Upcoming documentary
A Year That Mattered
—Varian Fry and the Refugee Crisis,
1940-1941

“As governments once again shut borders and attempt to turn us against the foreigners in our midst, (…) the stories of the refugees who flocked to Marseille in 1940
are more essential than ever.”
Maurice Samuels, The New York Review of Books, Feb. 26, 2026

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

an upcoming documentary by Pierre Sauvage

New York intellectual Varian Fry ran the most successful private American rescue effort of the Nazi era, defying American officials and American anti-immigrant policies.

Working out of Marseille in Nazi-occupied France, Fry and his colleagues—including other remarkable Americans—helped to save some 2,000 refugees, Jewish and non-Jewish, some of them among the cultural giants of Europe. A Year That Mattered: Varian Fry and the Refugee Crisis—1940-1941 will tell the story.

Below, A Year That Mattered—work-in-progress

The password is required for access to what is still a PRIVATE work-in-progress, which can only be shared at present with people who have been involved—or could be involved—in the project. Chambon Foundation Varian Fry Institute: sauvage@varianfry.org

The rescue mission occurred right after France fell to Nazi Germany—and before the Final Solution began. Indeed, it was during that very year, a year that mattered, that Nazi Jewish policies shifted from persecution and expulsion—to mass murder.

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

Among the luminaries rescued or helped by the Fry mission were 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 thirty year 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 was one of the organizations that later evolved into today’s indispensable International Rescue Committee).

Virtually all of the witnesses captured in the documentary are now gone, but they recount these events for posterity, and they are joined by major historians of those times.

Among the witnesses 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 have not yet been formally honored as Righteous Gentiles. Yet Fry could not have succeeded by himself.

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 leading historians in the field—Yehuda Bauer, Christopher Browning, Robert Paxton, David Wyman, Henry Feingold, Omer Bartov, Richard Breitman, to name 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.

Fuller account by Pierre Sauvage of the Fry mission and the “year that mattered"
Oxford University, 2000

Below, historian Dr. Daniel Greene and filmmaker Pierre Sauvage discuss Varian Fry and
“A Year That Mattered” with Dr. Marilyn Harran, Chapman University, Oct. 17, 2023