Varian Fry knew trouble was coming. Adolph Hitler and his Nazi party had taken control of Germany in 1933. Now they had begun a brutal campaign of persecuting the Jews. Fry saw this for himself when he was visiting Germany in 1935. Again and again, Fry, a writer from New York City, saw how the Nazis went after Jews. He saw bloody riots staged against them. Once he saw a Nazi soldier pin an old Jewish man’s hand to a table with a knife. Then the Nazi pulled out the knife and walked away, laughing. After that, Fry, who was not a Jew, decided that he would fight to save Jews from Nazi horror if he ever had the chance.

　　That chance came in 1940, one year after World War II broke out. By then, the Nazis had conquered France. They ordered French officials to “surrender on demand ” any Jew or Nazi enemy. Such people were to be turned over to the Nazi police, called the Gestapo.

　　At this time, the U.S. was still at peace. It did not join the war until the end of 1941.Still, many Americans wanted to help those trapped by the Nazis. Some of them formed the Emergency Rescue Committee. Its main goal was to get Jewish artists and writers out of France. The committee needed someone to go to France to oversee this effort. The person would risk arrest, torture, and maybe death. Fry had no training for this kind of rescue work. Nonetheless, he volunteered to go. He later wrote, “…I could not remain idle so long as I had the chance at all of saving even a few of [Nazi Germany’s] intended victims.”

　　Fry was an unlikely hero. He had never done anything brave in his life. He certainly didn’t look heroic. Fry was a thin 32-year-old who suffered from ulcers. He was a bookworm and a bird watcher. “All I [knew] about trying to outsmart the Gestapo,” he wrote, “[was] what I’d seen in the movies.”

　　Still, in August of 1940, Fry flew to the French port city of Marseilles. He had with him a list of 200 specific people he would try to save. He had exit visas to get each of them out of France. He also had $3,000 wrapped around his legs. Fry had planned on staying for just three weeks. But the rescue effort proved so demanding and the need was so great, he stayed for 13 months. “I stayed because the refugees needed me,” he later explained. But it took courage, and courage [was] a quality I hadn’t previously been sure I possessed.”

　　Fry set up his office in a local hotel, By day, he ran a simple -–and legal -–relief agency. His American Relief Center helped people get food, money, and visas. At night, however, Fry did real work. With the help of a complex network, he arranged the escape of the 200 people on his list. He also helped nearly 2,000 others flee the Nazis.

　　It was hard to get out of Marseilles in 1940. All exit terminals were watched by the police. With the right papers, some of Fry’s “clients” managed to leave by train or boat. Most, however, had to sneak out of France. Often they had to be disguised as farm laborers. They carried their possessions on lunch boxes and climbed a secret escape route over the Pyrenees Mountains and into Spain.

　　Fry not only saved people, but he also saved great works of art. Some of these pieces he smuggled out of the country himself. He once took 12 suitcases by train across the border to Spain. In the suitcases was the original score of Anton Buckner’s Third Symphony.

　　Fry, of course, was putting his life on the line. As a citizen of the neutral United States, he had little to fear if he followed Nazi rules. But he didn’t follow them. Night after night he broke the law to aid his refugees. He met with a cartoonist from Vienna who agreed to forge I.D. cards. He raised money on the black market. He kept a map of his secret escape routes pinned to the wall behind a mirror in his hotel room.

　　The police suspected Varian Fry was up to something. They watched him closely. A few times they even brought him in for questioning. So Fry had to be careful. He masked conversations he had in his hotel room by running water in the sink. He got rid of secret papers by burning them in train station bathrooms. He even stuffed secret messages into hollowed-out toothpaste tubes.

　　At last, in September 1941, Varian Fry was ordered out of France. He was labeled an “undesirable alien”, When he asked the police why they were kicking him out, one of them said, “Because you have protected Jews and anti-Nazis ”

　　Back in the United States, Fry tried to alert U.S. officials to the plight of the Jews under the Nazis. But few people listened to him. Miriam Davenport, who worked with Fry in France, explained why. She said, “We were still pretty anti-Semitic in this country at that time. A lot of people just didn’t want to hear his story.”

　　Varian Fry died in 1967. At the time he was teaching Latin at a school in Connecticut. Shortly before he died, the French gave him a Legion of Honor award. Later, in 1991, the U.S. honored him with the Eisenhower Liberation Medal. But his greatest tribute came from the Jews themselves. Israel named him “Righteous Among the Nations.” This award is given to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews. Varian Fry was the first American to win it. As Susan Goodman, the curator of the Jewish Museum in New York, said,” His story shows any person can be a hero.”

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