Fry's associates, commented similarly: "They wouldn’t listen to you. They thought, 'We were so famous, nobody will do anything to us.' Some of them said that! 'The French wouldn’t dare to do anything to us—there’s world opinion.' World opinion—can you imagine that? Let me tell you, world opinion wasn’t standing behind them much in those days."
The selection of those deeded eligible for ERC help among many tens of thousands of refugees was a brutal process, consisting of interviews and the personal knowledge of Fry and his associates. Fry later admitted that mistakes were made in deciding who received and who was denied help. The ERC staff was leery of anyone not known to them as he or she could be a police spy. Among those aided by Fry and the ERC, and also often aided by other refugee organizations, were: "Some of the 2,000 people assisted by Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee." Varian Fry Institute, February 12, 2008. Retrieved: March 25, 2016.
Other American refugee workers with experience in Europe, acknowledging that Fry's program in France had been effective, recruited him in 1944 to provide guidance to the Roosevelt administration's late-breaking refugee 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. (Its title refers to the 1940 French-German armistice clause requiring France to hand over to German authorities any refugee from "Greater Germany" the Gestapo might identify, a requirement Fry routinely violated.) 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 had 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, possibly owing to his irrational behavior, believed to have been a result of Bipolar disorder.Isenberg 2005, pp. 116, 251–252, 271.
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 Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York with his parents.
Fry's papers are held in Columbia University's Rare Book and Manuscript Library. "Varian Fry Papers." Rare Book and Manuscript Library: Columbia University. Retrieved: March 25, 2016.
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