Fry was born in New York City. His parents were Lillian (Mackey) and Arthur Fry, a manager of the Wall Street firm Carlysle and Mellick.[3] The family moved to Ridgewood, New Jersey, in 1910. He grew up in Ridgewood and enjoyed bird-watching and reading. During World War I, at 9 years of age, Fry and friends conducted a fund-raising bazaar for the American Red Cross that included a vaudeville show, an ice cream stand and fish pond. He was educated at Hotchkiss School from 1922 to 1924, when he left the school due to hazing rituals. He then attended the Riverdale Country School, graduating in 1926.[4]
An able and multilingual student, Fry scored in the top 10% of the Harvard University[4] entrance exams. In 1927, as a Harvard undergraduate, he founded Hound & Horn, an influential literary quarterly, in collaboration with Lincoln Kirstein. He was suspended for a prank just before graduation and had to repeat his senior year.[5][6] Through Kirstein's sister, Mina, he met his future wife, Eileen Avery Hughes, an editor of Atlantic Monthly, who was seven years his senior and had been educated at Roedean School and Oxford University. Although Fry was a closeted homosexual, according to his son James,[7] they married on 2 June 1931.[6]
Journalist
While working as a foreign correspondent for the American journal The Living Age, Fry visited Berlin in 1935, and personally witnessed Nazi abuse against Jews on more than one occasion, which "turned him into an ardent anti-Nazi". He said in 1945, "I could not remain idle as long as I had any chances at all of saving even a few of its intended victims."[5][8]
Following his visit to Berlin, in 1935 Fry wrote about the savage treatment of Jews by Hitler's regime in The New York Times. He wrote books about foreign affairs for Headline Books, owned by the Foreign Policy Association, including The Peace that Failed.[9][10] It describes the troubled political climate following World War I, the break-up of Czechoslovakia and the events leading up to World War II.[11]
Emergency Rescue Committee
Greatly disturbed by what he saw, Fry helped raise money to support European anti-Nazi movements. Shortly after the invasion of France in June 1940, which the Germans quickly occupied, Fry and friends formed the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC) in New York City,[2] with support of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and others.
By August 1940, Fry was in Marseille representing the ERC[12] in an effort to help persons seeking to flee the Nazis.[13][14] They worked to circumvent bureaucratic processes set up by French authorities, who would not issue exit visas.[5] Fry had $3,000 and a short list of refugees, mostly German Jews, under imminent threat of arrest by agents of the Gestapo. Other anti-Nazi writers, avant-garde artists, musicians, and hundreds of others came to him, desperately seeking any chance to escape France.[15]
Some historians later noted it was a miracle that a white American Protestant would risk everything to help the Jews.[16]
Beginning in 1940, in Marseille, despite the watchful eye of the collaborationist Vichy regime,[17] Fry and a small group of volunteers hid people at the Villa Air-Bel until they could be smuggled out.[2] More than 2,200 people were taken across the border to Spain and then to the safety of neutral Portugal from which they took ships to the United States.[18][19]
Fry helped other exiles escape on ships leaving Marseille for the French Caribbean colony of Martinique, from where they could also go to the United States.[20]
Among Fry's closest associates were Americans Miriam Davenport, a former art student at the Sorbonne, and Chicago heiress Mary Jayne Gold, a lover of the arts and the "good life" who had come to Paris in the early 1930s.[21][22][2]
Letter to his wife Eileen, February 1941
Among the people who have come into my office, or with whom I am in constant correspondence, are not only some of the greatest living authors, painters, sculptors of Europe . . . but also former cabinet ministers and even prime ministers of half a dozen countries. What a strange place Europe is when men like this are reduced to waiting patiently in the anteroom of a young American of no importance whatever.
From his isolated position in Marseille, Fry relied on the Unitarian Service Committee in Lisbon to help the refugees he sent.[27] This office, staffed by American Unitarians under the direction of Robert Dexter, helped refugees to wait in safety for visas and other necessary papers, and to gain passage by sea from Lisbon.[28]
Fry was forced to leave France in September 1941 after officials of both the Vichy government and of the United States State Department had become angered by his covert activities. He then spent more than a month in Lisbon before returning to the United States in October.[5][29]
In 1942, the Emergency Rescue Committee and the American branch of the European-based International Relief Association joined forces under the name the International Relief and Rescue Committee, which was later shortened to the International Rescue Committee (IRC). The IRC has continued as a leading nonsectarian, nongovernmental international relief and development organization that still operates today.
There are some things so horrible that decent men and women find them impossible to believe, so monstrous that the civilized world recoils incredulous before them. The recent reports of the systematic extermination of the Jews in Nazi Europe are of this order... we can offer asylum now, without delay or red tape, to those few fortunate enough to escape from the Aryan paradise. There have been bureaucratic delays in visa procedure which have literally condemned to death many stalwart democrats... This is a challenge which we cannot, must not, ignore.
Fry, Varian. "The Massacre of Jews in Europe." The New Republic, 1942.[31]
Fry wrote and spoke critically against U.S. immigration policies particularly relating to the fate of Jews in Europe. In a December 1942 issue of The New Republic, he wrote a scathing article titled: "The Massacre of Jews in Europe".[31]
Although by 1942 Fry had been terminated from his position at the Emergency Rescue Committee, American private rescuers acknowledged that his program in France had been uniquely effective, and recruited him in 1944 to provide behind-the-scenes guidance to the Roosevelt administration's late-breaking rescue program, the War Refugee Board.[28]
Fry published a book in 1945 about his time in France under the title Surrender on Demand, first published by Random House, 1945. (Its title refers to the 1940 French-German armistice clause requiring France to hand over to German authorities any refugee from "Greater Germany" the Gestapo might identify, a requirement Fry routinely violated.) A later edition was published by Johnson Books, in 1997, in conjunction with the U.S. Holocaust Museum. In 1968, the US publisher Scholastic (which markets mainly to children and adolescents) published a paperback edition under the title Assignment: Rescue.[29]
After the war, Fry worked as a journalist, magazine editor and business writer. He also taught college and was in film production. Feeling as if he had lived the peak of his life in France,[2] he developed ulcers. Fry went into psychoanalysis and said that "as time went on, he grew more and more troubled."
Fry and his wife Eileen divorced after he returned from France. She developed cancer and died on May 12, 1948. During her hospital convalescence, Fry visited her and read to her daily. At the end of 1948 or early 1949, Fry met Annette Riley, who was 16 years his junior. They married in 1950, had three children together, but were separated in 1966, possibly owing to his irrational behavior, believed to have been a result of manic depression.[32]
A Bibliography of the Writings of Thomas Stearns Eliot, Hound & Horn, 1928
Headline Books, New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1938.
War in China: America's Role in the Far East, New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1938. LCCN38-27205
Bricks Without Mortar: The Story of International Cooperation, New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1938; 1939 LCCN39-2481
The Peace that Failed: How Europe Sowed the Seeds of War, New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1939. LCCN40-3702
Surrender on Demand, New York: Random House, 1945; Johnson Books, 1997 LCCN45-3492OCLC1315136
To Whom it May Concern, 1947.
Assignment Rescue: An Autobiography, Scholastic Inc., 1968; 1970; 1993; Four Winds Press, 1969; Madison (Wisconsin): Demco, 1992 ISBN978-0-439-14541-1
Co-author
Popper, David H., Shepard Stone and Varian Fry, The puzzle of Palestine, New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1938
Goetz, Delia and Varian Fry, The Good Neighbours: The Story of the Two Americas, The Foreign Policy Association, 1939 LCCN39-7983
Fry, Varian and Emil Herlin, War Atlas: A Handbook of Maps and Facts, New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1940 LCCN42-11302
Wolfe, Henry Cutler, James Frederick Green, Stoyan Pribichevich, Varian Fry, William V. Reed, Elizabeth Ogg and Emil Herlin, Spotlight on the Balkans, New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1940
Legacy
1967 - The government of France recognized Fry's contribution to freedom making him a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur.,[29] the only honour in his lifetime, awarded at the French Consulate in New York
1980 - Mary Jayne Gold's 1980 book titled Crossroads Marseilles 1940[34] sparked an interest in Fry and his heroic efforts.
2002 - On the initiative of Samuel V. Brock, the U.S. Consul General in Marseille from 1999 to 2002, the square in front of the consulate was renamed Place Varian Fry.[38]
2005 - A street in the newly reconstructed East/West Berlin Wall area in the Berlin borough of Mitte at Potsdamer Platz was named Varian-Fry-Straße in recognition of his work.[39]
2007 - On October 15, 2007, the U.S. House of Representatives honored Varian Fry on the 100th anniversary of his birth.[9]
2019 - Julie Orringer's historical novel The Flight Portfolio is a fictionalized account of Fry's life and experiences in Marseille, which merges real events and historical characters with invented elements. The invented elements include a clandestine love affair and intrigue surrounding the plot to rescue a fictional young physics genius.[40]
2023 – Transatlantic, a streaming television series based on Orringer's The Flight Portfolio, is released on Netflix; Cory Michael Smith plays Varian Fry.
Gold, Mary Jayne. Crossroads Marseilles, 1940. New York: Doubleday, 1980. ISBN978-0-385-15618-9.
Grunwald-Spier, Agnes. The Other Schindlers: Why Some People Chose to Save Jews in the Holocaust. Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: The History Press, 2010. ISBN978-0-7524-5706-2.
Isenberg, Sheila. A Hero of Our Own: The Story of Varian Fry. Bloomington, Indiana: iUniverse, 2005. ISBN978-0-595-34882-4.
McCabe, Cynthia Jaffee. "Wanted by the Gestapo: Saved by America – Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee", pp. 79–91 in Jackman, Jarrell C. and Carla M. Borden, eds. The Musses Flee Hitler: Cultural Transfer and Adaptation 1930-1945. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1983.
Moulin, Pierre. Dachau, Holocaust, and US Samurais: Nisei Soldiers First in Dachau?. Bloomington, Indiana: AuthorHouse, 2007. ISBN978-1-4259-3801-7.
Paldiel, Mordecai. Saving the Jews: Men and Women who Defied the Final Solution. Lanham, Maryland: Taylor Trade Publications, 2011. ISBN978-1-58979-734-5.
Riding, Alan. And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-occupied Paris. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2010. ISBN978-0-307-59454-9.
Roth, John K. and Elisabeth Maxwell. Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide. London: Palgrave, 2001. ISBN978-0-333-80486-5.
Schwertfeger, Ruth. In Transit: Narratives of German Jews in Exile, Flight, and Internment During 'The Dark Years' of France. Berlin, Germany: Frank & Timme GmbH, 2012. ISBN978-3-86596-384-0.
Sogos, Giorgia. "Varian Fry: „Der Engel von Marseille“. Von der Legalität in die Illegalität und zur Rehabilitierung", in Gabriele Anderl, Simon Usaty (Hrsg.). "Schleppen, schleusen, helfen. Flucht zwischen Rettung und Ausbeutung". Wien: Mandelbaum,2016, S. 209–220, ISBN978-3-85476-482-3.
Strempel, Rüdiger, Letzter Halt Marseille - Varian Fry und das Emergency Rescue Committee, in Clasen, Winrich C.-W./Schneemelcher, W. Peter, eds, Mittelmeerpassagen, Rheinbach 2018, ISBN978-3-87062-307-4
Strempel, Rüdiger, Varian Fry: Der Amerikaner, der Europas Künstler rettete / The American Who Rescued Europe's Artists (German-English) CMZ Verlag, Rheinbach 2023 ISBN978-3-87062-364-7
Watson, Peter. The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution and the Twentieth Century. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010. ISBN978-0-85720-324-3.