Varian Mackey Fry

Humanitarian. He was an American intellectual, journalist, author, and humanitarian who ran a rescue network in Vichy, France during World War II and is credited with helping 2,000-4,000 refugees escape from the hands of Nazi, Germany. He went to France two months after France's defeat by the Nazis and a year and a half before America became involved in the war. He wrote about the dangers the Nazis posed to European Jews long before most people recognized there was a crisis. With most Americans not recognizing the extreme danger the refugees were in, he focused upon saving those political and Jewish refugees who were famous artists, musicians, writers, and scientists who were more likely to be granted entrance into the United States because of their accomplishments. He also focused on those under imminent threat of arrest by agents of the Gestapo. Among the saved were: artist Marc Chagall, writer Ernest Leonard, educator Hilda Rothschild, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, philosopher Hannah Arendt, mathematician Emil Julius Gumble, historian Wilhelm Herzog, composer Erich Itor Kahn, physician Fritz Kahn, pianist Wanda Landowska, poet Valeriu Marcu, biochemist Otto Meyerhof, law professor Boris Mirsky, photographer Hans Namath, film director Max Ophüls, publisher Kurt Wolff, and thousands more. While even some in the U. S. State Department opposed Fry's efforts, his supporters included First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Mary Jayne Gold, Miriam Davenport Ebel, economist Albert Otto Hirschman, diplomat Hiram Bingham, IV, Robert Dexter, the founder of the Unitarian Service Committee, and many others. In 1998 Fry was the first American singled out to be honored as a Righteous Among the Nations by Israel's Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem memorial to the Holocaust, an honor given to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. He is the author of eight books, co-author of four, and is the subject of several books and documentary films about his humanitarian efforts.