Exodus from Vichy France

...Marino also interviewed additional people, had access (o various remaining Fry papers, and reviewed the memoirs published by a half-dozen other participants...

...Working mostly out of Marseilles, where he established an American Rescue Center, Fry and his dedicated staff interviewed more than 12,000 prospective refugees (or perhaps 18,000...

...He was left out when the Emergency Rescue Committee merged into the International Rescue Committee...

...Soon the Gestapo was hunting Italian and Spanish anti-Fascists as well...

...And he helped André Malraux, who was organizing the Free French underground resistance, gel a report on his work to General Charles de Gaulle in London...

...Marino tolls us more than Fry did about the others in the drama, refugees and rescuers alike, and he discloses various wartime sec rets Fry could not divulge in 1945...

...Fry went to see the American-born Ernst "Putzi"" Hanfstaengel, who was the foreign press chief in Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry...

...The same day...

...For 20 minutes, they heard her trying to persuade her husband to grant the necessary entry visas...

...One closes Marino's book with mixed but strong feelings: feelings of shame for the petty bureaucrats who did Fry in, and feelings of great pride in him and the wonderful people who helped him...

...For that assistance Fry was awarded the cross of the Legion of Honor in 1967...

...Despite strong testimony on Fry's behalf by Alfred Kazin and Sol Levitas, the executive editor of The New Leader, it took five months to clear his name and get the ban lifted...

...The Fry mission originated at a crisis meeting held in New York's Commodore Hotel on June 25, the day after Marshal Pétarn's rump government in Vichy signed an armistice that agreed to "surrender on demand" any Germans named by the Nazis—which primarily meant Jews, intellectuals, Social Democrats, and other anti-Nazi activists...

...Since Hanfstaengel had not declared the conversation off the record, "Fry filed another report through the [AP] as soon as he had left the country, quoting Hanfaestengel's exact words...

...The initial impulse for the meeting came from "Paul Hagen" (Leo Frank), a German Socialist who had already organized a committee of American Friends of German Freedom...

...Why, they wanttoexterminate them, replied Hanfstaengel simply...

...at its opening, Secretary of State Warren Christopher formally apologized on behalf of (he Stale Department to Fry's family...

...He and their common literary agent persuaded his friend Andy Marino to take up Ihe job...

...Its inner strength— and Fry's own—lies in the force of the democratic convictions that led him to volunteer for the dangerous Vichy France assignment, to constantly risk new dangers, and to stay as long as he possibly could...

...Erika Mann, daughter of Thomas Mann, persuaded the group that "money alone" would not relieve the situation of the artists and intellectuals scattered around France (many underground, others already detained by Vichy authorities...

...Breitscheid was sure that Hitler would "never dare" arrest them, but both men were eventually seized by the Gestapo...

...At the time (1951), Fry was a member of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom and Alfred Kohlberg's pro-Kuomintang American China Policy Association...

...The contradictory guidance that consular officers in Europe received amounted to: "Issue all the visas you wish, but not to the people who apply for them...

...Somebody has to go there, she said, to find these people and somehow get them out of the Nazis'reach...

...A number of emergency visas were quickly issued...

...Breitscheid perished in an American air raid...

...The New Russian Tragedy" Even if Varian Fry (1907-67) had not himself written frequently for The New Leader during the 1940s, and even if so many of the European intellectuals he rescued from Vichy France in 194041 had not also gone on to write for this journal, it is likely that NL readers would especially value A Quiet American...

...Kill them all...

...The best account of the Fry mission is still his own...

...There were also sad tales, like that of two German Social Democrats, Rudolf Breitscheid and Rudolf Hilferding, who declined Fry's pleas to let him gel them out...

...A Quiet American owes its existence to Donald Carroll, an editor of art books in London...

...When il was over, he filed a story at Ihe Associated Press office that appeared the following morning on the front page of the New York Times...

...and bring as many of the endangered refugees as possible across the Atlantic...

...Roosevelt was also helpful on several subsequent occasions, as was Secretary of State Cordell Hull, but they could not always prevail over the reactionaries and anti-Semites in the State Department led by Assistant Secretary Breckinridge Long...

...After the ERC leaders spent several weeks without finding a representative to send to Vichy France, Varian Fry—then a young classical scholar turned foreignaffairs journalist—volunteered to take on the task...

...Although in December 1942 he had published an unusually informative and prophetic article in the New Republic on "The Destruction of European Jews" under way, later in the War he publicly broke with that magazine because of its ever more pro-Soviet line...

...There were personal ups and downs (divorce, depression, psychoanalysis, remarriage), but also great professional frustrations...

...The story combines personal heroism, political commitment, shrewd observation (needed, for example, to identify French and Spanish police and border guards willing to look the other way), and enough adventures involving successful and failed escapes to keep a movie or TV producer in business for years on end...

...Senator Hiram Bingham, and a colleague, Myles Standish, were among those who helped the refugees whenever they could...

...On June 27, Hagen and Buttinger went down to Washington to seek help from Eleanor Roosevelt...

...He left by PanAm Clipper on August 4, expecting to stay a few weeks...

...I lilferding hanged himself...

...Surrender on Demand, published by Random House in January 1945...

...Fry helped hundreds of British flyers, shot down in France and elsewhere by the Luftwaffe, to get home via Spain and/or Portugal...

...The museum also made Fry's undertaking the theme of an exhibit...

...They included the economist Albert O. Flirschman, who helped design the Marshall Plan...

...and by a variety of means dispatched some 1,500 to freedom, including nearly all the "big stars": Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfe I and his wife, the celebrated Alma Mahler Werfel, André Breton, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Lipchitz, Konrad Heiden, Arthur Koestler, Hannah Arendt, and such young antiNazis as Norbert Mühlen (a frequent contributor to The New Leader during the 1950s...

...Frank Kingdon, a Methodist minister and president of Newark University, accepted the chairmanship of what was called the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC)—and $3,500 (then an appreciable sum) was raised on the spot...

...Believing that FBI files might have prompted the Army to deny him film work, Fry wrote personally to J. Edgar Hoover, who disclaimed responsibility...

...For Fry's heroic deeds were part of the vigorous response of American liberals to the fall of France in June 1940, a response The New Leader (anti-Fascist, antiCommunist) contributed to throughout and after World War II...

...Mosl usefully, Marino sketches Fry's life before and after his year of glory, liven before informing the reader about Kry's origins and beliefs, Marino's brilliant opening chapter describes how Fry observed a vicious Nazi pogrom in Berlin on July 15, 1935...

...the young Virginian Charlie Fawcell, who married a series of Jewish girls to get them out of concentration camps (he himself escaped from the Biarritz Geslapo headquarters by walking out the front gate behind a German officer and hopping a train...

...Fry pushed Hanfslaengel on what the so-called radicals wanted to do with the Jews...

...Carroll's efforts produced an article on Fry in American Heritage magazine in 1983, bui he could go no further...

...How Fry and his friends performed all these miracles (avoiding violence) is one of the great stories of the 20th century, as colorful and dramatic in its way as the book of Exodus, although without, perhaps, the presence of divinity...

...Many of the consular officers were all too ready to give the refugees the cold shoulder...

...some records were lost during police raids...

...As it turned out, Fry spent 13 months of 16- to 18-hour days on the scene, with danger ever present...

...Hanfstaengel tried to sell Fry the proposition that there was a struggle at the top of Ihe Nazi hierarchy between "moderates" and "radicals" on how to solve the Jewish problem...

...In 1997, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum undertook, with Johnson Books of Pueblo, Colorado, to republish Surrender on Demandas a handsome paperback with a postscript by the museum curators...

...Famous Europeans (her father, Jacques Maritain, Jules Romains, Jan Masaryk, Max Ascoli, Julio Alvarez del Vayo, Joseph Buttinger) nominated people for an ERC list of 100 persons...

...If necessary, the ship will cruise up and down the East Coast until the American people, out of shame and anger, force the President and Congress to permit these victims of political persecution to land...

...The moderates supposedly favored assembling Jews in reservations in Germany or getting them to emigrate to Madagascar...

...The Commodore participants included Reinhold Niebuhr, Dorothy Thompson, Elmer Davis, Raymond Gram Swing, and Robert Hutchins...

...Finally, she got tough: "If Washington refuses to authorize these visas immediately, German and American émigré leaders with the help of their American friends will rent a ship...

...In addition...

...He was finally forced to leave by an unholy alliance of Nazis, Petainists and foes in the State Department (plus, alas, the inadequacies of a "home office" that had difficulty coping with his ceaseless torrent of emergency visa requests...

...He quit the film business the next year and was soon teaching the classics again...

...There were honorable exceptions from this disgraceful record: Hiram "Harry" Bingham, a vice-consul at Marseilles who was the son of former U.S...

...Harry Bingham in Connecticut: and Gaston Defferre, Fry's brave lawyer in 1940 who later became the longterm Mayor of Marseilles...

...tried to help more than 4,000 of them...

...Sharply focused and written, in a taut prose style that recalls the young Graham Greene, it is a book seemingly destined (on literary as well as political grounds) to become a classic...

...The fortunate result is his very good new book, which amplifies (it is twice as long) and adds color to Fry's basic narrative...

...Every approach to government employment (even the Office of Strategic Services) and Government contract work encountered the hostility of "security" types...

...A television producer for several years, he was denied permission to do film work for the Army on the spurious grounds that he had been "a Communist Party member since 1937" who "openly and actively engaged in Communist Party activities...

...It, too, made the front page of the New York Times" The last 30 pages of Marino's book recount what happened to Fry after he came home...

...In 1965 he came upon a reference lo "the Fry committee" in a book on Chagall and was curious to learn about it...

...This was the solution favored by Hitler and Goebbels...

...Ten years later, he sought out Variait's widow in New York and began interviewing everyone he could who had been involved with Fry's operations...