Sampler (11 min.) of
A Year That Mattered
—Varian Fry and the Refugee Crisis,
1940-1941

PASSWORD NEEDED

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 to date!