This is a gripping account of young and unassuming American journalist Varian Fry’s mission to save the literary and artistic greats of his day
July 2, 2025 16:03
Just when eager readers may have thought that escape tales from detention and death camps during the Second World War have covered every angle, here is a meticulous historical account of a single year in a single city. In 300 pages, the German scholar Uwe Wittstock maps out the fall of France through the country’s escape routes from its last “free” zone in Marseille by land and sea. It combines the essential elements of a rigorous history of a year, with the derring-do and excitement of a fast-moving thriller, narrated in a breathless present tense. It’s a riveting book.
Marseille was the junction where those fleeing Nazism would gather to obtain the essential safe-conduct papers and, where necessary, a human guide, to get them over the Pyrenees into northern Spain, and on down to Lisbon, then the major trans-Atlantic exit point. Their onward journey was masterminded by a young American journalist Varian Fry. In 1935 he had been in Berlin, reporting on an anti-Jewish riot for the New York Times: “I saw one man brutally kicked and spat upon as he lay on the sidewalk, a woman bleeding, a man whose head was covered with blood, hysterical women crying. Nowhere did the police make any effort whatever to save the victims from this brutality.” This experience made Fry (a Presbyterian) determined to both express his solidarity with and to share the risks of Jewish people in flight.
Wittstock focuses on a single year, starting from the Nazi Occupation of Paris in June 1940, and with Fry determined to establish an Emergency Relief Committee (ERC). Within weeks, he succeeded in assembling “two hundred prominent people’” at New York’s Hotel Commodore, raising the then considerable sum of $3,500 in contributions.
From then he searched for an ERC representative to serve in Marseille, eventually volunteering himself. He went to France intending to stay three weeks, and remained 13 months. During that time he helped upwards of 2,000 refugees to escape over the Pyrenees into northern Spain and – with luck – on to Lisbon, to board a ship heading for the Americas.
Wittstock structures his chapters month by month, yet never loses momentum. Fry’s first task was to establish a safe house for refugees where he could equip them with the essential documents – including ID cards and train tickets where necessary – as well as guides to accompany them on their dangerous journey on foot or by car.
A dilapidated chateau known as the Villa Air-Bel proved the ideal base to house the expanding band of those in flight, including escapees from the two main regional French internment camps at Gurs and Les Milles but also some of the most significant intellectuals and artists of the day.
These included artists Marc Chagall and Max Ernst; Jacques Lipchitz; authors André Breton, André Gide, Heinrich Mann, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt and Lion Feuchtwanger, Brecht’s mentor. Established innovators in their work, often larger-than-life in their habits, the Kulturträger (transmitters of culture) represented all that the Nazis most loathed in international culture and radical politics.
Fry’s own relationship with the ERC and fellow organisations ended when he was expelled for his unorthodox methods and refusal to deny even the smallest chance of escape to Hitler’s victims. In June 1941, a year on from the establishment of the Villa Air-Bel, following his arrest and incarceration by the Vichy police, he studies not the list of those whom he helped save, but of the 15,000 he felt he’d “failed” in being unable to save.
It is characteristic of the brave but unassuming Fry that, when escorted by train to the Spanish border by an Inspector Garandel, they share their stories – and a bottle of cognac. Shortly before his death in 1967, France awarded Fry the Légion d’honneur. In 1996 Israel recognised him as the first American Righteous among the Nations.
He may even have assisted my family, two young members of whom were incarcerated at Les Milles, along with Ernst, Hans Bellmer and Feuchtwanger, and aided their escape from Les Milles on bicycles in 1941.
Marseille 1940: The Flight of Literature by Uwe Wittstock
Trans by Daniel Bowles
Polity Books