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Varian Fry Exhibit: Assignment Rescue

When members of the Emergency Rescue Committee called upon Varian Fry to bring political and intellectual refugees out of France after the Second World War, he tried to dissuade them.

Fry, a young editor from New York, told the committee, "I'm not right for the job. All I know about being a secret agent, or trying to outsmart the Gestapo, is what I've seen in the movies. But if you can't find anyone else, I'll go."

Thus began Fry's journey, recorded in his manuscripts dated 1941 to 1942 and on display in the Humanities Gallery in Trinity Hall through April 28. Titled

Assignment: Rescue, The Story of Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee, the traveling art exhibition from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., opened April 3 with a presentation by Walter Meyerhof, Ph.D., the son of Nobel Prize winner Otto Meyerhof, one of the 2,000 people rescued by Fry and his colleagues.

The exhibit is sponsored by the CSU, Chico Modern Jewish and Israel Studies Program's Holocaust Studies and funded in part through the Koret Foundation and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial and Museum.

After Germany defeated France in June 1940, Fry went to Marseilles, France, as the representative of the American Rescue Committee, a private relief group. There he offered aid and advice to anti-fascist refugees who found themselves threatened with extradition from Nazi Germany under Article 19 of the Franco-German Armistice the "Surrender on Demand" clause.

Although Fry's manuscripts show his apprehension toward joining the committee's effort, he accepted. By August 1940, Fry set off for Marseilles.

"Among the refugees who were caught in France were many writers and artists whose work I enjoyed. To them all, I owed a heavy debt of gratitude for the pleasure they had given me," he wrote. "Now that they were in danger, I felt obliged to help them."

Working practically day and night, often in opposition to the French and even obstructionist American authorities, Fry assembled a band of associates and built an elaborate rescue network. He originally thought the effort would take one month. Convinced that he could not abandon the operation while the desperate refugees needed help, Fry extended his trip into a thirteen-month journey.

Fry wrote of the perils of leaving France without an exit visa and the proper papers, which some of the refugees refused to do.

"I tried to get some through on the train, even without exit visas; others had to walk over the Pyrenees. Some were stopped and sent back. Others were directed to the Spanish border. A great deal depended on luck. Every opening of the frontier meant hope renewed, every closing -- hope abandoned. It was a cruel way to torture human beings," he wrote.

By the time the French expelled Fry in September 1941, he and his colleagues had rescued some 2,000 people from France, among them politicians, artists, writers, scientists, and musicians. Such notables were painters Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, and Andre Masson, sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, and writers Franz Werfel and Hans Habe. s

When Fry returned to New York, he recounted his story and tried to warn of Hitler's impending massacre of the Jews. But few listened. He died unexpectedly in 1967, the pages of his memoirs scattered about him. The police officer who discovered the papers described them as an apparent "work of fiction." The photographic and written materials he left behind chronicle his experiences in France. His words and pictures serve as a guide throughout the exhibit.