A quiet American

by Andy Marino

"The history of Varian Fry is perhaps one of the least known yet most extraordinary sagas of World War II. In the summer of 1940, following the defeat of France by Hitler's armies, Fry, an idealistic American journalist and classical scholar, arrived in the port city of Marseilles armed with only three thousand dollars and a list of two hundred names. Sent by the newly formed American Emergency Rescue Committee, Fry was charged with the task of finding many of this century's most famous artists and intellectuals and helping them escape from Nazi-occupied France.". "In a rescue operation unprecedented in modern times, Fry managed to save a virtual roll call of twentieth-century genius. Among the lucky were the artists Marcel Duchamp, Andre Masson, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Wilfredo Lam, and Jacques Lipchitz; writers Franz Werfel, Hans Habe, Victor Serge, Walter Mehring, Hannah Arendt, Andre Breton, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Heinrich Mann; scientists Peter Pringsheim, Emil Gumbel, and the No