ERC

Emergency Rescue Committee

(Varian Fry in Marseilles. France, 1940–1941.)

Varian Mackey Fry (October 15, 1907 – September 13, 1967) was an American Journalist. Fry ran a rescue network in Vichy France that helped approximately 2,000 to 4,000 anti-Nazi and Jewish Refugees to escape Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. He was the first of five Americans to be recognized as "Righteous Among the Nations", an honorific given by the State of Israel to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.

Greatly disturbed by what he saw n Nazi Germany, Fry helped raise money to support European Anti-Nazi movements. Shortly after the Invasion of France in June 1940, which the Germans quickly occupied, Fry and his friends formed the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC), with support of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and others. By August 1940, Fry was in Marseille representing the ERC in an effort to help persons wishing to flee the Nazis, and circumvent the processes by French Authorities who would not issue Exit Visas. Fry had $3,000 and a short list of Refugees under imminent threat of arrest by agents of the Gestapo, mostly Jews. Clamoring at his door came anti-Nazi Writers, Avant-Garde Artists, Musicians and hundreds of others desperately seeking any chance to escape France.

Beginning in 1940, in Marseille, despite the watchful eye of the collaborationist Vichy regime, Fry and a small group of volunteers hid people at the Villa Air-Bel until they could be smuggled out. More than 2,200 people were taken across the border to Spain and then to the safety of neutral Portugal from which they made their way to the United States.

Fry helped other exiles escape on ships leaving Marseille for the French Colony of Martinique in the Caribbean, from where they could also go to the United States. Among Fry's closest associates were Americans Miriam Davenport, a former Art Student at the Sorbonne, and the heiress Mary Jayne Gold, a lover of the arts and the "good life" who had come to Paris in the early 1930s. When the Nazis seized France in 1940, Gold went to Marseille, where she worked with Fry and helped finance his operation. Also working with Fry was a young Academic named Albert O. Hirschman.

Especially instrumental in getting Fry the Visas he needed for the Artists, Intellectuals and Political Dissidents on his list, was Hiram Bingham IV, an American Vice Consul in Marseille who fought against anti-Semitism in the State Department and was personally responsible for issuing thousands of Visas, both legal and illegal.

Fry was forced to leave France in September 1941 after Officials both of the Vichy Government and of the United States State Department had become angered by his covert activities. In 1942, the Emergency Rescue Committee and the American branch of the European-based International Relief Association joined forces under the name the International Relief and Rescue Committee, which was later shortened to the International Rescue Committee (IRC). The IRC is a leading nonsectarian, nongovernmental international relief and development organization that still operates today.

Among those Fry aided were: Hannah Arendt, Jean Arp, Hans Aufricht, Hans Bellmer, Georg Bernhard, Victor Brauner, André Breton, Camille Bryen, De Castro, Marc Chagall, Frédéric Delanglade, Óscar Domínguez, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Edvard Fendler, Wanda Landowska, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jean Malaquais, Bohuslav Martinů, Heinrich Mann, Otto Meyerhof, Boris Mirkine-Guetzevitch, Ferdinand Springer and Bruno Strauss.