The Artist Schindler’s List: How Varian Fry Rescued Artists from Burning Europe

Varian Fry’s Early Life

Varian Fry was born in New York City in 1907 and grew up in New Jersey in a Protestant family with liberal values. He constantly irritated his teachers at the various boarding schools he attended and was briefly expelled from Harvard for several months before graduating. Fry, a classicist, also loved the intellectual complexity of modernist culture. As a foreign correspondent, a trip to Germany in 1935 changed his view on politics and human nature. He witnessed firsthand the violence committed by fascists against Jews. This experience transformed Fry, channeling his natural rebelliousness into a strong hatred for Nazism and everything it represented.

Rescuing Europe’s Persecuted Intellectuals

In June 1940, after the fall of France to the Nazis, Varian Fry joined 200 museum curators, artists, journalists, and Jewish refugees at a meeting at the Hotel Commodore in New York. That day, the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC) was created with the goal of helping anyone persecuted by the Nazis, including European artists, philosophers, and writers. Fry volunteered to travel to Europe and become the ERC’s agent in Vichy France.

Fry arrived in Marseille on August 15, 1940, with $3,000 in banknotes taped to his leg and a list of 200 artists, writers, and intellectuals wanted by the Gestapo and the Vichy police. Although Fry thought he could complete his mission quickly, he found himself in a no man’s land full of Gestapo spies, corrupt French police, and many refugees. Fry also faced a U.S. State Department that viewed his work as a threat to their neutrality and was intent on keeping the U.S. out of the war. To U.S. authorities, Fry was a troublemaker whose covert operation undermined official policy.

In Marseille, Fry established an office at the Hôtel Splendide and quickly began forming a network of allies to plan escapes, forge documents, and exchange money on the black market. He soon became known among the underground network of refugees in France and received many requests for repatriation, receiving 25 letters a day and conducting up to 120 interviews on a typical day. In total, about 15,000 refugees contacted Fry, and he had to decide who would live and who would die.

The Team Behind

To carry out this work, Fry was not alone. Among his closest collaborators were Americans Miriam Davenport and Mary Jayne Gold, as well as Hiram Bingham IV, a U.S. vice-consul in Marseille who fought against antisemitism in the State Department and issued thousands of visas, both legal and illegal. He also received help from Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art, and his wife Margaret Scolari Barr, an art historian who also worked at MoMA.

Villa Air Bel

Fry and his team rented a villa, Air Bel, on the outskirts of Marseille, which had frescoed walls, antique fireplaces, and a grand piano. Many artists found refuge there while Fry worked on their visas and transport options. Among these artists, we can find the writer Victor Serge with his wife and son, André Breton with his wife Jacqueline Lamba and their daughter Aube, and other Surrealists such as the painters Victor Brauner, Max Ernst, Wifredo Lam, André Masson, Oscar Dominguez, Jacques Hérold, and the poet Benjamin Péret.

The villa temporarily became home to a lively group of surrealist artists who impressed Fry with their imaginative discussions, liberal love affairs, and strange games. One of these games was the Marseille Deck of Cards. During one of their frequent meetings at the café Au Brûleur de loups, someone proposed the idea of creating a deck of cards. They wanted to “replace old images with new ones” without “breaking the general structure of the card deck.” André Breton explained that they rejected “everything in the old deck that indicated the survival of the sign and the thing signified.”

However, all this was temporary, and once Varian Fry had prepared the visas and transport, each artist had to leave for their new destination. Ernst departed for New York via Portugal, Lam and Breton bid farewell to Marseille aboard a converted freighter bound for Martinique. Varo emigrated to Mexico from Casablanca. After Fry organized an escape route for the Russian-born Jewish painter Marc Chagall, the artist gave him a small drawing as a thank-you. It depicted a female goat in a fur coat holding a violin. Chagall and his family arrived by boat in New York in June 1941.

Varian Fry’s Impact on Art History

The arrival of artists in New York marked the greatest migration of intellectuals since the Byzantine Empire. The United States became home to a golden generation of European culture. American artists had the opportunity to see the great European cultural heroes not as remote demigods, but as regular presences on the scene. The presence of figures like Breton, the founder of Surrealism, confirmed New York as the new cultural center.

This gave New York artists a new and powerful self-confidence. It attracted international artists to live and work there. Ai Weiwei, Shirin Neshat, and Yoko Ono, to name just a few, were part of this vibrant new generation. They were drawn not to Paris, but to New York. But it wasn’t just New York that benefited from the cultural exodus; Mexico, where artists like Varo emigrated, also reaped the benefits of their presence.