THE SAVIOUR

In 1940, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Hannah Arendt, Heinrich Mann - the cream of European culture - were trapped by the Nazis in the South of France. They were saved by Varian Fry, a foppish, friendless American. DONALD CARROLL tells the forgotten story of...

Like the first bird note of a gloomy morning, a rumour ran around the cafs,'' recalled the Czech writer Hans Natonek. ``It was said that an American had arrived with the funds and the will to help. It was another distraction in a city in which black market operators sold hysterical men berths on ships which did not exist to ports which, in any case, would have denied them entry. But the rumour persisted. It was said that this American had a list..."

Varian Fry, the American in question, arrived in Marseilles in August 1940. And he did, indeed, have a list. During the next 12 months this thin, bespectacled young dandy would be responsible for one of the most audacious rescue operations of the Second World War - the rescue and mass transplanting of the intelligentsia of one continent to another: a feat that Laura Fermi, herself a distinguished refugee and the wife of the great physicist Enrico Fermi, later described as "a unique phenomenon in the history of emigration".

Fry was hardly typecast for the job. Born in 1908, the son of a well- to-do New York stockbroker, he was a sickly child who became a gifted linguist, with a particular passion for Latin - and a gift for antagonising everyone he considered his intellectual inferior. In 1926, he went to Harvard, where he cultivated an eccentric streak (he would not touch a sandwich except with a knife and fork) and a sub-Wildean foppishness (a flower forever blossomed from his buttonhole, a silk handkerchief always cascaded from his breast pocket). He left Harvard as he had entered it, friendless.

With one exception. In his final year, he met Eileen Hughes, an editor on Atlantic Monthly and a gentle, maternal woman seven years Fry's senior. They were married in 1931. After moving to Manhattan, Eileen took a job teaching English, and Fry became an assistant editor at Scholastic magazine. In 1935, at the age of 27, he was offered the editorship of The Living Age, a prestigious review of international affairs. But there was one condition attached: he must go to Berlin to see at first hand what was happening under the Third Reich. He saw, and he returned with a cause - the cause of alerting America to Hitler's intentions. But his warnings fell on deaf, or at best indifferent, ears.

And then, in 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and Fry, together with an Austrian migr, Karl Frank, began to raise funds to bring refugees of Nazism to the United States. But when France capitulated to Germany in June 1940 and the Vichy government was formed, Fry realised this was not enough; not only were French Jews now at appalling risk from their own government, but so too were thousands of Europe's most distinguished writers, artists and intellectuals, who had fled to the South of France since Hitler came to power. To Fry, the torch-bearers of European civilisation, his people, were being held in the world's largest concentration camp.

He declared that if no one else would go to help them, then he would. So he first coaxed a passport out of the State Department, which at that time took a dim view of Americans travelling to Europe. Then he cajoled a letter of introduction out of the International YMCA, identifying him as a relief worker, because the French authorities took a dim view of anyone who wanted to enter France without having some kind of official business. He quizzed recent arrivals from Europe about the true conditions in Vichy-governed France. He spoke to Eleanor Roosevelt, enlisting her support for his efforts, specifically with the American consuls in France. He conferred with Thomas Mann, Jacques Maritain, Reinhold Niebuhr, Jules Romains and many others, all of whom provided him with names of those whom he would try - somehow - to save from the Nazis.

Fry arrived in Marseilles on 15 August 1940, after travelling overland by train from Lisbon. He had with him two suitcases of clothes, a list of several hundred names, and $3,000 in cash taped to his leg. He installed himself in Room 307 of the Htel Splendide, just down from the Gare St Charles.

Action was necessary; the collaborationist zeal of the French authorities was worse than Fry had been led to expect. In the weeks before his arrival, one ominous decree after another had come out of Vichy. There were laws against Jews and statutes authorising prefects of police to arrest and intern foreign Jews without cause. And then it was announced that all foreigners between the ages of 18 and 55 could be interned.

Furthermore, no one was allowed to leave the country without an exit visa - and all applications for exit visas were handed over to the Gestapo. For those in the greatest danger if they remained in France, the very act of asking to leave was sufficient to guarantee instant arrest, internment in a concentration camp and, ultimately, deportation to Germany.

So Fry moved quickly to establish contact with as many people on his list as he could find among the city's swollen refugee population. The first he located were Franz Werfel, the Czech writer whose novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh had been an international bestseller, and his already legendary wife, Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel. They were staying in a hotel near the Vieux Port. Fry found them distinctly unappealing: Werfel, a fat little man with thick glasses, was full of whining self-pity; his wife, of imperious self-importance.

Much more congenial was the patrician and soft-spoken Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann's older brother, who at that time was probably better known as a writer than his brother. Indeed, such was the respect he commanded that in 1932 he had been put forward by the social democratic press as a candidate for President of Germany. In 1933, when Hitler came to power, Mann was the first person to be stripped of his German citizenship. He and his young wife, Nelly, were staying in a hotel across the street from the Splendide.

After these initial contacts, Fry quickly managed to get in touch with most of the people on his list. In fact, the refugee grapevine was so efficient that most of them found Fry before he could find them. Equally quickly, he recruited some much-needed helpers. Two were to become crucial to the success of his operation: Albert Hirschman, a baby-faced 25-year-old German economist, whom Fry nicknamed Beamish, and Miriam Davenport, an energetic young woman from Boston who had been studying art history at the Sorbonne when war broke out. With Fry as their ringleader, this improbable little band proceeded to launch one of the most daring rescue operations of the War.

A cover had to be established for the operation and, if possible, official sanction obtained. Fry went to see the secretary-general of the prefecture and explained his plans for an American Relief Centre to aid needy refugees. Whether it was that the plans sounded innocent enough, or that Fry looked innocent enough in his pin-striped suit with the ever-present silk hand- kerchief and boutonnire, the secretary-general gave his blessing. A few days later, the Centre Amricain de Secours opened in an abandoned handbag factory in the rue Grignan.

There, from early in the morning until late at night, Fry and his two young cohorts interviewed refugees. The basic information about each person, plus the name of someone who could verify that information, was written down on an index card. Addresses, for obvious reasons, were omitted. Some refugees were given money for food, and a letter of introduction to a bona fide relief agency. Others, the ones on Fry's list, were told to await news of possible "travel plans".

After the last of the refugees had departed each day, Fry and Beamish would adjourn to the bathroom, turn on the taps to foil any attempts at eavesdropping, and talk over any special problems. Afterwards, they would hide the most incriminating documents, usually by loosening the screws on the mirror inside the closet door and sliding the papers behind it. Whatever cash was on hand went home with Beamish. Finally, Fry would spread the index cards in careful disarray on one of the desks so that he could tell if they had been tampered with.

But the biggest problem was to find an escape route. The most obvious - by sea - was also the most perilous. The available boats were often unseaworthy, and the traffic in and out of Marseilles was subject to tight restrictions. Further out, the Italian and German fleets patrolled the Mediterranean. And, even if a boat survived the crossing to North Africa, there was still a considerable risk of capture and return to France.

That left the Pyrenees. Although the Spanish and Portuguese had repeatedly compromised their neutrality in their willingness to accom-modate Hitler, they still were prepared to allow refugees to travel through their countries on transit visas, so long as they had an ultimate destination, such as the United States. The problem was to find a way to get out of France illegally - that is, to slip across the border without an exit visa - but enter Spain legally.

Beamish had fought briefly with a Republican unit in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, and knew that in the mountains above Cerbre, a fishing village near the border with Spain, the French and Spanish frontier posts were so placed that neither was visible to the other. It was possible, he told Fry, to climb the mountain on the French side without being seen by the guards, while also managing not to overshoot the Spanish border station, where it was imperative to get the entry stamp in one's passport.

Beamish drew Fry a sketch. This map, drawn in pencil on a little scrap of paper, was to become a crucial document in the cultural history of our time.

But there were other, more formal documents that were needed - a carte d'identit, which was required for anyone travelling in France, and, of course, a passport. Very few of the people on Fry's list could risk travelling under their own names; Fry had to acquire a large number of passports and blank identity cards, and he had to find a skilled forger who could make them usable.

To forge the documents, he engaged the services of a cheery, diminutive Austrian cartoon-ist named Bill Freier. Freier, who had fled to France when the Germans entered Vienna in March 1938, spent his days drawing portraits of people down by the Vieux Port and his nights in his hotel room altering passports. He would take a black market passport - usually a Dutch or Belgian one, because they were least likely to be scrutinised - and, with a razor blade, carefully remove the original photograph, replacing it with a picture of the person who would be using the passport. Then, with a very fine brush, he would painstakingly reproduce the stamp that made the document official. Finally, he would "age" it with the help of a few drops of water, some cigarette ash and fine sandpaper.

The first to make use of Freier's handiwork was Konrad Heiden, the man who had revealed Hitler's true nature to the world in his masterful biography, Der Fhrer. Of all the refugees, probably none was in greater danger than Heiden. Obviously, he couldn't travel under his own name, so Freier prepared for him a whole new set of papers. Thus the man who left Marseilles was a businessman named Silbermann. He made it to Lisbon. Following Heiden, in rapid succession, were Hans Natonek, Emil Gumbel, the great mathematician whose outspoken pacifism had provoked a riot at Heidelberg, Otto Meyerhof, the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist, and the novelists Leonhard Frank, Alfred Polgar and Hertha Pauli. They, too, made it safely to Lisbon. Fry's underground railway was in business.

While most refugees would have done anything to be able to escape, there were a few who had misgivings. The most prominent among these were Franz Werfel and Heinrich Mann. The pessimistic Werfel would probably have had misgivings about any plan, but in this case his worries were justified; he had suffered a serious heart attack two years earlier, and he was overweight, with dangerously high blood pressure. The rigours of the journey, and especially the climb up to the border, might prove too much for him. Mann, who was almost 70 and in frail health, was also concerned about his ability to endure the long, strenuous trip. Fry only succeeded in persuading them to go by offering to travel with them.

So, at 5am on Thursday, 12 September 1940, a small group gathered in a corner of Gare St Charles. There were Varian Fry, Franz and Alma Werfel, Heinrich and Nelly Mann, and Thomas Mann's son Golo. There was also, despite Fry's pleas that they bring only essential luggage, a pile of 12 suitcases - all of them belonging to Alma. At 5.30am the six of them, plus Alma's luggage, boarded the train.

It was late afternoon when the train pulled into Cerbre. After checking Alma's bags with a porter, the party moved into a hotel for the night. At breakfast the next morning Alma presented Fry with another unwelcome surprise: she had put on a blindingly conspic-uous white dress in which to climb the sunlit mountainside. To make matters worse, Nelly Mann went into a mild panic when she realised that it was Friday the thirteenth.

After a tense breakfast, Fry led the group to the town cemetery, a walled- in enclave of ornamental tombs perched in isolation on a mountain overlooking the bay. There he explained once more the exact procedure and once again checked to make sure that none of them was carrying anything that might arouse suspicion. Sure enough, Heinrich Mann, whose passport identified him as Heinrich Ludwig, had the initials HM on his hatband. As Fry began scratching the initials out with his penknife, Mann said miserably, "We are obliged to act like real criminals." Fry supplied the group with American cigarettes for pacifying the police and bade them farewell. Then he returned to town to accompany Alma's luggage on the short train ride through the tunnel to Port-Bou in Spain. Before sunset, Fry and his escapees were reunited. Two days later, they were in Lisbon.

Once in Lisbon, Fry set about interviewing refugees he had helped to escape to see if they had encountered any hazards along the way. Each person had a different story to tell, but the only tale that really unnerved Fry was the last one: a group that had tried to cross the border the day after Fry's own group reported that they had found Cerbre swarming with Germans. They had therefore spent the night in the mountains west of the village and had only managed to escape by approaching the Spanish frontier post from the inland side. What troubled Fry about this was that several other refugees, including Lion Feuchtwanger, an eminent historical novelist whose books were anathema to the Nazis, and in whose fate Eleanor Roosevelt herself was particularly interested, had also been scheduled to leave in the days following Fry's departure. What if they had walked into a trap? Fry's question appeared to have been answered by a headline in the New York Times: feuchtwanger in berlin - still held by police - beheading in paris is denied.

Back in Marseilles, Fry learned, to his great relief, that Feuchtwanger was safely in Lisbon. None the less, the story could so easily have been true that Fry decided at once to change the escape route. The problem was how to find a new way over the Pyrenees.

The answer was provided by a young German couple, Johannes and Lisa Fittko. Johannes Fittko had been a prominent journalist and an active social democrat in Berlin until 1933. Shortly after Hitler came to power, the Nazis passed a law decreeing the death penalty for anyone who could be considered the "intellectual author" of a capital crime. Within a few weeks, it was used to get rid of Fittko. A Nazi was murdered in Berlin -by other Nazis, as it turned out - and the crime was blamed on an article Fittko had written. Fittko was forced to flee to Prague, where he found out that he had been condemned to death in absentia, and where he met Lisa.

For the next seven years Fittko continued to churn out articles against the Nazis while the Gestapo pursued him and Lisa across Czechoslovakia, Austria, Switzerland, France, Germany, Holland, and finally France again. Like so many others, they had ended up in Marseilles. But unlike most, they had a great deal of experience in slipping across borders with the Gestapo at their heels. So, when Beamish discovered that they had already scouted the eastern Pyrenees for their own escape, he immediately brought them to Fry, who persuaded the Fittkos to delay their departure in order to help guide others over the border.

So, at the end of September, the Fittkos left Marseilles for Banyuls, a town a few miles up the coast from Cerbre. There, with the help of identity papers forged by Freier, they moved into a large house and found work in local vineyards along the border. That house would soon become a transit hotel for waves of writers, artists and scholars fleeing Europe.

Before leaving Marseilles, each refugee was given half of a torn strip of coloured paper. On the end of each strip there was a number. Fittko had the other half, with the same number on it. If the numbers matched, and the two pieces of paper fitted together perfectly, Fittko knew that the refugee had been sent by Fry. After a few days, Fittko would take some of his "visiting friends" out into the fields, either to help in the vineyards or simply to have a picnic, whereupon they would, one by one, fade into the hills. Miraculously, no one was ever caught.

Two further problems started to become critical. One was getting money into France; the other was getting messages out. To deal with the money problem, Fry approached a well-known Corsican gangster, a man with the same problem as Fry but in reverse: he had friends who wanted to get money out of France. The two men came to an arrangement; every time one of the Corsican's people wanted to transfer a sum of money out of the country, Fry would cable the Emergency Rescue Committee to pay that sum in dollars into a bank account in New York. In return, the Corsican would hand over the money to Fry in francs.

Fry's solution to the communication problem was more homespun. Whenever an important message needed to be sent to New York, Fry would type it out on light airmail paper. The paper was then cut into thin strips, each containing a single line, and these were glued together end to end. When the glue had dried, the long, slender message was rolled up tightly and placed in a condom. Next, Fry would make a slit near the bottom of a half- empty tube of toothpaste, slip the message inside, and then roll the tube up so that it looked like every other half-used toothpaste tube. The "tubegram" was then given to a refugee to deliver when he got to America. Not one message failed to get through.

So it was that Fry succeeded in organising the escapes of nearly 1,500 men and women, including the artists Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz and Max Ernst; musicians like Wanda Landowska; scientists such as Emil Gumbel; and writers such as Hannah Arendt and Andr Breton.

Fry succeeded in spite of growing police surveillance - and harassment. He succeeded in spite of the constant lack of co-operation, even discouragement, he received from American consular officials in Marseilles. He succeeded in spite of the reluctance of some, like Lipchitz, to wave goodbye to Europe. He succeeded in spite of the self-endangering arrogance of others, like Chagall, who thought that anything short of death would be preferable to living in a cultural wasteland like America. (After the passage of Vichy's more savage anti-Jewish laws, however, Chagall reconsidered. He asked Fry if there were any cows in America. Once he had been reassured on this important point, he eagerly began packing his bags.)

Varian Fry's work came to an end on Friday, 29 August 1941, when he was taken into custody by agents of the Suret National. After being held incommunicado overnight at police headquarters, he was taken to Cerbre for his second trip through the international tunnel into Spain.

When he got to Lisbon, Fry wrote a letter to his mother explaining why he had lingered so long in France. He had stayed, he said, because it took courage to stay - "and courage is a quality I hadn't previously been sure I possessed".

But in New York a series of cruel disappointments awaited him. He had trouble finding a job, and was turned down by the US army: he was told that his chronic indigestion was "psychogenic". Most wounding of all, many of the celebrated refugees he had rescued suddenly could find no time for him.

In the face of such setbacks, his marriage to Eileen began to buckle and in a matter of months collapsed completely. Then, in 1947, she was found to have lung cancer. Though by now divorced, Fry remained devoted to Eileen, and he was devastated by the news. After she was hospitalised, he went every day to her bedside and sat for hours, trying to cheer her up. She died in early May 1948.

The following year he met Annette Riley. Where Eileen had been mature, wise, maternal, Annette was bouncy and naive, and almost 20 years younger than Fry. The daughter of a philosophy professor, she also had the kind of curiosity that Fry found irresistible. They married in 1950.

The early years of their marriage, during which they had three children, were possibly the happiest of Fry's life. Then things started to go sour again. A small business he was running failed, and he had to take up freelance writing and teach Latin and Greek. He had trouble finding magazines that wanted to publish his work, and he couldn't hold down a teaching job for more than a year or two - not because he wasn't a good teacher, but because he would denounce his colleagues for being lazy.

Once more he began brooding, now more bitterly than ever, about the way his work in Marseilles had been forgotten, about the way he had been rejected and snubbed by some of the very people whose lives he had saved.

Then, at last, came the recognition for which he had been waiting more than 25 years. On 12 April 1967, in a ceremony at the French consulate in New York, he was awarded the Croix du Chevalier of the French Legion of Honour.

Convinced that the world was finally ready to hear his story, Fry set out to write a book about that year, when the fate of so many of Europe's writers and artists was in his hands. He dug out old notes. He looked up old comrades. He contacted as many of the former refugees as he could find. And he moved out of New York.

The Joel Barlow High School in Redding, Connecticut, had offered him a job as a Latin teacher, an offer he had eagerly accepted. Not only was it a good teaching post, but it also gave him an opportunity to make a graceful exit from a marriage that now lay in ruins. Above all, it gave him an opportunity to go off alone and write the book that would earn him the respect and admiration he felt were his due.

He found a large house a few miles from Redding, and in the late summer of 1967 he moved in. He was in exceptionally good spirits, looking forward to the teaching as well as the writing. He began both a few days later.

On Tuesday, 12 September, only a week after he had started his new job, Fry failed to show up at the school. The next day, when he again failed to appear, the school became worried and notified the police. A young officer named Richard Schwartze was sent to investigate.

The front door was unlocked, Schwartze reported, and there was a light on in an upstairs bedroom. There he found Varian Fry, lying in bed, two pillows propping up his head. In his hand he held his glasses, unfolded, as if he had just taken them off, tired of reading. Next to him were manuscript pages of his book. Questioned by a reporter for the local news-paper, Schwartze described the manuscript. "It appeared to be a work of fiction," he said.