AMERICAN SCHINDLER

'American Schindler’ helped 4,000 Jews escape the Nazis

An American journalist saved up to 4,000 Jews from the Nazis and helped ship some of the brightest Jewish minds from art and literature to New York, newly released passenger figures show.

 

Varian Fry on a blacony in Berlin Photo: USHMM Photo Archive

Those saved by Varian Fry, known as the American Oskar Schindler, include Marc Chagall, the Jewish French-Russian artist, Claude Levi-Strauss, the French anthropologist, and surrealist artist, Marcel Duchamp.

But while Schindler, a German Industrialist, has been internationally recognised for saving an estimated 1,200 Jews - his story was made into the 1993 film Schindler’s List, directed by Steven Spielberg - the full extent of Fry’s heroic efforts is only now coming to light.

The passenger lists of ships bound for New York from Europe have revealed the true extent of his work with the French Resistance during the Second World War to smuggle Jews out of Nazi occupied territory.

Others who owed him their life to Fry were artists Max Ernst and Andre Breton, the Nobel laureate physiologist Otto Meyerhof, mathematician Jaques Hadamard, and writers Franz Werfel, Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Mann.

A Harvard Classical scholar, who had covered Hitler’s rise to power before the outbreak of war for an American newspaper, Fry returned to New York and dedicated himself to raising funds to help persecuted Jews escape to America.

This month marks the 70th anniversary since Fry first arrived in Marseille as part of the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC) an independent organization set up by wealthy Americans concerned with the persecution of the Jews.

Fry arrived in the French port with a chequebook and a list of 200 intellectuals deemed at greatest risk from the Gestapo. He spent a year fighting bureaucracy to bring them, their families and several thousand other Jews to start a new life in America.

The list of those he saved has been traced through historical records published on the family history website Ancestry.co.uk.

Annabel Bernhardt from the online archive service said: “Like so many who acted in opposition to the Nazis, Varian Fry is something of a forgotten hero.

“Therefore with 70 years having now passed since he started his important work which ultimately saved thousands of lives, it is important to remember him, and also to explore his legacy through historical records.”

Fry, who died in 1967, a month before his 60th birthday, was posthumously named 'Righteous Among Nations’ in 1995 by Yad Vasham, Israel’s Holocaust Memorial, the first American to be awarded the honour reserved for those non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazis.

A documentary film about the time he spent in Marseille is currently in production.