Varian Fry – The Story of a Selfless Man
Varian Fry helped thousands of people in the period of WW2. He helped these people get out of France as Hitler was destroying it. This is the story of what he did, and how he was recognised to be one of the Righteous Among the Nations, a very high title given to Gentiles who compassionately helped Jews.
In June 1940, Germany had a stunning victory over France. The Nazis had control over Paris, and many other parts of France. According to the armistice agreement, the French had to hand over all those that the Gestapo (the Nazi Police) wanted. Many tens of thousands of Jews and Anti-Nazis were in grave danger.
The ERC (Emergency rescue committee) which was started in New York sent a man called Varian Fry over to France, because the president’s wife had allowed 200 refugees to come into the country.
Two months after the German victory, at the age of 32, Varian Fry arrived in Marseilles, and started writing to those on the list of 200. Very soon, he realized that there were far more than 200 that needed help. In less than a day of his arrival in France, he had totally committed to helping Jews and other refugees get out of the country. The Americans would not let him take any more refugees, so he decided to work independently. If Fry was caught he would have been arrested. But nothing stopped him.
He joined some other people, some refugees, others not, and together they helped 50+ people per day. He even paid substantial amounts to his workers. In her memoir, Miriam Davenport Ebel (one of those who helped him) wrote “He could only pay me 3,000 francs a month, 750 a week in other words. He seemed to think that very little; to me it was riches. It was the salary of a lycée professor, more than twice that of a saleslady”
Varian helped the refugees in many, many ways. He smuggled many of them to America disguised as soldiers, and enlisted a cartoonist to create forge documents. He also created fake visas to many different countries, including Czechoslovakia, Spain, Mexico, and others. Day after day after day he kept coming to the office he had rented and helping more people. Guggenheim wrote: “The American Government was perpetually trying to get him to go back to America to avoid difficulties with the Vichy Government. However, he stuck it out to the bitter end.”
By December, the French finally arrested him after 3 months of solid work. He was arrested, and kept on a prison ship in the Marseille harbor. But he soon got back to his work and kept persevering and pushing forward, whatever the risk. Nothing could stop him now. He remained until August 1941, 1 year after he had started, when he was forced to return to America. Among the people he saved were Marc Chagall, Siegfreid Kracauer, Max Ernst and Jacques Lipchitz.
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