[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 10 (Wednesday, February 11, 1998)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E144-E146]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
HOMAGE TO VARIAN FRY, A REAL AND UNLIKELY HERO
______
HON. TOM LANTOS
of california
in the house of representatives
Wednesday, February 11, 1998
Mr. LANTOS. Mr. Speaker, Varian Fry was one of the greatest, albeit
one of the most unrecognized, American heroes of the twentieth century.
As a young relief worker in Vichy France during the early years of
World War II, he responded to the onslaught of Nazi persecution with a
degree of bravery which stands out even when compared to the courage of
other noble men and women who resisted German oppression. Fry led a
small group of American liberals in creating the Emergency Rescue
Committee (ERC), an organization dedicated to using every means at its
disposal to help political and intellectual refugees escape from Nazi-
dominated France. The ERC operated for two years, from the fall of
France in 1940 until its offices were forcibly shut down in 1942, and
its work saved the lives of at least 2,000 talented scholars, artists
and leaders, including such cultural luminaries as Marc Chagall, Hannah
Arendt and Max Ernst. Fry's actions led to the founding of the
International Rescue Committee after the war.
Varian Fry's lifesaving efforts are all the more remarkable in light
of fierce opposition not only from the pro-Fascist Vichy government,
but also from resentful American consular officials. As a result of
this antagonism, Fry's heroism went unrecognized in his lifetime. He
died in obscurity over thirty years ago.
Varian Fry's contributions have been recognized by Yad Vashem,
Israel's memorial to the Holocaust, where he stands as the only
American honored as a ``Righteous Gentile.'' Mr. Speaker, it is long
past due for the American government and the American people to pay
tribute to this heroic champion of human rights. I would like to enter
into the record a touching and inspiring review of Fry's autobiography,
Surrender on Demand, written for ``The New Republic'' by Alfred Kazin.
I would also like to invite my colleagues to attend Assignment: Rescue,
The Story of Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee, a moving
exhibit which will be featured at The Jewish Museum in New York through
March 29, as well as The Varian Fry Celebration, which will be on
display at the San Francisco Main Library after March 8.
[From the New Republic, Feb. 9, 1998]
A Real and Unlikely Hero--Homage to Varian Fry
(By Alfred Kazin)
The Armistice with Nazi Germany that France had to sign in
June 1940 contained a clause, Article XIX, obliging the
French Government to ``surrender upon demand all Germans
named by the German government in France, as well as in
French possessions, colonies, Protectorate Territories, and
Mandates.'' ``Germans'' originally meant all inhabitants of
the greater German Reich--Germans, Austrians, Czechs, and
many Poles--but by 1940 it meant every political opponent
whom the Nazis wanted to get their hands on. There were
American relief organizations in France sponsored by the
YMCA, the Unitarians, and the Quakers. But a group of
American liberals, outraged by the Nazis' open violation of
the right of asylum, formed the Emergency Rescue Committee to
bring political and intellectual refugees out of France
before the Gestapo and the Italian and Spanish Fascist police
caught them in what their rescuer Varian Fry was to call
``the most gigantic man-trap in history.''
The volunteer (there were not many) whom the Committee
chose to direct this effort from Marseille was Varian Fry, a
32-year-old Harvard-trained classicist perfectly at home in
Europe. Indeed, on the surface, with his elegant name and his
precise manner, he may have seemed just a little too refined.
With his classmate Lincoln Kirstein, he had founded the
pioneer journal of modernism The Hound and Horn. When I met
him at The New Republic after the war, he liked, on our many
walks, a little affectedly, to show off the little dogtricks
that he had taught his French poodle Clovis, whom he had
named after the ancient king of the Franks. But Varian was at
heart so pure and intense a democratic conscience that he
could not bear the lingering Popular Front sentimentality
about Stalin on The New Republic; and he resigned from the
magazine in 1945, just before Henry Wallace took it over.
In fact, for thirteen months in France, Varian was our own
Scarlet Pimpernel. He was endlessly bold and resourceful in
the always correct manner that was natural to him. And he was
forced to leave France because his labors on behalf of Jews
and political refugees had enraged both Vichy's pro-Fascist
bureaucrats and reactionary American consular officials.
Varian was one of the great civilian heroes of the war. In
the face of the most maddening bureaucratic slights, delays,
and hostilities presented by Vichy France, Franco's Spain,
and the American consul in Marseille (he finally got the
French to expel Varian), my friend organized from a room in
the Hotel Splendide the ramshackle yet somehow effective
organization that helped to get virtually 2,000 people to
safety. Varian is the only American honored as a ``Righteous
Gentile'' at Yad Vashem, Israel's memorial to the Holocaust.
Surrender on Demand, Varian's wonderful account of his
noble adventure in France, his ``story of an experiment in
democratic solidarity . . . of illegal work under the nose of
the Gestapo,'' was first published without much effect in
1945, and it has now been brought back into print in
conjunction with the splendid exhibition ``Assignment:
Rescue, The Story of Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue
Committee'' at the Jewish Museum in New York. The museum has
also enclosed in its press kit Varian's essay ``The Massacre
of the Jews,'' which appeared in
[[Page E145]]
The New Republic's issue of December 21, 1942. Unlikely as
this seems now, the anguish that Varian brought to the
subject did not altogether interest people at the magazine (I
had just joined the staff), who were languishing for the New
Deal that Roosevelt had discarded in wartime. ``That such
things could be done by contemporary western Europeans, heirs
of the humanist tradition, seems hardly possible'': only
Varian, hardly innocent but obstinately virtuous, would have
written that sentence. He ended his article by demanding ``a
little thing, but at the same time a big thing''--that the
United States ``offer asylum now, without delay or red tape,
to those few fortunate enough to escape from the Aryan
paradise.''
In Berlin on July 15, 1935, Varian had seen Hitler's
troppers attack Jews in ``the first pogoam.'' On November 9,
1938, Nazi leaders had openly encouraged the burning of
synagogues, the pillage of Jewish homes, and the murder of
their inhabitants. ``Injecting air-bubbles into the
bloodstream,'' Varian observed in his New Republic article in
1942, ``is cheap, clean, and efficient, producing clots,
embolisms, and death within a few hours . . .''
``Even though Hitler may lose this war, he may win it
anyway, at least, as far as Europe is concerned. . . . The
Christian churches might also help . . . the Pope by
threatening with excommunication all Catholics who in any way
participate in these frightful crimes. . . . There is a
report, which I have not been able to verify, that the Office
of War Information has banned mention of the massacres in its
shortwave broadcasts. . . . The fact that the Nazis do not
commit their massacres in Western Europe, but transport their
victims to the East before destroying them, is certain proof
that they fear the effect on the local populations of the
news of their crimes.
Despite the fact that the urgency of the situation has
never been greater, immigration into the United States in the
year 1942 will have been less than ten percent of what it has
been in `normal' years before Hitler, when some of the
largest quotas were not filled. There have been bureaucratic
delays in visa procedure which have literally condemned to
death many stalwart democrats.''
This was the man who had gone to Marseille two years before
with just $3,000 from patrons of the Emergency Rescue
Committee, only to find himself initially frustrated by the
delusions of some VIPs whom he had come to rescue. Rudolph
Breitscheid, the leader of the Social Democratic bloc in the
Reichstag, openly frequented a sidewalk cafe with Rudolph
Hilferding, formerly German Minister to France. He boasted
that Hitler would ``never dare'' to arrest him. He was wrong.
He was nabbed and never heard from again. Giuseppe
Modigliani, the head of the Italian Socialist Party and a Jew
(and the brother of the painter), was easy to spot. He
insisted on wearing in all weather a fur coat, a gift from
the Garment Workers Union in New York, and he adamantly
refused to shave his beard, ``I've always worn it.''
Franz Werfel and his wife Alma were at the Hotel du Louvre
et de la Paix, in hiding under the name of Mrs. Werfel's
former husband Gustav Mahler, who had died in 1911. Werfel
looked ``exactly like his photographs: large, dumpy, and
pallid, like a half-filled sack of flour. His hair was thin
on top and too long on the sides. He was wearing a silk
dressing gown and soft slippers and was sitting all over a
small gilt chair.'' The Werfels had fled from Paris to
Lourdes, where they had sought the protection of the Church.
Werfel, a jew, had begun The Song of Bernadette. When they
realized that they would never be able to leave France from
Lourdes, they came to Marseille to get the American visas
waiting for them at the Consulate. But there was now a
general ban on exit visas.
The Werfels insisted on ordering up champagne as they went
over their problem with Varian. He had just arrived and he
hadn't yet found out what the possibilities were. The Werfels
had heard of refugees going down to the Spanish frontier and
getting over safely, but they didn't know if those lucky
souls had reached Lisbon for passage to America. Most of them
had probably been arrested in Spain and handed over to the
Gestapo. There was also the risk of being arrested for
travelling without permission. It was all very confusing.
What were they to do? They finally got away, at first
encumbering their saviors with twelve suitcase. But Alma made
it into Spain on foot, Mahler, manuscripts in her pack.
The American Federation of Labor had succeeded in
persuading the State Department to grant emergency visas to a
long list of European labor leaders, and it had dispatched
Frank Bohn to help them with the escape. Bohn, a hearty
extrovert who talked like ``an itinerant revivalist,'' was
one of the two or three Americans in France prepared to help
Varian. Through Bohn he met a young German social democrat
named Albert Hirschman, a political refugee who was ``very
intelligent and eternally good-natured and cheerful,'' who
joined his staff. ``I began to call him Beamish,'' Varian
wrote, ``because of his impish eyes and perennial pout, which
would turn into a broad grin in an instant.'' Staff
conferences were held in the bathroom, where Varian turned on
the faucets to create a deafening rush of water.
Another invaluable aide was ``vivacious and ebullient''
Lena Fishman, who had worked in the Paris office of the joint
Distribution Committee, was competent in English, French,
German, Russian, Polish, and Spanish, and was especially
useful in calming the excited. ``Il ne faut pas exagerer,''
she used to say. (Lena had her own way of talking. When I
first met her, she asked me who my publisher was. I told her,
but the name obviously meant nothing to her. ``Je n'ai jamais
couche avec,'' she said.)
Most of the refugees whose names had been given to Varian
in New York were still missing. Nobody knew where they were
or what had become of them. But refugees started coming to
Varian's room at the Splendide as soon as word went out.
``Many of them had been through hell; their nerves were
shattered and their courage was gone. Many had been herded
into concentration camps at the outbreak of the war, then
released, then interned again when the Germans began their
great offensive in May. In the concentration camps they had
waited fearfully while the Wehrmacht drew nearer and nearer.
It was often literally at the last moment that they had had a
chance to save themselves. Then they had joined the great
exodus to the south, sometimes walking hundreds of miles to
get away from the Nazis. . . .
Nor was it only the refugees from Germany and Austria who
were worried. Luis Companys, the Catalan trade-union leader,
had been picked up by the Nazis in Belgium or the occupied
part of France and sent down to Spain, where he was promptly
garroted. And the French police were treating foreigners with
a combination of muddle and brutality which left very few of
them with any desire to stay in France longer than they had
to.''
In big cities such as Marseille, the large and constantly
changing refugee population kept the police nervous, and
occasionally stirred them to mass arrests called rafles.
Fortunately for Varian, the first to come to the Splendide
were young and vigorous German and Austrian Socialists who
were not afraid, once Varian gave them American money, to go
down to the Spanish frontier and cross over on foot. One of
them gave Varian a map of the frontier, showing that they
planned to cross along a cemetery wall at Cerbere. They knew
where to avoid the French border control. You were not to go
farther into Spain until you got the Spanish entrada stamp on
your passport. The Spaniards were interested only in Spanish
transit visas and, above all, in money.
Refugees who hadn't yet received American visas were taking
Chinese or Siamese visas and getting Portuguese transit visas
on almost any identification they possessed which seemed to
promise that the holder would go on from Portugal. The first
difficulty was getting into Marseille, that is, past the
police control for passengers arriving by train. You could
avoid the police only by going into the station restaurant
through a service corridor to the Hotel Terminus. There were
risks. Foreigners weren't supposed to travel in France
without safe conducts issued by the military authorities. Any
foreigner caught traveling without such a safe conduct was
likely to be sent to a concentration camp, where his future
was uncertain, and where the Gestapo could get him if he was
wanted.
The Nazis were dreaded, the French were corrupt and brutal,
the American consular officials were difficult and nasty. So
difficult and nasty, indeed, that they became Varian's
particular antagonists. In a short preface to Surrender on
Demand, ex-Secretary of State Warren Christopher writes of
Varian that ``regretfully, during his lifetime, his heroic
actions never received the support they deserved from the
United States government, particularly the State
Department.'' That is putting it mildly. Varian's book is too
taken up with the many people he saved (and the many more he
couldn't save) to relate how Assistant Secretary of State
Breckenridge Long managed to keep immigration quotas unfilled
when thousands of refugees were desperate to get into
America.
When a member of Varian's staff named Danny was arrested,
and Vichy's Ministry of Finance intimated that Danny would be
let off with a fine if the American Embassy intervened,
Varian had no hope that this would happen. He was aware of
the Embassy's hostility to ``aliens.'' To his surprise, he
was able ``to touch something very deep in the American
consul at Marseille, who helped get Danny off.'' This was
astounding. Harry Bingham, son of Hiram Bingham, the former
governor of Connecticut and United States senator, had been a
humane, helpful figure as head of the visa section at the
Marseille Consulate. But he was recalled, and his successor,
Varian wrote, ``seemed to delight in making autocratic
decisions and refusing as many visas as he could.''
Varian sought a visa for Largo Caballero, the Socialist
prime minister of Republican Spain when Franco launched the
Civil War. The Consul had never heard of him, and when he was
finally informed who Caballero was, he said: ``Oh, one of
those Reds.'' Varian explained that Caballero had resigned
the premiership rather than continue to cooperate with the
Communists. ``Well,'' the Vice-Consul said, ``it doesn't
make any difference to me what his politics are. If he has
any political views at all, we don't want him. We don't
want any agitators in the United States. We've got too
many already.'' The court at Aix had refused to grant
Caballero's extradition to Spain. If he could get him an
American visa, Varian thought, he might be able to smuggle
him to Casablanca and there put him on a boat for America.
Caballero remained a prisoner of the Nazis until the end
of the war.
Both the Vichy French and the American Embassy now sought
to get Varian out of
[[Page E146]]
France. The Gestapo was bringing pressure on the French
police to arrest him immediately. A high police official
informed him that ``you have caused my good friend the
Consul-General of the United States much annoyance. . . .
Unless you leave France of your own free will, I shall be
obliged to arrest you and place you in residence forcee in
some small town far from Marseille, where you can do no
harm.'' As Varian got up to go, he asked the official, ``Tell
me frankly, why are you so much opposed to me?'' ``Because
you have protected Jews and anti-Nazis.''
Varian played for time. He had no assurance of a
replacement, and his staff was afraid that their ``relief''
organization would collapse if he was forced out of France.
And finally he was. The Embassy had refused to reissue his
passport unless he agreed to leave at once. The organization
sent out nearly 300 people between the time he left in August
1941 and the time it was raided and closed by the police, on
June 2, 1942.
Varian returned to the States, wrote his book, and quit The
New Republic in protest against the pro-Soviet sentiments of
its editors. His last years were unhappy. His first wife
died, and he was separated from his second. He moved to
Connecticut, taught Latin at a local school, and died in
1967. During his thirteen months in France, Varian's
organization offered assistance to 4,000 people, and between
1,200 to 1,800 of those people made it to safety. Varian's
organization saved British soldiers and pilots, Marc Chagall,
Jacques Lipchitz, Andre Breton, Max Ernst, Andre Masson, Hans
Namuth, Hannah Arendt, Wanda Landowska, Marcel Duchamp,
Randolfo Pacciardi (leader of Italian exiles fighting in the
Spanish Civil War), the German poet Hans Sahl, Victor Serge,
Max Ascoli, the pianist Heinz Jolles, the Catholic writer
Edgar Alexander-Emmerich, the psychiatrist Dr. Bruno Strauss,
the German art critic Paul Westheim, the Sicilian novelist
Giuseppe Garetto, the Surrealist poet Benjamin Peret, the
former liberal Prime Minister of Prussia Otto Klepper, the
museum director Charles Stirling, the novelist Jean
Malaquais. There were many, many more. Chagall would not
leave until he was assured there were cows in America.
Varian rescued also many people who were not famous, not
distinguished, not artistic. And how it burned him that there
were many, many more he was unable to rescue. This man really
cared.
____________________