Varian Fry

Varian Mackey Fry (October 15, 1907 – September 13, 1967) was an American journalist.

Fry ran a rescue network in Vichy France that helped 2,000 to 4,000 anti-Nazi and Jewish refugees to escape Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

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 risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.

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, an 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Bingham was personally responsible for issuing thousands of visas, both legal and illegal.

Fry was also helped in his mission by Alfred Barr, Director of the Museum of Modern Art, and his wife Margaret Scolari Barr, an art historian also working at the MoMA.

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 passage by sea from Lisbon.

Although Fry was a closeted homosexual, according to his son James, they married on 2 June 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".

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. 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.

Shortly after the invasion of France in June 1940, which the Germans quickly occupied, Fry and friends formed the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC) in New York City, with support of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and others.

By August 1940, Fry was in Marseille representing the ERC in an effort to help persons seeking to flee the Nazis.

They worked to circumvent bureaucratic processes set up by French authorities, who would not issue exit visas.

Fry had $3,000 and a short list of refugees, mostly German Jews, under imminent threat of arrest by agents of the Gestapo.

Other anti-Nazi writers, avant-garde artists, musicians, and hundreds of others came to him, 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 took ships to the United States.

Fry helped other exiles escape on ships leaving Marseille for the French Caribbean colony of Martinique, from where they could also go to the United States.

Fry was forced to leave France in September 1941 after officials of both the Vichy government and of the United States State Department had become angered by his covert activities.

He then spent more than a month in Lisbon before returning to the United States in October.

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 as a leading nonsectarian, nongovernmental international relief and development organization that still operates today.

Among those aided by Fry were:

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."