Escape from wartime Marseille

Contre nous de la tyrannie

L’étendard sanglant est levé.

La Marseillaise

Varian Fry, like Oskar Schindler in Poland and Raoul Wallenberg in Hungary, saved thousands of Jews from death.  Fluent in French and German, idealistic, courageous and politically shrewd, Fry worked in Marseille from August 1940 to September 1941 for the New York-based Emergency Rescue Committee.

His father was the wealthy manager of a Wall Street firm.  Varian Fry (1907-67) was educated at Hotchkiss School and Harvard, where he co-edited the innovative little magazine Hound & Horn and published Joyce, Eliot and Pound.  After college he worked as a journalist.  His sometime-lover Lincoln Kirstein called Fry officious, tiresome and often depressed, erudite and sensitive with bouts of “aggressive intellectual one-upmanship”, but with an admirable mind and knowledge of the Classics.  A secret homosexual, Fry was married twice and had three children.  When his wife in New York found out about his homosexual liaison with one of his colleagues in France, she bitterly asked, “How is your Danny?”

During the war Marseille was not at all like the charming romantic city celebrated in the sentimental films Fanny (1932 & 1961), based on the trilogy by Marcel Pagnol. Fry rescued 2,000 Jewish, German-Austrian, anti-Nazi exiles, who were hiding out in Marseille or confined to concentration camps in Vichy France.  Many exiles suffered barbaric conditions in the internment camps: unheated barracks, filthy latrines, crawling vermin, straw mattresses, scarce water, insufficient food and devastating disease.  The prisoners were always at the mercy of the brutal French guards who worked for the Nazis.  Three agonised exiles, including the distinguished critic Walter Benjamin, committed suicide rather than face capture and torture by the Gestapo.

Mary Jayne Gold, an attractive wealthy heiress and expert liar, gave money to Fry’s organization and worked closely with him.  She also became disastrously obsessed with the sexually magnetic criminal “Killer” Raymond and paid to get him out of prison.  Raymond’s rival then offered to kill him so he could inherit Mary Jayne.  Once released, Raymond resumed his criminal activities with the Corsican gangs of Marseille, finally left the emotionally shattered Gold and joined the British army.  After distinguished service and suffering several wounds with British commandos in the war, Raymond became a member of the French general staff.

Varian Fry,

Fry saved many elite writers, artists and intellectuals, including Thomas Mann’s son Golo and brother Heinrich; Heinrich’s bargirl wife Nelly, who was vulgar, alcoholic and addicted to drugs; Franz Werfel and his rich pretentious wife Alma Mahler, who managed to travel with 12 suitcases that contained precious original scores by Gustav Mahler and Anton Bruckner; as well as Lion Feuchtwanger, André Breton, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Lipchitz and André Masson.  When Werfel was hiding in the Catholic pilgrimage town of Lourdes, he became fascinated by the young girl who had convinced the world she’d seen visions of the Virgin Mary.  Safe in California, Werfel wrote the tremendously successful novel, made into a popular film, The Song of Bernardette (1943).

As Fry tried to help these exiles escape from the German Occupation of France,

he fought a desperate race with the swift advance of German tanks.  The refugees needed an almost impossible-to-get combination of documents, equivalent to a royal flush in poker: French exit visas, Spanish and Portuguese transit visas, tickets on over-crowded ships from Lisbon to New York and influential people in America who would sponsor them.  The greatest stateside help came from Eleanor Roosevelt and Thomas Mann, “the all-powerful savior in times of need”.  When the refugees could not obtain exit visas, Fry arranged to have them illegally led on foot through arduous paths in the Pyrenees mountains and safely into neutral Spain.  Communists such as Victor Serge and unmarried couples were refused entry to America, and went instead to Mexico and Martinique.

In 1940, before the U.S. entered the war, Fry’s work was fiercely opposed by the American Consul-General in Marseille.  He did not want to offend the Nazi-controlled Vichy government in France and kept demanding that Fry be recalled.  But Fry was actively helped by the Consul’s subordinate Hiram Bingham IV (descended from the discoverer of Machu Picchu in Peru), who hid Chagall and others in his own home.  Despite intense pressure, Fry refused to leave until he was actually arrested and forced out of France.  The obstacles were endless.  Fry found an expert forger of passports and visas, but he too was later arrested.  Two attempts to escape by ship from Marseille also failed.  One ship sank; the captain of the other vessel took all the money in advance and suddenly disappeared.

Uwe Wittstock’s Marseille 1940 (Polity, 319 pp, £25/$30) narrates an important subject in a fascinating way.  Instead of following each main character from beginning to end, he narrates a series of brief, lively, present-tense, month-by-month chronological scenes and describes the terrible ordeals of all the prominent exiles who sought help in Marseille.

The most perilous escape, which took the older Manns, Werfels, Feuchtwangers and young Golo over the mountains, was exciting.  Heinrich was 69, Werfel was overweight and had a heart condition.  Uwe Wittstock writes: “It is an oppressively hot day.  The leader procures water for the whole group.  Since Fry is the only one to have an exit visa he is to take the train over the border with the luggage.  Before saying goodbye to the others, he buys them a dozen packs of cigarettes, Gitanes and Gauloises, which they can slip to the Spanish customs agents as soon as they reach the border posts.”

Unfortunately, the translation from German by Daniel Bowles is extremely awkward and has more than 20 strange expressions, including “planned that Jeanne will take,” “by no means made only friends,” “defying her charisma”.  But surprising moments of humour compensate for this defect.  Someone had a dog that barked whenever Hitler’s name was mentioned; messages were secretly packed into condoms; Thomas Mann was pleased that Heinrich and Golo had been saved but sorry that Nelly Mann, whom he loathed, had been rescued.  When French officials became suspicious of the exiles living in a whorehouse, one of Fry’s colleagues offered to “sacrifice” himself and disappeared with one of the obliging women.  Max Ernst, without any papers, unrolled his paintings at the Spanish border and the guard, recognizing great art, let him pass.

Despite Fry’s heroic efforts the Nazis, with active French cooperation, murdered 75,000 native and foreign Jews in France.  In 1994 he was recognized in Jerusalem by the Yad Vashem memorial to victims of the Holocaust as one of the “Righteous Among Nations.”

Varian’s War (2001), an earnest but rather dull movie with William Hurt and Julia Ormond, tells his story.  By contrast, the brilliant film Casablanca (1942), which has a flashback to Bogart and Bergman in Paris the day before the German invasion, vividly portrays the refugees in Morocco who are trying to escape from North Africa via Lisbon to America.  The hard-nosed, soft-hearted Bogart allows the young Bulgarian couple to win money in his casino so they can bribe the corrupt police chief and obtain their exit visas.  At the end of the patriotic film, the idealistic Bogart renounces his love for Ingrid Bergman, enabling her to fly out of Casablanca with her husband and continue their vital underground work.

Fry’s activities suggest famous heroic accounts in Virgil’s Aeneid and the Hebrew Bible.  The exiles recall Aeneas fleeing from the burning Troy with his father on his back.  Fry recalls Moses leading the Jews out of Egyptian bondage and into the Promised Land.

Jeffrey Meyers published Forty-Three Ways of Looking at Hemingway with LSU Press in November.  The Biographer’s Quest will appear in April 2026.

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