assignment rescue varian fry

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Assignment: rescue : an autobiography

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Assignment: Rescue : An Autobiography Paperback – 1 April 1993

• Language English
• Publisher Point
• Publication date 1 April 1993
• Dimensions 10.8 x 1.91 x 17.15 cm
• ISBN-10 0590469703
• ISBN-13 978-0590469708
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EXHIBITIONS

Varian fry, assignment: rescue, 1940-1941.

“Varian Fry, Assignment: Rescue, 1940–1941,” an exhibition documenting the extraordinary efforts of a young American relief worker to save thousands of anti-Nazi artists and intellectuals, is now on display in Holocaust Museum Houston’s Central Gallery. The photographic exhibit, organized and circulated by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, is showing in conjunction with HMH’s “How Modern Art Escaped Hitler: From the Holocaust to Houston” exhibition, which features the works of Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Josef Albers and other artists whom Fry rescued from German-occupied France.

In 1940, Varian Fry volunteered to work for the Emergency Rescue Committee, a private relief organization that sent him to Marseilles. He had $3,000 and instructions to find a select 200 individuals and help them escape the Nazis. Upon his arrival, however, Fry found there were many more antifascist refugees who were threatened with extradition to Nazi Germany, and probable death. Since officials of the Vichy France government were cooperating with the Gestapo, he hoped to enlist the help of the American Foreign Service. After visiting the United States Consul in Marseilles, it was clear to him that the AFS was working to keep people out of the United States, not get them in.

He realized he would have to work outside the law and immediately set up a clandestine operation to forge documents, deal with the black market and develop escape routes. Fry worked directly against the wishes and instructions of both the French and American governments and endured repeated arrests, interrogations and searches by suspicious authorities. By the time Vichy France finally expelled him in September 1941, he and his organization has saved more than 2,000 people, including many famous artists, musicians, writers, scientists and politicians.

The American intellectual community benefited significantly from the arrival of the individuals he had saved; yet, he was reprimanded by the United States government and put under surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Back in New York, he wrote and spoke extensively of what he had witnessed in Europe and warned of Hitler’s impending massacre of Jews. Shortly before his death in 1967, France honored Fry with the Croix de Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur. It was the only official recognition he received in his lifetime.

Fry left a wealth of photographic and written materials documenting his experiences in France. “Varian Fry, Assignment: Rescue, 1940-1941” exhibits only a small portion of his memoirs, which have been published in the book “Surrender On Demand.”

Hours: M: Closed T-W: 10 am to 5 pm Th: 10 am to 8 pm F-Sa: 10 am to 5 pm Su: Noon to 5 pm

ASSIGNMENT: RESCUE

The Story of Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee

• Description

France, 1940: Fry is sent by the newly formed Emergency Rescue Committee to evacuate refugees detained in Marseilles by the Vichy government. Among those blacklisted by the Nazis are Franz Werfel, Marc Chagall, and Andre Breton. USA, 1940s: Anti-immigration—and anti-Semitic—sentiment is strong. The State Department opposes Fry’s mission. Combining solid historical background with a true story as dramatic as any spy thriller, this book profiles an American hero whose persistence and courage saved the lives of more than 2000 refugees. Quantities are limited.

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ISBN: 0439145414

ISBN13: 9780439145411

Assignment: Rescue An Autobiography

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Marseilles, France....August, 1940 The Gestapo's blacklist was thousands of names long...How many people could he get out before Hitler sealed the frontiers? Varian Fry didn't know any more about... This description may be from another edition of this product.

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Assignment: Rescue

An inexperienced American journalist, Varian Fry, rescues thousands of refugees from Vichy France. An inexperienced American journalist, Varian Fry, rescues thousands of refugees from Vichy France. An inexperienced American journalist, Varian Fry, rescues thousands of refugees from Vichy France.

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Varian Fry (1907–1967) was an American journalist who helped anti-Nazi refugees escape from France between 1940 and 1941.

After France surrendered to Nazi Germany in June 1940, the Emergency Rescue Committee, a private American relief organization, sent Fry to Marseille to aid anti-Nazi refugees who were in danger of being arrested and turned over to authorities in Nazi Germany.

Fry used legal and illegal techniques to help some 2,000 people, including a number of prominent writers and artists, escape France and emigrate to the United States.

Varian Fry was the first American to be named “Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem (Israel’s official memorial to Holocaust victims) for risking his life to rescue Jews.

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Varian Fry was born in New York City on October 15, 1907. He graduated in 1931 with a degree in  classics from Harvard University, moved back to New York City, and married Eileen Hughes, an editor at Atlantic Monthly . Fry worked as a researcher and editor at a number of magazines in the early 1930s, during which time he traveled to Nazi Germany to report on the country under Hitler’s rule. Upon witnessing an anti-Jewish riot in Berlin on July 15, 1935, Fry wrote several dispatches for the New York Times , describing what he had observed.

“I saw one [Jewish] 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.” —Varian Fry

After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War , Fry resigned as editor of the foreign policy magazine The Living Age to work for the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy. Despite its name, the committee supported the Republican side of the war, which included communists, and Fry, a fervent anti-Communist, resigned in June 1937. With wars breaking out all over the world, Fry began writing books for the Foreign Policy Association, including War in China, The Good Neighbors (about US relations with Latin America), Bricks Without Mortar (about international diplomacy), War Atlas , and The Peace that Failed (about the Nazi seizure of Czechoslovakia).

The Emergency Rescue Committee

After Germany invaded France , Fry helped gather more than 200 notable Americans, including journalists, museum curators, university presidents, and artists—as well as a number of Jewish refugees—at the Hotel Commodore in New York on June 25, 1940. During that meeting, the group founded the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC), a private American relief organization, with the goal of rescuing endangered intellectuals in France. The armistice agreement detailing France’s surrender to Germany, signed a few days before the ERC founding meeting, included “Article 19,” nicknamed the “Surrender on Demand” clause. Authorities in Vichy France, the southern half of the country which was not occupied by Germany, agreed to arrest and “surrender” any individuals the Germans “demanded.” The Emergency Rescue Committee vowed to aid anti-Nazi writers and artists, Jews and non-Jews, who were likely to be targeted by Nazi Germany .

A few days after the founding meeting, several members of the newly created ERC met with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt , who used her influence to obtain “emergency” non-quota visas for a number of endangered intellectuals. The ERC decided they needed a representative in France to guide their rescue efforts. Varian Fry volunteered, and flew to Europe on August 4, 1940. He planned to be in southern France for three weeks.

Establishing the Centre Americain

Fry landed in Lisbon, Portugal, where he 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 Marseille. Fry realized upon arriving in France that the plight of anti-Nazi refugees was far greater than the ERC had imagined. He advertised his presence in the city, meeting with refugees in his room at the Hotel Splendide, and quickly befriended American vice consul Harry Bingham Jr. Using his position as an American diplomat, Bingham extended aid to refugees and even hid endangered author Lion Feuchtwanger in his home.

Needing a more formal space, Fry leased an office on rue Grignan (and later on boulevard Garibaldi) and gathered a staff, a mix of Jewish and non-Jewish refugees including artist Bill Spira, future Bard College professor Justus Rosenberg, and future economist Albert Hirschmann, as well as American expatriates Miriam Davenport, Mary Jayne Gold, and Charlie Fawcett.  

Rescue Efforts

Almost immediately after arriving in Marseille, Fry 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, 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 they boarded a ship for the United States. Once he was in the United States, Werfel explained his escape to a reporter. This ultimately alerted US State Department officials to the fact that Fry was breaking international laws to aid refugees .

Fry continued his efforts in France for the next thirteen months. Fry rented the “Villa Air Bel” outside of Marseille, to provide a home for prominent refugees who needed a safe residence. He and his colleagues used legal and illegal means to assist these refugees with their immigration efforts, even utilizing an escape route across the mountains with the assistance of French resistance workers Hans and Lisa Fittko. He assisted artists Marc Chagall , André Breton, André Masson, Max Ernst, and Jacques Lipchitz, poet Walter Mehring, harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, writer Lion Feuchtwanger, and nearly 2,000 others. Fry and some of his American collaborators were arrested by French police in December 1940 and briefly interned on a ship in Marseille harbor during a visit to the city by French leader Marshal Petain. Authorities feared they were planning acts of terrorism.

Fry was specifically trying to aid refugees endangered by Nazi Germany, and his efforts angered Vichy French officials. Moreover, US State Department representatives complained that Fry’s illegal work interfered with American efforts to stay neutral in World War II.   

Fry was under constant surveillance and was, more than once, questioned and detained by French authorities. On August 29, 1941, Fry was arrested by the French police and given two hours to pack his belongings before being escorted to the Spanish border. He spent more than a month in Lisbon before returning to the United States in October 1941.

World War II

Less than two months after his return to the United States, Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor brought the country into World War II. The Emergency Rescue Committee (which in 1942 became the International Rescue Committee) severed ties with Fry due to his outspoken criticism of the State Department. Fry began a new job as the assistant editor of The Nation magazine.

In December 1942, after information about the mass murder of Jews reached the United States, Fry wrote an article for The New Republic magazine titled “The Massacre of the Jews.”  After describing events he had witnessed, and information he had received from European correspondents,  Fry exhorted readers that all the evidence adds up to “the most appalling picture of mass murder in all human history.”

Fry was deemed unfit for military service, and spent most of the war preparing his memoirs. Eileen Fry passed away in 1948, and a year later, Varian Fry married Annette Riley, with whom he had three children. By the 1960s, Fry was teaching Latin, Greek, and French in secondary schools in Connecticut.

Recognition

Shortly before Fry’s death, the French government awarded him the Croix de Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur , France’s highest decoration of merit. It was the only official recognition he received in his lifetime.

Fry died in 1967 while revising his memoirs. He left behind a wealth of written and photographic materials that document his experiences in France. Surrender on Demand , his memoir about his experiences in France, had been published in 1945, and Assignment: Rescue , a rewritten version of his first memoir aimed at students, was published shortly after his death.

In 1991, the United States Holocaust Memorial Council awarded the Eisenhower Liberation Medal to Varian Fry. Three years later, Fry became the first American to be honored by Yad Vashem as a " Righteous Among the Nations . "  In 2000, the square in front of the US consulate in Marseille was renamed “Place Varian Fry.”

Series: Righteous Among the Nations

Gino Bartali

Martha and Waitstill Sharp

Jan zwartendijk.

Father Jacques

Oskar Schindler

Le Chambon-sur-Lignon

Corrie ten Boom

Chiune Sugihara

Raoul Wallenberg and the Rescue of Jews in Budapest

Mohamed Helmy

Critical thinking questions.

• What pressures and motivations may have affected Fry’s decision to attempt to rescue Jews in Europe?
• How can individuals contribute to or assist in the rescue of endangered citizens of other nations?

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Since the founding of the USC Shoah Foundation in 1994, more than 56,000 survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides have recorded their testimonies for our Visual History Archive. As we mark our 30th anniversary year, we highlight some of these remarkable stories by sharing a curated selection from our Voices from the Archive series. A version of this article originally appeared following Justus Rosenberg’s passing at the age of 100 in October 2021.

He Helped Rescue Thousands from the Nazis, Then Kept His Story Quiet for Decades

By: Julie Gruenbaum Fax

In a five-hour interview with the USC Shoah Foundation, Justus Rosenberg refers to himself as a “small fry,” “a cog,” an unimportant person. And perhaps it was for this reason that for decades, the Bard College literature professor hadn’t let on—to his colleagues, to his students, and even, for a time, to his wife—that he had fought and outwitted the Nazis during World War II to save thousands from persecution.

Between the years of 1939 and 1947, with Forrest Gump-ian omnipresence, Rosenberg was a courier and guide for Varian Fry’s Emergency Rescue Committee in Marseilles, a spy and a guerilla soldier for the French underground, a scout for the U.S. Army, and a relief worker at United Nations camps for Displaced Persons in Germany. As a result, he was awarded the U.S. Bronze Medal and Purple Heart and made a commander in the French Legion of Honor. 

Rosenberg first revealed the extent of these exploits when he recorded his Visual History Archive testimony in 1998 at the age of 77.  In 2020 he published his memoirs, “The Art of Resistance: My Four Years in the French Underground” (HarperCollins). 

Rosenberg died on October 30, 2021, at his home in Rhinebeck, New York, at the age of 100.

Risking For Rescue

Justus (pronounced yus-tus) Rosenberg was born in The Free City of Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland) in January 1921 to a well-off Reform Jewish family. At that time, Danzig was heavily German and by 1935 its Nazi-dominated city government had enacted the Nuremberg laws, which encoded discrimination against Jews. 

Rosenberg engaged with would-be persecutors even as a high school student.

“In biology, one of the teachers, I remember, would ask me a question such as this: ‘Could you tell me the reason why the Nuremberg Laws were enacted?’ My answer was, ‘Well, for the safeguard of German blood.’ He says, ‘Yes, that's correct … And safeguard against who?’ … Obviously, he wanted me to say against the Jews. And I was not going to say that. Well, after class I got a beating.”

In 1938, Rosenberg’s parents sent him to Paris to continue his education. When France surrendered to Nazi Germany in June 1940, Rosenberg headed toward the Spanish border, hoping to escape to Portugal.

At a movie house in Toulouse that had been converted into a shelter for refugees, he ran into Miriam Davenport, an American who took a liking to him because he resembled her brother. She invited Rosenberg to Marseilles to meet Varian Fry , an American journalist who had set up the Emergency Rescue Committee in the south of France with the support of the American government. Fry had arrived with a list of 200 intellectuals and artists to rescue from the Nazis, and the operation had since mushroomed. Davenport and American heiress Mary Jayne Gold were aiding in the effort.

Rosenberg was 19 but looked like a 15-year-old Aryan when he met Fry. He also spoke French, German, English, Polish and Yiddish. Fry hired him to carry messages and documents. 

“If caught with those papers, which were, of course, often illegal messages, I would have immediately ended up in a concentration camp,” Rosenberg said.

Fry soon tasked Rosenberg with coordinating logistics with mobsters, sleeping in the office to guard the files, and helping manage the crowds in the hallways, where people lined up daily for interviews to determine whether they qualified for rescue. Thousands were turned away.

"I was somewhat annoyed, irritated, about the discrimination that was being made, by favoring intellectuals and sort of ignoring many people, other people who had no particularly great accomplishments, but were just as human as anybody else and deserved to be rescued just as well,” Rosenberg said in his testimony.

Between the fall of 1940 and August 1941, the Emergency Rescue Committee extricated more than 1,000 people from Nazi-occupied territories, smuggling many over treacherous routes through the Pyrenees to Spain. Among those Fry’s operation rescued were Hannah Arendt, Marcel Duchamp, Marc Chagall, Heinrich Mann, Max Ernst, and André Breton. 

All the while, Rosenberg kept an eye out for his own escape, and tried, with no success, to find word of his parents.

By August 1941, Fry’s operation had been shut down and Fry and his American cohorts were sent back to America. 

Spying And Fighting for Justice 

At the end of 1941, Rosenberg set out to cross the Pyrenees with a friend, but he was arrested by French police and thrown in jail “with a pimp and a guy who killed his wife’s lover,” he recalled.  

He was released after a few weeks and then made his way with other refugees to a resort in Grenoble, France. In August 1942, he and hundreds of other foreign Jews in Grenoble were arrested and taken to a transit camp near Lyon. Rosenberg learned they would be sent to a work camp in Poland within the next few days.  

Rosenberg knew what awaited Jews in Poland. So, with the help of a detainee who was a nurse, he faked peritonitis, moaning and groaning and rubbing a thermometer to show a fever. 

“The Geneva Convention said you cannot send prisoners away if they are sick or if they suffer from some sort of disease. You have, first, to re-establish their health. Then you can kill them,” he quipped in his testimony. 

A few days later, Rosenberg woke up in a hospital in actual pain—his appendix had been removed. 

During his recovery, he talked a nurse into sending a letter to an address that a social worker at the transit camp—a woman he had met in Grenoble—had slipped him. Within a few days, a priest showed up at the hospital with a bicycle and a change of clothes. Rosenberg slipped out of the hospital and got on the bike, standing as he pedaled to dull the pain, until he arrived at the church. 

After a few weeks of recovery, he was sent to the French countryside and assumed the identity of Jean Paul Guiton, the nephew of his Protestant host. Under his new identity, he taught at Sunday school and became an ad salesman for the Yellow Pages—a cover for his work as a French underground spy. 

“This gave me justification to be in different towns, to go to bars where German soldiers were hanging out, or to other places,” he said. The information he gathered was transmitted to England or North Africa. 

But after a few months, the German army uncovered the operation, and Rosenberg escaped to join a guerilla military group in the French mountains in 1943. He learned to shoot and lob grenades, and he helped blow up German supply lines, railroads, and convoys. 

In August of 1944, Rosenberg was on a mission when he ran into three American soldiers, recently landed at Normandy, who had lost their way. Rosenberg helped them back to base, where the lieutenant major, learning of Rosenberg’s language and military skills, attached him to the 636th Tank Destroyer Battalion Reconnaissance Company as a scout and a liaison to locals. 

“You can imagine what it meant to me. First of all, I had these beautiful K-rations—toilet paper, chocolate, cigarettes—things I had not seen for years and years,” Rosenberg said in his testimony. 

Finding Family and Career 

The company offered to smuggle Rosenberg to the U.S. when the war ended in 1945, but Rosenberg wanted to wait for legal status. He returned to Paris, where he studied at the Sorbonne, and then went to Germany to work for the UN in the supply operations for DP camps. 

During this time Rosenberg learned, with the help of the Red Cross, that his family had survived the war. His parents and sister had escaped Danzig in 1941 and made it to a ship in Turkey that was intended to take them to Palestine. But the British intercepted the ship one mile outside the port of Haifa and sent the Jewish refugees to a detention camp on the Island of Mauritius, where they spent the rest of the war. His family finally made it to Palestine in 1945. 

But by the time Rosenberg made contact with his parents, he had secured a coveted visa to go to the US, sponsored by a fellow soldier and the University of Dayton, where he was offered a job teaching French. Justus’ father advised him to stick with his plans and go to America.  

After gaining US citizenship in 1952, Rosenberg, then 31, traveled to Israel to see his parents for the first time since he was 16. 

When his ship landed in Haifa, Justus was sound asleep after a night of partying. 

“[My father] saw all the people coming down from the boat, and not his son. Eventually, I woke up. And I went in my pajamas to the railing of the boat, and I looked down. And there I saw my father, whom I hadn't seen for 15 years. … We had a family whistle that we used when I was a child. And I let go of that family whistle, and he looked up. He recognized me. No word was said, because we just looked at each other,” Rosenberg recalled. 

In the United States, Rosenberg earned an MA and PhD in linguistics and comparative literature at the University of Cincinnati, then taught at Dayton and Swarthmore and received tenure at Bard College in upstate New York. Rosenberg kept in touch with Miriam Davenport, Fry and others, and attended reunions of the Emergency Rescue Committee. In 1994, Yad Vashem recognized Varian Fry as a “Righteous Among the Nations.” 

Rosenberg went to Israel often to visit his parents and his sister, who had three children and nine grandchildren. In 1997, after never having wed, he married Karin Kraft. 

Rosenberg always retained a perspective of humility around his accomplishments. In his testimony, he acknowledged those who risked their own lives to help him, so he in turn could help others. 

“Some of my religious friends—and I have many of them in all quarters, Protestants, Catholics, and Jews—tell me that God has designs on certain people and that it was God's finger who guided me. I think, to some extent, survival is a question of luck, of chance, of a coming together, concurrence of circumstances. And to seize the right moment and the opportunity that is being offered, that little, little hole that exists there, through which you may slip through.”

Watch Justus Rosenberg’s full testimony .

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Coordinates of Elektrostal in decimal degrees

Coordinates of elektrostal in degrees and decimal minutes, utm coordinates of elektrostal, geographic coordinate systems.

WGS 84 coordinate reference system is the latest revision of the World Geodetic System, which is used in mapping and navigation, including GPS satellite navigation system (the Global Positioning System).

Geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude) define a position on the Earth’s surface. Coordinates are angular units. The canonical form of latitude and longitude representation uses degrees (°), minutes (′), and seconds (″). GPS systems widely use coordinates in degrees and decimal minutes, or in decimal degrees.

Latitude varies from −90° to 90°. The latitude of the Equator is 0°; the latitude of the South Pole is −90°; the latitude of the North Pole is 90°. Positive latitude values correspond to the geographic locations north of the Equator (abbrev. N). Negative latitude values correspond to the geographic locations south of the Equator (abbrev. S).

Longitude is counted from the prime meridian ( IERS Reference Meridian for WGS 84) and varies from −180° to 180°. Positive longitude values correspond to the geographic locations east of the prime meridian (abbrev. E). Negative longitude values correspond to the geographic locations west of the prime meridian (abbrev. W).

UTM or Universal Transverse Mercator coordinate system divides the Earth’s surface into 60 longitudinal zones. The coordinates of a location within each zone are defined as a planar coordinate pair related to the intersection of the equator and the zone’s central meridian, and measured in meters.

Elevation above sea level is a measure of a geographic location’s height. We are using the global digital elevation model GTOPO30 .

Elektrostal , Moscow Oblast, Russia