Varian Fry had seen Nazi terror firsthand, even before traveling to Europe in 1940 to assist refugees. In 1935, as a young journalist, he had made his way to Nazi Germany and witnessed an anti-Jewish riot in Berlin. In the New York Times, Fry described the scene: “I saw one man brutally kicked and spat upon as he lay on the sidewalk, a woman bleeding, a man whose head was covered with blood, hysterical women crying. . . . Nowhere did the police seem to make any effort whatever to save the victims from this brutality.”

Fry, and many other American intellectuals, were concerned about the Nazi regime’s persecution of Jews and other victims. After Germany invaded France in May 1940, a group of approximately 200 notable Americans, including journalists, museum curators, university presidents, and artists, as well as a number of Jewish refugees, formed the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC).

The ERC focused its efforts on rescuing endangered intellectuals who had escaped from Nazi Germany to southern France. As part of France’s surrender to Germany, authorities in Vichy France, the southern half of the country not occupied by Germany, had agreed to arrest and “surrender” any individuals the Germans “demanded.” The Emergency Rescue Committee knew that anti-Nazi writers and artists, Jews and non-Jews, were likely to be targeted.

Thirty-two-year-old Varian Fry volunteered to serve as the ERC’s representative in France, and flew to Europe on August 4, 1940. After landing in Lisbon, Portugal, Fry met Waitstill Sharp, a Unitarian minister who had been active in rescue efforts both in Prague and southern France. Sharp gave Fry advice and lists of sympathetic contacts in Marseilles.

Fry realized upon arriving in France that the plight of anti-Nazi refugees was far greater than the ERC had imagined. He quickly befriended American vice consul Hiram Bingham Jr. Using his position as an American diplomat, Bingham extended aid to refugees and even hid endangered author Lion Feuchtwanger in his home.

Fry soon met German Jewish writer Franz Werfel, who, with his wife Alma Mahler Werfel, needed to escape France to avoid arrest. In early September 1940, Fry purchased train tickets for himself, the Werfels, and family members of novelist Thomas Mann (who had already made it to the United States). The group took the train to Cerbère, on the border of Spain. While Fry traveled by train with the luggage to Port bou, Spain, the refugees, who did not have Spanish entrance visas, crossed the Pyrenees on foot to avoid border guards. They were successful, and reunited with Fry before traveling on to Lisbon, where the refugees boarded a ship for the United States.

Fry continued these activities for over a year with the Emergency Rescue Committee, sometimes working with the French resistance. Fry and his colleagues assisted artists Marc Chagall, André Breton, André Masson, Max Ernst, and Jacques Lipchitz, poet Walter Mehring, harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, and nearly 2,000 others.

Fry’s willingness to break the law angered both the US State Department and officials in Vichy France. After 13 months of constant surveillance and danger, Fry was arrested by the French police and given two hours to pack his belongings before being escorted to the Spanish border. He returned to the United States in October 1941.

Fry wrote two memoirs about his experiences: Surrender on Demand, his memoir about his work in France, and Assignment: Rescue, a rewritten version aimed at students. He passed away in 1967.

In 1994, Varian Fry became the first American to be honored as a “Righteous Among the Nations,” a title granted by Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the Holocaust, to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. In 2000, the square in front of the US consulate in Marseilles was renamed “Place Varian Fry.”