Fry’s List: The Artists

When high school Latin teacher Varian Fry died alone at 59 of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1967, papers recovered from his home by police were reportedly described as a work of fiction. It was not.

Fry was in the midst of writing a new version for young people of his 1945 book, “Surrender on Demand,” detailing his dramatic rescue work in France in which he saved nearly 2,000 artists, intellectuals and others. Among Fry’s “clients” were painters Marc Chagall, Andre Masson and Max Ernst, philosopher and writer Hannah Arendt, novelists Franz Werfel and Lion Feuchtwanger, poet and essayist Andre Breton, sculptor Jacques Lipchitz.

Fry’s daring wartime exploits are at the heart of an exhibition now on view at the Jewish Museum here through March 29. With its three-dimensional “suggested environments,” “Assignment: Rescue, The Story of Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee” re-creates everything from Fry’s New York apartment to his hotel room in Marseilles. Supplemented by period photographs, many taken by Fry, the walk-through exhibition depicts cafes, internment camps and even the French villa where Surrealists and others spent time awaiting their visas to leave France.

“Our show is calling attention to a figure many people don’t know about,” says Susan Goodman, the Jewish Museum’s chief curator. “Yet this is the story of an individual who risked his life for artists, intellectuals and Jews and had no personal or vested interest. He wasn’t Jewish or European. He had some sort of personal transformation there. His story shows any person can be a hero.”

The son of a New Jersey stockbroker, Fry attended prep schools, studied classics at Harvard and, after graduating, pursued international affairs and journalism at Columbia University. He worked at Scholastic magazine, edited the monthly magazine the Living Age, was editor of the Foreign Policy Assn.’s Headline Books.

His work kept him aware of what was happening abroad. He knew that European exiles had often fled to France and that France’s fall to Germany created, in his words, “the most gigantic man-trap in history.” Worse, the Vichy government’s armistice with Germany included the infamous Article 19, which required France to “surrender on demand” German and other “political” refugees, which included Jews and other opponents of the Nazi regime.

Fry sympathized with the work of the Emergency Rescue Committee, formed in the U.S. to help get political and cultural refugees to safety. Not only did Fry believe strongly in the contribution of artists to society, but he had also been to Berlin in 1935 and seen the way Jews were both humiliated and brutalized. He told a friend later of seeing a Nazi soldier pin an old Jewish man’s hand to a table with his knife, pull out the knife and walk away laughing. He would not “remain idle” if there was a chance to save people in France who might be intended victims of “that same oppression.”

Fry says the Emergency Rescue Committee selected him because they couldn’t find anyone else. Others say he volunteered. Either way, as he readily admitted, he had no experience in either refugee or underground work. (He was so naive about his mission that one of the last things he did before leaving New York was to buy a new dress shirt.)

In August, 1940, two months after France fell, 32-year-old Fry boarded a Pan American Clipper in New York. He had with him the names of 200 refugees he was to bring out of France and $3,000, reportedly wrapped around one of his legs, to help him do so. He expected to stay three weeks.

Fry set up operations in his room on the fourth floor of Marseille’s Ho^tel Splendide, a map of possible escape routes behind the mirror of his wardrobe. There, and later at an outside office, he ran by day a relief organization, helping people with visas, funds, food. But after hours, sometimes in his hotel room where running water in the bathroom would camouflage conversation, he helped his “clients” get Czech passports, or sometimes Chinese or Siamese visas. A Viennese cartoonist helped create false identity cards.

Leading a double life, he became a sort of 20th century Scarlet Pimpernel. Sometimes accompanying refugees to the border, he burned papers in train bathrooms, stuffed messages into hollowed-out toothpaste tubes. His mission expanded from three weeks to 13 months once he decided that far more than 200 people needed his help. He reviewed cases of 15,000 people who either visited or wrote to him.

The Jewish Museum exhibition, like the 1993 predecessor at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., on which it is closely modeled, is designed to allow visitors to experience Marseilles and the refugees much as Fry did--to literally enter Fry’s world. Text panels are from Fry’s writings, and many of the mural-size photographs are his. “There is no curatorial writing in the show, which is why it very much is an evolving story,” says Goodman. “You live it through Varian Fry’s words.”

Early in the exhibition, for instance, is an environment reminiscent of Fry’s New York apartment at the time. On the walls are photographs he took in Berlin in 1935. Visitors can see Fry’s packed suitcase with its silk handkerchief and fresh white shirt from Brooks Brothers.

The only major artwork in the show is in the re-creation of the Villa Air-Bel, a 19th century villa half an hour from Marseilles where everyone from philanthropist Peggy Guggenheim to surrealist Breton stayed with Fry at some point. The winter was so cold, they slept in their overcoats, and the scarce food was supplemented by plentiful wine. Other Surrealists visited, and often they would create montages or other artworks that Breton would review and praise. Sometimes, too, they would hang their paintings in the trees and auction them off to one another.

There is an on-site re-creation of a cafe, one of the places refugees gathered for both anonymity and communication. On a large screen are cafe scenes from the time, including a voice-over by writer Hans Sahl, who was rescued by Fry and also worked with him for a time. Visitors can also sit in the cafe and read assorted relevant documents.

There have been small adjustments to the show’s design in New York, Goodman says, because of spatial restraints, but both it and its Washington predecessor were designed by Lynne Breslin. People have told Goodman that going through the show they feel “confused, trapped and disoriented,” she says, “and that is absolutely the intention of the show. The show’s designer wishes to suggest the disorientation of the refugee.”

By the time Fry arrived, leaving the Mediterranean port city of Marseilles was extremely difficult. Some of his “clients” were still able to leave by train or boat with the passports or visas he got for them, but others had far more difficult passage. Museum maps, artifacts and photographs dramatize escape routes, most notably the “F route” (named after a Fry colleague whose last name began with F.) Refugees dressed as farm laborers and, often carrying their possessions in lunch-style containers, would head out into the fields and across the border into Spain.

Perhaps the most famous escape was that of a group including Lion Feuchtwanger, Thomas Mann’s brother Heinrich and son Golo, Alma Mahler Werfel and Franz Werfel, who crossed the Pyrenees on foot. (Fry meanwhile took their 12 suitcases with him on the train. Alma Mahler Werfel’s bags reportedly contained Mahler compositions, a draft of Werfel’s “The Song of Bernadette” and the original score of Anton Bruckner’s Third Symphony.)

Many of these refugees went on to make enormous contributions to American as well as European culture. As the Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibition “Exiles and Emigres” demonstrated earlier this year, Europe’s loss was often America’s gain. Many of Fry’s rescuees “would have significant impact upon subsequent generations of American artists and scholars,” says Stephanie Barron, the curator of “Exiles and Emigres.”

Not all of the people Fry tried to rescue could be saved, obviously, while others had to be convinced to leave. A worried Marc Chagall asked Fry if there were cows in America, for instance. At another point, when Chagall, a Jew, was arrested, Fry phoned the Vichy police to say Chagall was “one of the world’s greatest living artists.” Should word of his arrest become known, he said, “the world would be shocked, Vichy would be gravely embarrassed and you would probably be severely reprimanded.” (Chagall was home in less than an hour.)

Fry himself was often threatened with arrest and, in August 1941, was finally ordered out of France. It was expected--he received little support from either French or American officials and had long been pressured by both to leave; his passport had been confiscated in January 1941, when it expired. (Fry’s book, which has been reissued by Johnson Books in conjunction with this exhibition, includes a preface by former Secretary of State Warren Christopher noting, among other things, that Fry’s “heroic actions never received the support they deserved from the U.S. government, particularly the State Deptartment.”)

Toward the end of the exhibition, there is a blowup of Fry’s Dec. 2, 1942, cover story in the New Republic, headlined “The Massacre of the Jews.” Quoting reports that nearly 2 million European Jews had already been slain, he cited “evidence”--letters, cables, other documents. He urged the U.S. to offer asylum and to cease bureaucratic delays that were stalling visas. “He was one of the major voices to speak out on the horrors,” says curator Goodman, “and he was ignored.”

Discouraged by the U.S. government’s lack of acknowledgment and response to the situation in Europe, Fry soon retreated from public life. As Holocaust Museum research curator Elizabeth Kessin Berman writes in a new afterword to Fry’s book, Fry devoted himself to such things as horticulture, birding, wine tasting and photography. He returned to France in the late ‘60s and met with many of his former artist “clients” about contributions to a portfolio of prints to raise funds for the International Rescue Committee. But less than a year later, he died, separated from his second wife and teaching Latin at a high school in Redding, Conn.

While Fry received France’s Croix du Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor shortly before he died in 1967, he did not receive the appreciation given fellow heroes Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg until his story was brought to greater public attention by the 1993 exhibition in Washington. Fry’s story was selected as the Holocaust Museum’s first special exhibition, says its curator Susan Morgenstein, because “it was a dramatic and uplifting American tale and piece of American history that we felt was inspiring and important to the education of family audiences.”

The show also further documented Fry’s heroism for another audience, leading to his selection in 1996 as the first American designated by Israel “Righteous Among the Nations,” an award given to non-Jews who risk their lives to save Jews. The reissue of Fry’s memoirs, which the New York Times Book Review in 1945 said was “by turns wildly exciting, horrifying and exalting,” should also widen knowledge of his heroism.

There have been films made about Fry in Europe since then, and other documentaries are either planned or in preparation both in the U. S. and abroad. The Jewish Museum has organized extensive programming there and at such other New York venues as the Museum of Modern Art, the New School for Social Research, Columbia University, Manhattan School of Music and the Goethe Institute.

“I stayed because the refugees needed me,” Fry wrote as he was on his way back from France in 1941. “But it took courage, and courage is a quality I hadn’t previously been sure I possessed.”

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The Jewish Museum, 1109 5th Ave. (at 92nd Street), New York. Sundays, Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, 11 a.m. to 5:45 p.m.; Tuesdays, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Adults, $7; students and senior citizens, $5; children under 12, free; also free to all on Tuesdays, 5 to 8 p.m. (212) 423-3200. Through March 29.