Despite some near misses, the group makes it to freedom. Fry and Davenport decide to shepherd a large group of frightened refugees, first on a train, then taking the group on a long hike through a mountain forest to a checkpoint where, if their documents will be accepted, they will be free to enter neutral Spain. Even Chagall now joins with author Heinrich Mann and others in seeking passage out of Marseille. ![]() With French collaborators turning in Jews, an urgency to leave begins to take hold. Both French and German officials suspect that Fry is deceitful and assign agents, such as Nazi SS Oberstleutnant Marius Franken, to follow him. With picture-perfect forged passes and identification cards, Fry begins to send Jewish artists out of France to Spain where they can arrange transport to the United States. Two other accomplices approach Fry, Albert Hirschman, a Jewish con-man that he names "Beamish", and Bill Freier, a counterfeit expert. In setting up an office out of his hotel room, Fry encounters Miriam Davenport, who helps him screen the numerous refugees that begin lining up at his hotel. Word spreads quickly in Marseille that an American will help Jews to escape Vichy France. The Chagalls, like many other expatriates, believe they are safe in Vichy France, willfully ignoring the article in the terms of the French surrender stating that France must immediately hand over any French citizen that the Nazis should demand. Consul Jamieson is intransigent and rude to him, Fry later learns that Vice Consul Harry Bingham is an ally, as Bingham has worked with Waitstill and Martha Sharp, taking Feuchtwanger, Hannah Arendt, and Marc and Bella Chagall into his own home. ![]() In 1940, heading for Marseille in Vichy France – the nominally unoccupied zone libre in the southern part of Nazi-conquered metropolitan France, where he knows that Jewish artists have taken refuge – Fry arrives with money to bribe officials. She specifically asks Fry to check on Lion Feuchtwanger, imprisoned without charge by the French in the Camp des Milles internment camp. When the State Department tries to block his plans to head back to Europe, Fry finds an ally in First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who intervenes on his behalf. Learning that the Nazis have targeted artists and intelligentsia, he approaches the State Department with a plan and a few prominent names, such as artist Marc Chagall, scrawled on a list. The experience left him with a resolve to do something to help the Jews.īack in the United States, Fry begins to canvass his influential friends and acquaintances, only to find indifference or even antisemitism. He was helpless and physically sick as the SA brown-shirts clubbed their victims to the ground. While in Berlin during Kristallnacht in 1938, journalist Varian Fry witnesses the Nazis' brutal treatment of Jews.
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