In June of 1935, two years after the German government falsely portrayed the burning of the Reichstag as a Communist plot to overthrow the state and just at the moment that it had banned all but “Aryans’’ from serving in the military and made homosexuality a crime, Varian Fry, a young Manhattan editor who was preparing to take over a magazine called The Living Age, traveled to Berlin.
About one month into his stay, he witnessed a night of gruesome rioting in which Jews were kicked, bloodied and spat on, leaving him to provide one of the earliest accounts of Nazi cruelties in the American news media. Relaying his observations to The Associated Press, Fry remarked that the police “nowhere’’ seemed “to make any effort whatever to save victims from this brutality.’’ Occasionally, he said, “they attempted to clear areas for motor traffic,’’ or to keep people from congregating in front of beloved cafes, but “that was all.’’ The crowds — made up of people young and old, well-bred-looking and common — chanting “‘The best Jew is a dead Jew,’” he continued, conducted themselves as if “in holiday mood.’’
The impression left was so searing that journalism alone became insufficient. During times of crisis, ordinary people often ask themselves what they can do; Fry’s pursuit of this line of self-inquiry did not take him to a place of protest clothes and phone banking. He became a founding member of the Emergency Rescue Committee, a group of activists who opposed the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924, sentiments of which are echoed in the Trump plan to stop protections against the deportation of young immigrants, worrying that the quotas it imposed would prevent refugees in need from finding safety in this country. The committee was concerned in particular about foreigners who had fled to southern France — an unoccupied part of the country under Vichy control — and who could now be turned over to the Nazis at any time.
With that in mind, in August 1940, Fry, a Protestant and 32-year-old, went to Marseilles to begin a covert rescue operation that during his 13-month stay would result in the escape of more than 2,000 people, among them many artists and intellectuals, including Marc Chagall, Hannah Arendt, Max Ernst, Heinrich Mann, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Jacques Lipchitz and Alma Mahler, who crossed the Pyrenees carrying Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 10, her former husband’s final composition.
Given the scope of his heroism and its implications for the momentum of 20th century cultural life, Fry remains relatively little known. He died in 1967, in Connecticut, a high school Latin teacher. In an announcement of his engagement to a Democratic Party political operative named Annette Riley in The New York Times in 1950, Fry is identified as the president of a film company called Cinemart, Inc. with no mention of his work during the war.
Fry is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery, in Brooklyn, where he had spent summers as a young boy with a grandfather who was active in the Children’s Aid Society. Earlier this year officials at Green-Wood got a call from someone prominent in immigration circles who suggested that Fry receive some considered attention. The moment seemed to demand it. As a result Fry’s life and legacy is the subject of a symposium scheduled at the cemetery for this weekend with panelists from the worlds of art and humanitarian aid.
While Fry was exceptional in some ways — an impressive student who graduated from Harvard having created an influential literary magazine with his friend Lincoln Kirstein, a co-founder of the New York City Ballet — there was little about him that would have presaged his outsize acts of bravery. “He was not James Bond,’’ Jeff Richman, Green-Wood’s resident historian said. Rejecting a name that seemed to destine him for espionage, Fry as a child at school asked to be called Tommy.
In June 1940, he had sent a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt explaining that there was an urgent need for someone — “an adventurous daredevil’’ — to go to France and risk his life in an attempt to “save the intended victims of Hitler’s chopping block.” But Fry did not see himself in the role, in part because his own command of French and German was merely “halting,’’ he wrote and because he had “no experience whatever in detective work.”
He hoped that either Mrs. Roosevelt or her husband could suggest someone, but when no such individual surfaced, he volunteered as if there were no other reasonable choice — strapping $3,000 to his leg as he left New York, holding meetings in bathrooms with the water running to evade the detection of German spies who had planted listening devices. Moral calling inserted him in a world of black market money, forged passports and visas and clandestine mountain routes. He stayed in France, having originally imagined it would only be for a few weeks, long past the point at which he understood it was dangerous.
When Fry returned to the United States, parties were not thrown. The State Department, which had insisted on keeping the number of immigrants bound for the United States low, hardly approved of what he had been doing. Fry’s one ally was the vice counsel in Marseilles, Hiram Bingham IV, who helped provide Fry’s passengers with travel documents, some of them fraudulent, after a few hundred authorized emergency visas had run out. Bingham suffered too for his rectitude, never advancing significantly in the Foreign Service. Instead he retired in his 40s to a farm in Connecticut to paint and play the cello. Today both men would find much more to do.