In 1935 a 27-year-old American journalist called Varian Fry paid a visit to Germany. Greatly interested in international politics and witness to brutal attacks on Jews by Nazi thugs, he returned home to the United States convinced that mayhem was not far off in Europe. Once the German army had begun to advance through France in the spring of 1940, he joined forces with another journalist, Paul Hagen, who was himself a refugee from Germany, to put together an operation to rescue European writers and artists, many of them Jewish or communist, at risk of capture by the Nazis. They called it the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC) and began to raise funds. Eleanor Roosevelt promised, despite her husband’s reluctance, to provide US visas.

Finding no other candidate willing to run the operation, Fry, who spoke good French and passable German, arrived in Marseille via Portugal in August 1940 with $3,000. To keep his mission secret, he taped his list of two hundred intellectuals to his calf. By the summer of 1940, the city was awash with desperate people trying to escape the Vichy police and Nazi spies. 

In his new book, Uwe Wittstock tells the story of Fry’s venture, drawing on the memoirs and letters of individuals making their way south to Marseille. Setting up an office in the Hotel Splendide, Fry recruited an intrepid team of Americans, French, Germans and Austrians to work as interpreters and