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A Quiet American: The Secret War of Varian Fry
The story of Varian Fry, called the "real Rick" of Casablanca, is perhaps one of the most unknown, yet extraordinary sagas of World War II. This penetrating biography follows Varian Fry through his adult life--from his beginnings in the 1930s as a Harvard graduate and political journalist to his arrival in Marseille in 1940 where he managed to spirit away thousands of Europe's cultural elite by falsifying passports, creating new identities, and always resorting to subterfuge.
The list of those saved Hannah Arendt, Andre Breton, Franz Werful and his wife Alma Mahler, Heinrich Mann, Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Andre Masson, and Max Ernst among others.
A Quiet American is an effort to extensively examine the life of a genuine American hero whose political and cultural influence is still largely unacknowledged.
The list of those saved Hannah Arendt, Andre Breton, Franz Werful and his wife Alma Mahler, Heinrich Mann, Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Andre Masson, and Max Ernst among others.
A Quiet American is an effort to extensively examine the life of a genuine American hero whose political and cultural influence is still largely unacknowledged.
416 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
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245 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
January 22, 2022
The Nazis are on the move and seem unstoppable. WWII is on the verge.
This is a phenomenal book about being driven from your homeland because of your race &/or your views. Running for your life, in fear for your life with nowhere safe to go and no one to turn to.
1940 Enter: Varian Fry, a quiet American, one of the founders of the hastily put together EMERGENCY RESCUE COMMITTEE in NYC. The Committee assembles a list of intellectuals, artists, authors and such who need to be spirited out of France before they are arrested and possibly killed.
Fry, with no experience or special recommendation for undercover work, takes on the mission to go into occupied France with the list but no idea how exactly to find these people or how he is going to get them out of France.
Arriving in France with no clear direction Fry manages to cobble together a ‘staff’ of sorts and begins the job of figuring out the job he has been sent to do.
Getting little or no help from those who he expected to assist him (including the American Consul) Fry is understandably frustrated. He becomes feisty in his frustration and is told to leave on several occasions by the very Committee who sent him there, but Fry refuses “I must stay as long as I can, even if it means saving only one more human being.” (Pg.300) until he is arrested and forced to leave in 1941.
The author does not shy away from pointing out Fry’s many faults but what Fry accomplished in the year he was in France with little or no help from the State Department or anyone else who was supposed to have his back, is nothing short of a miracle.
Recommended reading: “Surrender on Demand” by Varian Fry (1945)
This is a phenomenal book about being driven from your homeland because of your race &/or your views. Running for your life, in fear for your life with nowhere safe to go and no one to turn to.
1940 Enter: Varian Fry, a quiet American, one of the founders of the hastily put together EMERGENCY RESCUE COMMITTEE in NYC. The Committee assembles a list of intellectuals, artists, authors and such who need to be spirited out of France before they are arrested and possibly killed.
Fry, with no experience or special recommendation for undercover work, takes on the mission to go into occupied France with the list but no idea how exactly to find these people or how he is going to get them out of France.
Arriving in France with no clear direction Fry manages to cobble together a ‘staff’ of sorts and begins the job of figuring out the job he has been sent to do.
Getting little or no help from those who he expected to assist him (including the American Consul) Fry is understandably frustrated. He becomes feisty in his frustration and is told to leave on several occasions by the very Committee who sent him there, but Fry refuses “I must stay as long as I can, even if it means saving only one more human being.” (Pg.300) until he is arrested and forced to leave in 1941.
The author does not shy away from pointing out Fry’s many faults but what Fry accomplished in the year he was in France with little or no help from the State Department or anyone else who was supposed to have his back, is nothing short of a miracle.
Recommended reading: “Surrender on Demand” by Varian Fry (1945)
March 3, 2016
“Like the first bird note of a gloomy morning, a rumor ran though the cafés of the Vieux Port and Canebière. It was said that an American had arrived with the funds and the will to help.”
So the Czech writer Hans Nanotek, a desperate fugitive from the Nazis, described the arrival of Varian Fry in Marseilles in 1940. Fry’s mission to rescue key cultural and political figures wanted by the Nazis was a daring and improbable one, and Fry himself was an unlikely hero. But as this excellent account makes clear, extraordinarily brutal times can be transformative. Some people sink into depravity and act solely in their own interests; others arise with unsuspected resourcefulness to become saviors.
I had been wanting to read a biography of Varian Fry for some time, and only indecisiveness at which of the half dozen or so well-reviewed biographies to choose stalled me. Having settled on Marino’s book, I was happy to learn that the author had, in a sense, picked up the baton from an earlier, unpublished attempt by a London art editor named Donald Carroll, who in 1965 had been compiling a book on the artist Marc Chagall.
Carroll noted that “I found my curiosity aroused by a footnote mentioning, almost off-handedly, the fact that Chagall was one of the many artists who escaped to New York City early in the war through the good offices of ‘The Fry Committee.’ What, I wondered, was the Fry Committee? No one could tell me, despite the fact that…I had access to virtually every prominent art historian and critic writing in English.”
Carroll’s later research eventually did turn up information on “The Fry Committee” and Varian Fry, and he began conducting extensive interviews with the war survivors who had been rescued by or worked with the committee. However, he never did complete a book he had planned on Varian Fry, though an article he published on Fry led to growing recognition of his achievements. Marino was ultimately tapped to write the story, and he had access to all of Carroll’s interview tapes and notes as he did so. As a result, material drawn from the interviews in particular imparts an engaging freshness and authenticity to the book..
I will not attempt to summarize Varian Fry’s life and exploits, as others have done this better than I could. But I would like to comment on a few things that particularly struck me as noteworthy while reading the book.
First of all, Fry was not a particularly likable person. The thankfully brief synopsis of Fry’s youth and upbringing that Marino provides makes it clear that he was, on the whole, simultaneously cocky and insecure. He distanced himself from others, stood on ceremony, and was something of a pompous ass. But he was undeniably bright and also undeniably open to ideas and susceptible to devoting himself to causes. He was, in short, a man looking for a direction.
From the onset, the author laid out Fry’s personality, but not in an overly speculative way. I felt some kinship and sympathy for Fry, recognizing in him many of the flaws and foibles of intellectuals. What intrigued me most in reading the book, apart from the sheer drama of the situation that Fry found himself in once he undertook his assignment to extricate prominent cultural figures from Europe under the noses of the Nazi, was the gradual change that overtook Fry. He summed this up in a letter to his wife before he returned to the U.S.:
“Doubtless I shall lose some of my new qualities; doubtless some of the old, now dormant, will be reawakened by the resumption of a normal, American life. But I do not think I shall ever be quite the person I was when I kissed you good-bye at the airport and went down the gangplank to the waiting Clipper. For the experience of ten, fifteen, and even twenty years have been pressed into one…. I have learned to live with people, and to work with them. I have developed or discovered within me, powers of resourcefulness, of imagination and of courage which I never before knew I possessed. And I have fought a fight, against enormous odds, of which, in spite of the final defeat, I think I can always be proud.”
Here I observe what has struck me countless times before in reading of Londoners who banded together during the Blitz or concentration camp internees who survived despite all odds: during a trial by fire “powers of resourcefulness, of imagination and of courage” emerge and the person is, essentially, transformed. This, I think, is something intrinsic to our species’ survival.
Another aspect of the book worth commenting on was the deplorable record of the United States government’s handling of the refugee crisis. Fry and his staff were working under almost impossible conditions, but perhaps the most unexpected problems arose due to obstacles and wrong-headed policies set up by the State Department. As Marino noted,
"The logic, issuing from the State Department, and quietly assented to by Roosevelt, had been that if these people were in trouble, then they must be troublemakers – probably 'Reds' or Nazi spies – and not the kind of immigrants that American wanted…. One or two were perhaps spies. But most were simply democrats, and brave ones who had been fighting the losing battle against Fascism for over a decade. And many were Jews, of course…. As a result of this attitude the exiles were in the process of being delivered into the hands of the Nazi enemy by a democracy (in fact by all the remaining democracies) that refused to aid them because they were guilty of having defended democracy.”
Indeed, when Avra Warren, the chief of the State Department Visa Division, was touring Europe in 1920, he told the American consul at Lisbon to make sure that not a ‘single goddam Jew’ got to America. This policy was essentially still in place during World War II.
The picture that Marino paints of the attitudes of most of the American consular staff, the U.S. government, and indeed the apathy of the public at large is painful to contemplate in these current days, with its talk of fences being built at the Mexican border, not to mention the proposed expulsion and exclusion of Moslem immigrants. It all seems so sadly familiar… rather like a broken record. Substitute “Moslem” for “Jew” and the situation seems for all practical purposes the same.
As some other reviewers have commented, there are many names, places, dates, and events to keep track of in this account, and for some, it seems, it became too much of a task. However, I am lucky to have read a number of books that overlap with this one, such as an account of theRed Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life and numerous other books on World War II, its battles, famous spies, and personal accounts.
Still, it would have been helpful, I think, for some sort of dramatis personae to appear at the beginning of the book, serving as a quick reminder of who was who. On a few occasions, I found myself resorting to the index to find the first mention of a person in hopes of reminding myself of who, exactly he or she was. This was a bit clumsy.
High marks, however, to describing the main figures of the book with almost cinematic vividness. Here, for example, is a description of the key money-launderer who helped Fry illegally convert U.S. donations into French francs at the favorable black-market rate:
"Kourillo – Fry called him Dimitru – was a Peter Lorre character. He stood at barely five feet tall, and his handshake felt like an empty glove. Kourillo claimed that in the old country he had been landed gentry (like many other rich 'White Russians,' his family presumably fled during the 1917 revolution) and said that in Paris he had been a member of the most select society. He had the manners and excessive politeness that made this seem both plausible and suspicious.... The Russian had the usual minor-underworld weaknesses for women and liquor, but he did possess one redeeming quality: Kourillo knew many people in Marseilles who wanted to make large amounts of money disappear from France."
And thus with that Peter Lorre image engraved in my head, I had no trouble remembering who Kourillo was. I could even feel that limp handshake!
I feel it will not be too much of a spoiler to mention one very poignant aspect of the book. Varian Fry’s life after his return to the States was not a happy one. It seemed to me that Fry was a victim of PTSD, although Marino never makes this claim. Fry had, strangely enough, been happier and more focused in Marseilles than he ever would be at home once all danger was past.
While he could be proud of saving several thousand people, among whom included “a virtual roll call of twentieth-century genius,” in the words of the book’s fly jacket, Fry’s accomplishments went more or less unheralded during his lifetime, though he did receive a Legion of Honor medal in France. (That was, oddly enough, not for his work rescuing refugees but for help in passing on vital data to the Resistance.) At the end of the book, I was moved to tears at the strange fate of a man who “had once found his homeland; thereafter he lived as an exile.”
So the Czech writer Hans Nanotek, a desperate fugitive from the Nazis, described the arrival of Varian Fry in Marseilles in 1940. Fry’s mission to rescue key cultural and political figures wanted by the Nazis was a daring and improbable one, and Fry himself was an unlikely hero. But as this excellent account makes clear, extraordinarily brutal times can be transformative. Some people sink into depravity and act solely in their own interests; others arise with unsuspected resourcefulness to become saviors.
I had been wanting to read a biography of Varian Fry for some time, and only indecisiveness at which of the half dozen or so well-reviewed biographies to choose stalled me. Having settled on Marino’s book, I was happy to learn that the author had, in a sense, picked up the baton from an earlier, unpublished attempt by a London art editor named Donald Carroll, who in 1965 had been compiling a book on the artist Marc Chagall.
Carroll noted that “I found my curiosity aroused by a footnote mentioning, almost off-handedly, the fact that Chagall was one of the many artists who escaped to New York City early in the war through the good offices of ‘The Fry Committee.’ What, I wondered, was the Fry Committee? No one could tell me, despite the fact that…I had access to virtually every prominent art historian and critic writing in English.”
Carroll’s later research eventually did turn up information on “The Fry Committee” and Varian Fry, and he began conducting extensive interviews with the war survivors who had been rescued by or worked with the committee. However, he never did complete a book he had planned on Varian Fry, though an article he published on Fry led to growing recognition of his achievements. Marino was ultimately tapped to write the story, and he had access to all of Carroll’s interview tapes and notes as he did so. As a result, material drawn from the interviews in particular imparts an engaging freshness and authenticity to the book..
I will not attempt to summarize Varian Fry’s life and exploits, as others have done this better than I could. But I would like to comment on a few things that particularly struck me as noteworthy while reading the book.
First of all, Fry was not a particularly likable person. The thankfully brief synopsis of Fry’s youth and upbringing that Marino provides makes it clear that he was, on the whole, simultaneously cocky and insecure. He distanced himself from others, stood on ceremony, and was something of a pompous ass. But he was undeniably bright and also undeniably open to ideas and susceptible to devoting himself to causes. He was, in short, a man looking for a direction.
From the onset, the author laid out Fry’s personality, but not in an overly speculative way. I felt some kinship and sympathy for Fry, recognizing in him many of the flaws and foibles of intellectuals. What intrigued me most in reading the book, apart from the sheer drama of the situation that Fry found himself in once he undertook his assignment to extricate prominent cultural figures from Europe under the noses of the Nazi, was the gradual change that overtook Fry. He summed this up in a letter to his wife before he returned to the U.S.:
“Doubtless I shall lose some of my new qualities; doubtless some of the old, now dormant, will be reawakened by the resumption of a normal, American life. But I do not think I shall ever be quite the person I was when I kissed you good-bye at the airport and went down the gangplank to the waiting Clipper. For the experience of ten, fifteen, and even twenty years have been pressed into one…. I have learned to live with people, and to work with them. I have developed or discovered within me, powers of resourcefulness, of imagination and of courage which I never before knew I possessed. And I have fought a fight, against enormous odds, of which, in spite of the final defeat, I think I can always be proud.”
Here I observe what has struck me countless times before in reading of Londoners who banded together during the Blitz or concentration camp internees who survived despite all odds: during a trial by fire “powers of resourcefulness, of imagination and of courage” emerge and the person is, essentially, transformed. This, I think, is something intrinsic to our species’ survival.
Another aspect of the book worth commenting on was the deplorable record of the United States government’s handling of the refugee crisis. Fry and his staff were working under almost impossible conditions, but perhaps the most unexpected problems arose due to obstacles and wrong-headed policies set up by the State Department. As Marino noted,
"The logic, issuing from the State Department, and quietly assented to by Roosevelt, had been that if these people were in trouble, then they must be troublemakers – probably 'Reds' or Nazi spies – and not the kind of immigrants that American wanted…. One or two were perhaps spies. But most were simply democrats, and brave ones who had been fighting the losing battle against Fascism for over a decade. And many were Jews, of course…. As a result of this attitude the exiles were in the process of being delivered into the hands of the Nazi enemy by a democracy (in fact by all the remaining democracies) that refused to aid them because they were guilty of having defended democracy.”
Indeed, when Avra Warren, the chief of the State Department Visa Division, was touring Europe in 1920, he told the American consul at Lisbon to make sure that not a ‘single goddam Jew’ got to America. This policy was essentially still in place during World War II.
The picture that Marino paints of the attitudes of most of the American consular staff, the U.S. government, and indeed the apathy of the public at large is painful to contemplate in these current days, with its talk of fences being built at the Mexican border, not to mention the proposed expulsion and exclusion of Moslem immigrants. It all seems so sadly familiar… rather like a broken record. Substitute “Moslem” for “Jew” and the situation seems for all practical purposes the same.
As some other reviewers have commented, there are many names, places, dates, and events to keep track of in this account, and for some, it seems, it became too much of a task. However, I am lucky to have read a number of books that overlap with this one, such as an account of theRed Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life and numerous other books on World War II, its battles, famous spies, and personal accounts.
Still, it would have been helpful, I think, for some sort of dramatis personae to appear at the beginning of the book, serving as a quick reminder of who was who. On a few occasions, I found myself resorting to the index to find the first mention of a person in hopes of reminding myself of who, exactly he or she was. This was a bit clumsy.
High marks, however, to describing the main figures of the book with almost cinematic vividness. Here, for example, is a description of the key money-launderer who helped Fry illegally convert U.S. donations into French francs at the favorable black-market rate:
"Kourillo – Fry called him Dimitru – was a Peter Lorre character. He stood at barely five feet tall, and his handshake felt like an empty glove. Kourillo claimed that in the old country he had been landed gentry (like many other rich 'White Russians,' his family presumably fled during the 1917 revolution) and said that in Paris he had been a member of the most select society. He had the manners and excessive politeness that made this seem both plausible and suspicious.... The Russian had the usual minor-underworld weaknesses for women and liquor, but he did possess one redeeming quality: Kourillo knew many people in Marseilles who wanted to make large amounts of money disappear from France."
And thus with that Peter Lorre image engraved in my head, I had no trouble remembering who Kourillo was. I could even feel that limp handshake!
I feel it will not be too much of a spoiler to mention one very poignant aspect of the book. Varian Fry’s life after his return to the States was not a happy one. It seemed to me that Fry was a victim of PTSD, although Marino never makes this claim. Fry had, strangely enough, been happier and more focused in Marseilles than he ever would be at home once all danger was past.
While he could be proud of saving several thousand people, among whom included “a virtual roll call of twentieth-century genius,” in the words of the book’s fly jacket, Fry’s accomplishments went more or less unheralded during his lifetime, though he did receive a Legion of Honor medal in France. (That was, oddly enough, not for his work rescuing refugees but for help in passing on vital data to the Resistance.) At the end of the book, I was moved to tears at the strange fate of a man who “had once found his homeland; thereafter he lived as an exile.”
December 24, 2024
I’ve long known about Varian Fry and his work in 1940/41 Vichy Marseille, but only in broad strokes. This book provided the engrossing and astonishing details.
Fry was Harvard educated with lefty leanings. As a young man working as a journalist he witnessed the increasingly violent antisemitism of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. In 1940, America was still a neutral power and the Nazis occupied northern France and increasingly controlled the Vichy government in the south. Upon arrival in Marseille, Fry created a legal and seemingly innocuous service agency. Within it he created a small efficient secret refugee evacuation organization under the noses of the Nazi-collaborating Vichy government and Gestapo agents.
Fry’s initial purpose was to find and evacuate specific artists and writers who were obvious targets of the Nazi regime—he arrived in France with a list of 200 names. With no prior training he was quickly able to master all manner of clandestine activities. In a little over a year he saved as many as two thousand or more mostly Jewish and/or anti-Nazi refugees from internment and ultimate transport to German concentration camps and death. Among the escapees arranged by Fry and his associates were Heinrich Mann, Franz Werfel, Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Hannah Arendt, Max Ernst, André Breton, and Lion Feuchtwanger. But his efforts expanded well beyond such leading cultural figures.
Earlier this year I read Julie Orringer’s novel, The Flight Portfolio, which is based on Fry’s work in Marseille. Soon after that I watched the Netflix mini-series, Transatlantic, loosely based on that novel. This led me to wonder if these fictionalized versions might have over-dramatized what actually happened. Having now read Marino’s book, I believe the truth was even more fantastic than those depictions. Added to the obvious and dangerous enemies that were the Vichy and German “security” apparatuses was the growing hostility against Fry from the American State Department and soon even his New York-based sponsoring NGO. While these elements were included in the fictionalized accounts, getting the true details not only did not diminish this story but had the effect of enhancing my appreciation of the brazen audaciousness and ingenuity of Fry and his ever-changing team—the latter because its members were mostly refugees themselves who ultimately needed their own escape.
At times some of the names of Fry’s associates and the many refugees began to blur, and one could wish for a more closely edited book, but the story itself and Fry’s tradecraft and heroism kept me riveted.
Fry was Harvard educated with lefty leanings. As a young man working as a journalist he witnessed the increasingly violent antisemitism of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. In 1940, America was still a neutral power and the Nazis occupied northern France and increasingly controlled the Vichy government in the south. Upon arrival in Marseille, Fry created a legal and seemingly innocuous service agency. Within it he created a small efficient secret refugee evacuation organization under the noses of the Nazi-collaborating Vichy government and Gestapo agents.
Fry’s initial purpose was to find and evacuate specific artists and writers who were obvious targets of the Nazi regime—he arrived in France with a list of 200 names. With no prior training he was quickly able to master all manner of clandestine activities. In a little over a year he saved as many as two thousand or more mostly Jewish and/or anti-Nazi refugees from internment and ultimate transport to German concentration camps and death. Among the escapees arranged by Fry and his associates were Heinrich Mann, Franz Werfel, Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Hannah Arendt, Max Ernst, André Breton, and Lion Feuchtwanger. But his efforts expanded well beyond such leading cultural figures.
Earlier this year I read Julie Orringer’s novel, The Flight Portfolio, which is based on Fry’s work in Marseille. Soon after that I watched the Netflix mini-series, Transatlantic, loosely based on that novel. This led me to wonder if these fictionalized versions might have over-dramatized what actually happened. Having now read Marino’s book, I believe the truth was even more fantastic than those depictions. Added to the obvious and dangerous enemies that were the Vichy and German “security” apparatuses was the growing hostility against Fry from the American State Department and soon even his New York-based sponsoring NGO. While these elements were included in the fictionalized accounts, getting the true details not only did not diminish this story but had the effect of enhancing my appreciation of the brazen audaciousness and ingenuity of Fry and his ever-changing team—the latter because its members were mostly refugees themselves who ultimately needed their own escape.
At times some of the names of Fry’s associates and the many refugees began to blur, and one could wish for a more closely edited book, but the story itself and Fry’s tradecraft and heroism kept me riveted.
June 10, 2018
The story of Varian Fry - the young, naive American who became a major rescuer during the Holocaust. I wish the author had been a little more adept at capturing how stunning this small act in the large theater of WWII truly was.
February 17, 2022
Although I have read a lot about the Nazi occupation of France during World War II, I had never come across Varian Fry until I read And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris by Alan Riding where Fry briefly came up. His seemed an interesting story so I followed up by reading A Hero of Our Own: The Story of Varian Fry by Sheila Isenberg. That was one disappointing book. I learned quite a bit about him and his work, but I thought the book was poorly written and didn't do justice to its subject -- one of the great and mostly unknown heroes of WW II. So I ploughed ahead with Assignment: Rescue, an authobiography by Varian Fry. This is an abridged edition, intended for school children, of Fry's initial book, Operation Rescue that I couldn't get hold of.
This book, A Quiet American, wins the prize. It is an excellent book -- throughly researched and well written. Fry saved the lives of close to 2000 artists, writers, political figures, and academics -- Germans, French, Austrian, and others, many of them Jewish, all of them in danger of being arrested and killed by the Nazis. His proteges included Marc Chagall, Heinrich Mann, Hannah Arendt, Max Ernst, and Andre Breton. His story is compelling and this book is the best I've found to explain it.
This book, A Quiet American, wins the prize. It is an excellent book -- throughly researched and well written. Fry saved the lives of close to 2000 artists, writers, political figures, and academics -- Germans, French, Austrian, and others, many of them Jewish, all of them in danger of being arrested and killed by the Nazis. His proteges included Marc Chagall, Heinrich Mann, Hannah Arendt, Max Ernst, and Andre Breton. His story is compelling and this book is the best I've found to explain it.
January 8, 2022
I just could not finish this book, and not for lack of trying. I also hate giving up on books, so maybe I’m having a midlife crisis and decided life is too short to make myself read books I don’t like.
Given the subject matter I thought I’d enjoy it, instead I was bored.
Given the subject matter I thought I’d enjoy it, instead I was bored.
November 27, 2022
Essential History for Americans
The fascinating, and terrifying true story of Varian Fry packs power today. It still remains relevant in U.S. and world politics. Yet Fry and his race against time got buried for years due to American leaders' embarrassment. None wanted it to be known they turned a blind eye to a wholesale massacre of intellectuals and anti-nazi activists and writers.
Not only is this nonfiction book a biography of an unsung hero, but it fills in the gaps of what happened after the Nazis slaughtered Frances army in three days, the dividing of the nation into two parts, and what happened to the geniuses after Hitler deprived them of their German citizenship.
Only a handful of Americans understood the leading novelists, poets, journalists, painters, performers, and scientists went into hiding after Hitler grabbed power. Most of these brilliant and talented Europeans fled the onslaught of the Gestapo. Most of them changed countries faster than they changed shoes. Varian Fry and others became aware that if a rescue project were not undertaken, Hilter would hunt all of them down in Marseille, France, and "could easily blow Europe's brains out" in one mass murder. Thankfully, Eleanor Roosevelt became a strong supporter of this citizen's effort.
This story reveals a secret small American group effort that raised funds to provide rescue visas to the U.S.A. or any neutral government. But Fry took the job without training. He learned that Spain and Portugal remained open and began to transfer or illegally send improvised refugees over the Pyrenees with a young couple who would later write a book.
Ultimately, this account of Varian Fry's tenacious efforts, legal and illegal work, to save endangered individuals in Europe. He hired employees to work in his tiny hotel room. Eventually, when the Vichy pro-German government began harassing Fry, he created a legal agency to vet and aid refugees in obtaining visas. Easier said than done. The American Embassy in France obstructed Fry at every turn. Fry visited Marseille's Department of Aliens, which could give residence permits, but as Fry depicted, the French representative seemed a mix of greed, opportunism, and half-buried decency.
Overall, I found this book wholly worthwhile and an astoundingly hopeful story.
Despite multiple enemies and criminal scams, Fry and his team succeeded beyond his original mission to stay for two months and save two hundred listed exceptional persons. Instead, in thirteen months, they rescued four thousand people, some young and promising in their expertise.
The fascinating, and terrifying true story of Varian Fry packs power today. It still remains relevant in U.S. and world politics. Yet Fry and his race against time got buried for years due to American leaders' embarrassment. None wanted it to be known they turned a blind eye to a wholesale massacre of intellectuals and anti-nazi activists and writers.
Not only is this nonfiction book a biography of an unsung hero, but it fills in the gaps of what happened after the Nazis slaughtered Frances army in three days, the dividing of the nation into two parts, and what happened to the geniuses after Hitler deprived them of their German citizenship.
Only a handful of Americans understood the leading novelists, poets, journalists, painters, performers, and scientists went into hiding after Hitler grabbed power. Most of these brilliant and talented Europeans fled the onslaught of the Gestapo. Most of them changed countries faster than they changed shoes. Varian Fry and others became aware that if a rescue project were not undertaken, Hilter would hunt all of them down in Marseille, France, and "could easily blow Europe's brains out" in one mass murder. Thankfully, Eleanor Roosevelt became a strong supporter of this citizen's effort.
This story reveals a secret small American group effort that raised funds to provide rescue visas to the U.S.A. or any neutral government. But Fry took the job without training. He learned that Spain and Portugal remained open and began to transfer or illegally send improvised refugees over the Pyrenees with a young couple who would later write a book.
Ultimately, this account of Varian Fry's tenacious efforts, legal and illegal work, to save endangered individuals in Europe. He hired employees to work in his tiny hotel room. Eventually, when the Vichy pro-German government began harassing Fry, he created a legal agency to vet and aid refugees in obtaining visas. Easier said than done. The American Embassy in France obstructed Fry at every turn. Fry visited Marseille's Department of Aliens, which could give residence permits, but as Fry depicted, the French representative seemed a mix of greed, opportunism, and half-buried decency.
Overall, I found this book wholly worthwhile and an astoundingly hopeful story.
Despite multiple enemies and criminal scams, Fry and his team succeeded beyond his original mission to stay for two months and save two hundred listed exceptional persons. Instead, in thirteen months, they rescued four thousand people, some young and promising in their expertise.
October 3, 2023
Polly and I watched the series “Transatlantic” which prompted each of us to find more written about him. “A Quiet American: The Secret War of Varien Fry” did that for me.
March 11, 2020
Incredibly well researched details of the approximately 13 months that Varian Fry spent in Marseilles rescuing refugees who needed to flee Nazi occupied Europe. His heroism and transformation during this period are a fascinating, unique story and as true with many individuals in these situations, he was never able to continue in such a productive manner. His contributions to so many and his guidance to other activists and resistance actors will impress any reader interested in this period. I've read SURRENDER ON DEMAND and THE FLIGHT PORTFOLIO, but A Quiet American fills in all the details with beautiful prose and insight.
May 16, 2019
I had read the fictional account by Anna Seghers of refugees trying to escape Nazi Germany through Marseilles ("Transit"), but Varian Fry is the non-fictional hero, who actually did this. Fry is credited with saving more than 2000 people in 13 months in 1940-1, including Jean Arp, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Hannah Arendt, and Seghers herself. In this case, truth is indeed stranger than fiction. The book is a fascinating account of a man who found his calling in his refugee rescue. Like Oscar Schindler and Tuvia and Zus Bielski, Fry's war effort brought out the hero in him.
July 27, 2019
Excellent Book about a Fascinating Man
In reading Franz Werfel’s “Blassblaue Frauenschrift,” I discovered he escaped the Nazis from Marseille. I didn’t know how. Then I read Julie Orringer’s “Flight Portfolio” and discovered that Varian Fry had gotten Werfel and his wife, Alma, out of Europe. I became obsessed in in wanting to discover more about this intriguing man who had so courageously spirited artists out of France. I found this book in my search for more information and definitely found a gem. I highly recommend this well researched book.
In reading Franz Werfel’s “Blassblaue Frauenschrift,” I discovered he escaped the Nazis from Marseille. I didn’t know how. Then I read Julie Orringer’s “Flight Portfolio” and discovered that Varian Fry had gotten Werfel and his wife, Alma, out of Europe. I became obsessed in in wanting to discover more about this intriguing man who had so courageously spirited artists out of France. I found this book in my search for more information and definitely found a gem. I highly recommend this well researched book.
June 27, 2013
Started off very good, but quickly descended into a mish-mash of names and dates with no clear narrative. The subject was fascinating, but the execution was so poor it was hard to read. Very disappointed.
February 3, 2022
My second book on the topic of WWII refugees fleeing France.
June 29, 2023
Scholarly volume by Andy Marino about Varian Fry. Much original research was conducted by Donald Carroll. He interviewed all the people who knew Fry that he could. Twenty years later, Marino picked up the research and wrote this book. Extensive end notes, bibliography and index.
The epilogue was particularly interesting to me. Fry had a sad life for many years. He was such a hero but wasn't recognized until much later.
I read part of this book, as I have read so much about Fry already.
This was published in 1999.
The epilogue was particularly interesting to me. Fry had a sad life for many years. He was such a hero but wasn't recognized until much later.
I read part of this book, as I have read so much about Fry already.
This was published in 1999.
July 20, 2024
An Incredible Story
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this account of Varian Fry. Previously I read The Flight Portfolio, a novel, and Fry’s book, Surrender on Demand. I became fascinated with Fry after reading the novel and wanted to find out which parts were true. Actually, most of it. He was an incredible human being. Read up. He’s worth the time!
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this account of Varian Fry. Previously I read The Flight Portfolio, a novel, and Fry’s book, Surrender on Demand. I became fascinated with Fry after reading the novel and wanted to find out which parts were true. Actually, most of it. He was an incredible human being. Read up. He’s worth the time!
January 28, 2012
(More like 3.5 stars) Very interesting story. Acceptable writing. Fry is a very unlikely hero. Not the guy you would picture to be risking his life rescuing intellectuals, artists, novelists and scientists from the Nazi's but that's precisely what makes him so compelling. A normal, reserved and rather intellectual figure who unexpectedly finds himself the leader of an underground rescue movement. And he rises to the occassion. The times make the man. He becomes absorbed into his work at high cost. His level of commitment is admirable to the reader and frustrating to his circle at home employers AND social connections, including his wife. But he has found joy and fulfillment in his new life and the reader can see why.
November 14, 2015
Fantastically written and a moving story. This country owes so much to the contributions of people who've come to this country, whether welcomed or more often than not, weren't. Admittedly, I am biased about this time period as it seems our country was at its worst, but also its best. Varian Fry was probably destined to be just another average American, but through selflessness and conviction, helped save so many people who without his help, would have almost assuredly died at the hands of Hitler. Just an all out great read.
September 18, 2012
02/09/98 New Republic article by Alfred Kazin
July 8, 2014
this is very dense, very compelling non-fiction
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