In June 1940, France fell to Hitler. More than four million people – refugees from across Europe as well as French citizens – were suddenly trapped in the “unoccupied zone,” the southern French provinces where the Vichy government was obliged by Armistice Article 19 to “surrender on demand” anyone the Gestapo wished to interrogate, imprison, intern in concentration camps or return to Germany for trial or murder. Panicking, thousands fled to Marseilles, hoping to find a way out of France.
As described by Victor Serge in his Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Marseilles in the summer of 1940 embraced a “crowd of refugees of first-rate brains from all those classes which have ceased to exist through the mere fact of daring to say no, most of them rather quietly, to totalitarian oppression. In our ranks are enough doctors, psychologists, engineers, educators, poets, painters, writers, musicians, economists and public meant to vitalize a whole great country. Our wretchedness contains as much talent and expertise as Paris could summon in the days of her primes, and none of it is visible, only hunted, terribly tired men at the limit of their nervous resources.”
Among these “hunted and terribly tired men” were some of the great artists, poets, writers and intellectuals of the twentieth century: André Breton, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Jacques Lipchitz, Henri Matisse, Lion Feuchtwanger, already in an internment camp, Franz Werfel and his wife, Alma Mahler Werfel, and Hannah Arendt.
Also, in Marseilles and at great risk were Konrad Heiden, whose truthful biography of Hitler made him an obvious target for Nazi reprisals, German Social Democratic leader Rudolph Breitscheid, former German Minister of Finance Rudolph Hilferding, and Italian Socialist Party leader Giuseppe Modigliani. There were others, scholars, journalists, scientists, Nobel-Prize winners, world renowned intellects, what Daniel Bell termed “the flower of European culture” desperately cornered individuals “at the edge of the water, waiting anxiously for their fate to be decided.”
For many, fate came in the form of another individual in Marseilles in August of 1940, an American by the name of Varian Fry, who, together with a small group of unlikely associates, succeeded in assisting more than two thousand artists, musicians, writers, scholars, politicians, labor leaders and their families to leave France either legally or illegally. Their effort came to be called “Operation Emergency Rescue,” the official name give to what ultimately emerged as the evacuation and preservation of civilization at risk.
There are times when the circumstances of history turn great men into small men, and small men into heroes. Such was the case with so many of the refugees caught in France in the summer of 1940, and with Varian Fry, an ordinary man transformed by extraordinary events. Caught in the lethal tempest of war, frightened wand desperate men and women of exceptional talents trusted him with their lives.
By virtue of Fry’s actions, both prominent and lesser known individuals were able to lead their lives, free from fear and persecution, as citizens of a free nation, and within that freedom, to create, contribute and prevail.
In April 1991, the United States Holocaust Memorial Council awarded Varian Fry its highest honor, the Eisenhower Liberation Medal. At the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s opening, in 1993, an exhibition, “ASSIGNMENT RESCUE: Varian Fry, 1940—1941,” brought the full story of Fry’s mission in France to the public.
At the request of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Heroes and Martyrs Remembrance Authority, Jerusalem, the Museum provided information and documentation from its research. In 1996, Yad Vashem posthumously honored Varian Fry as the first American to be named “Righteous Among the Nations.”
At the ceremony, Secretary of State Warren Christopher said, “Operating under constant threat, without regard for his personal safety, Varian Fry worked tirelessly, using every means available, to secure safe passage for those who came to him, desperate for help…even today, [his] tale of courage and compassion is too little known by his countrymen.”
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