About A Year That Mattered:
Varian Fry and the Refugee Crisis,
1940-1941

an upcoming documentary by Pierre Sauvage

The Varian Fry rescue mission to France in 1940-41—right after France fell to Nazi Germany—was the most ambitious and most successful private American rescue operation of the Nazi era. And it was during that very year that Nazi Jewish policies shifted from persecution and expulsion to murder!

Fry, who died in 1967, was to become the first American to be honored as a Righteous Gentile, posthumously, by Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial.

Among the people helped and rescued were many of the European cultural luminaries of the time, Jewish and non-Jewish: Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Jacques Lipchitz, Heinrich Mann, Franz Werfel, Alma Mahler Werfel, André Breton, Victor Serge, André Masson, Lion Feuchtwanger, Konrad Heiden, Marcel Duchamp, Hannah Arendt, Max Ophuls, Walter Mehring, Jean Malaquais, Valeriu Marcu, Remedios Varo, Otto Meyerhof, Albert Hirschman…  The list—Fry’s list, some 2,000 names—goes on and on.

Filming began twenty-five years ago for this documentary, allowing the saga to be chronicled now—at last!—through the testimony of those who participated in it, either as rescuers or as the beneficiaries of the rescue effort. The mission was initially sponsored by the private Emergency Rescue Committee in New York (which evolved into today’s International Rescue Committee).

Virtually all of the witnesses captured in the documentary are now gone, but they recount these events for posterity. Among them are several remarkable and colorful Americans who joined with Fry in Marseille, France: the beautiful heiress Mary Jayne Gold (author of the lively memoir Crossroads Marseille 1940, which was willed to the filmmaker); the intellectual art scholar Miriam Davenport Ebel; the swashbuckling actor and moral adventurer Charles Fawcett. They are among the Fry colleagues, which included French resisters, who deserve to be honored as Righteous Gentiles.

A Year That Mattered also draws on Fry's voluminous correspondence from that time, from his other relevant writings, and from the many photographs that he took and that are now part of the Varian Fry Institute archives.

With the help of the leading historians in the field—Yehuda Bauer, Christopher Browning, Robert Paxton, David Wyman, Henry Feingold, Omer Bartov, to name just a few—the documentary also does not shirk providing the indispensable—and not widely understood—historical context for the rescue mission: the Nazis embarked on the Final Solution after unsuccessful efforts to expel Jews from Nazi-occupied lands.

While defying the Nazis and its collaborators in Vichy France, the Fry mission was also the major challenge during that time to the closed-doors policies of the West—at the very time when rescue was still most feasible.

P.S. Varian Fry and the movies…

About Transatlantic, the 2023 Netflix dramatic series
purporting to be about Varian Fry and Mary Jayne Gold.

The Jewish history behind Netflix's Transatlantic and the WWII mission that inspired it: The degree of fictionalization has angered some people close to the real history,
by Shira Li Bartov, JTA, the Jerusalem Post, and The Times of Israel, April 6, 2023
[Before getting a chance to see the series,] Pierre Sauvage, president of the Varian Fry Institute, called the show’s trailer “shocking.”
Born in 1944, Sauvage survived the end of the Holocaust in the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon [the subject of his documentary Weapons of the Spirit], although his Jewish parents were turned down by Fry’s overwhelmed committee. He became close friends with some of Fry’s fellow rescuers in their later years, including the late {Mary Jayne] Gold, [Albert] Hirschman and [Lisa] Fittko.
“Are there any red lines?” he said. “Can one fictionalize at will, with no concern for the reality of the story, for the false impression that people will get—and for the way it affects the private lives of the families of people portrayed?”

The Love Song of Varian Fry by Phyllis Chesler, Tablet, May 1, 2023
[T]he series is one more example of education via entertainment, perhaps for those who no longer prefer books.  Unfortunately, providing contemporary and politically correct, revisionist characterizations of historical figures is what gets such projects funded and attracts an audience that sees nothing questionable about fictionalizing history.
Here is what Pierre Sauvage, the world's leading expert on Fry, has to say on the subject of Fry's sexual identity. Sauvage writes: "Whatever Fry's sexual nature may have been—and it is hard [or was hard in 2,000 when these words were written] to decide to what extent speculation about such matters is relevant—the stress that [author Andy] Marino puts on Fry not being an 'organization man' seems appropriate."

How Netflix Blew the Real Story of Varian Fry, a video by Sabine Kieselbach (Deutsche Welle), May 2, 2023
"They've done this very unfortunate pairing of portraying [Fry] as homosexual—and  making him seem weak, and cowardly, and less important than he was." (James D. Fry, son of Varian Fry) 
"Varian Fry was a brilliant man—that is missing. All his staff looked up to him with admiration, with adoration—that is missing. So to my mind, absolutely crucial aspects of the story are not present" (Pierre Sauvage, Varian Fry Institute)

The Banality of Evil on TV by Jonah Raskin, Tablet, May 1, 2023
Transatlantic offers a view of the resistance to fascism through the prism of Black Lives Matter and #MeToo.  It will likely be met with applause from members of those movements who might want to raise their fists and cry, along with the cast, "Viva La Resistance."  But to those who feel uncomfortable when the historical record is bent and twisted often beyond recognition, Transatlantic might go over like the proverbial lead balloon.

Transatlantic Misses the Boat by Letting the Bottom-line Trump Truth
by Vincent Brook, Babbling Brook Substack, May 1, 2023
Even when its docudramas are based on a nonfiction source, Hollywood has been known, if not expected, to play fast and loose with the truth. So, given that Netflix’s 2023 miniseries Transatlantic was adapted from an historical novel, Julie Orringer’s 2019 The Flight Portfolio, it’s no great surprise how far the show has strayed from historical fact.

Varian Fry—"the American Schindler"—has been betrayed by Netflix
by Tom Fordy, The Telegraph, April 28, 2023.  If behind paywall, see attached pdf.
Sauvage’s Jewish refugee parents had sought help, albeit unsuccessfully, from Fry. Sauvage has spent many years working on a documentary about Fry’s mission—A Year That Mattered— which he hopes will be released in the next year. Sauvage corresponded with [producer Anna] Winger while she was writing the series in 2020 and warned that showing Fry as distracted from his mission [by a homosexual liaison] would “vandalize the memory of a great man”.  (...) Changing historical events is hardly new – and often necessary when distilling real-life events into streamlined narrative fiction—but Transatlantic feels more two-star farce than factually based.

Anna Winger (Transatlantic co-creator) on balancing World War II "melodrama" with touches of "screwball" comedy
“Exclusive Video Interview” by David Buchanan, Yahoo Life, May 3, 2023
"It provided this window into the inner life of the characters," shares Transatlantic co-creator, writer, and executive producer Anna Winger on what appealed to her about [the] novel The Flight Portfolio, which served as the basis for the Netflix limited series.  [The novel's characterizations of the "inner life" of its hero, notably a gay romance during Fry's rescue effort in Marseille, are, in fact, mostly fabrications.]

Netflix's Glossy but Superficial Account of a World War II Rescue Network, review by Daniel Fienberg, The Hollywood Reporter, April 5, 2023
I can credit Transatlantic for its digestibility, while lamenting the great series that could have been made about this moment and this setting.  This is not it.

Not "Holocaust distortion" but creativity, says creator of Netflix's Transatlantic
by Renee Ghert-Zand, The Times of Israel, April 17, 2023
Anna Winger's series is based on Varian Fry's real-life rescue of thousands of European artists and intellectuals; critics warn of historical inaccuracies caused by dramatization.
Anna Winger makes no apologies for the creative liberties she takes with her new Netflix miniseries Transatlantic about Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee. (...) I made a series for Netflix.  It's not a documentary," Winger told the Times of Israel in a recent interview.
She said that the story of the heroism of Fry and his small team of American expats, European refugees, and sympathetic French in Vichy-controlled Marseille in 1940-1941 should be shared with a wide, mainstream audience. If that means blurring, embellishing, omitting, and eliding historical facts, so be it.
(...)“You cannot defame the dead legally," [Pierre Sauvage said]. But there are moral issues here, too. Can you really take real people and portray them in a way that would make them turn over in their graves?”
Sauvage worries not only about Holocaust denial but also about what he terms “Holocaust distortion.” “If you trivialize real stories, and embroider them in a thousand different ways, then you make that whole period seem vulnerable to similar accounts. That is the risk,” he warned.

About Varian's War, the 2001 Showtime movie