Varian Fry papers, 1927-2007, bulk 1940-1967

Creator:

Fry, Varian, 1907-1967

Abstract:

The Varian Fry papers primarily document Fry's work to rescue approximately 2,000 European intellectuals wanted by Nazi Germany—including prominent artists and writers such as Hannah Arendt, André Breton, Marc Chagall, and Heinrich Mann—from Vichy France during World War II.

Extent:

11 linear feet (27 boxes)

Language:

The collection is primarily in English and French, with a small amount of material in German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Scope and content:

The Varian Fry papers primarily document Fry's work for the Emergency Rescue Committee to rescue refugee intellectuals in Vichy France who were in danger of deportation to Nazi Germany in 1940 and 1941. The material from World War II and the immediate postwar period includes correspondence between Fry and his colleagues, family, and friends in Europe and the United States. There are also manuscripts of Fry's 1945 memoir of the rescue mission, Surrender on Demand; photographs taken in Vichy France in the early 1940s; and news clippings and other printed ephemera. Much of this material documents civilians' and refugees' living conditions in Vichy, including in internment camps; the means by which refugees fled Nazi persecution; the impact of American immigration policy on refugees during World War II; and political opposition to the Vichy regime in France. There are also publications written and edited by Varian Fry on international affairs in the late 1930s through the mid-1940s.

The collection does not contain extensive contemporary documentation of the measures used to rescue refugees wanted by Nazi Germany, including maps of routes crossing the Spanish border from France or falsified travel documents. (While Fry mentions these items in Surrender on Demand, he also describes destroying them on several occasions.)

A later group of material documents Fry's efforts, between 1964 and 1967, to persuade prominent artists—including many who had been refugees during World War II—to contribute lithographs to a fine art book to benefit the International Rescue Committee. There are also clippings and correspondence from the 1960s related to news and magazine features about the work of Varian Fry and other opponents of Nazi Germany during World War II.

There is comparatively little material dating from between 1946 and 1964. Two folders of correspondence and other documents dating from 1951 through 1955 document Fry's encounter with the House Un-American Activities Committee. A few other scattered items relate to Fry's professional activities in the 1950s and early 1960s. Finally, there is a small amount of material from Fry's childhood and college years, and a few items created after his death.

Biographical / historical:

Varian Fry (1907-1967) was best known for his efforts to save thousands of refugees in Vichy France who were in danger of deportation to Nazi Germany during World War II. His efforts saved prominent artists and intellectuals—many of whom were Jewish—including Hannah Arendt, André Breton, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Lion Feuchtwanger, Wifredo Lam, Jacques Lipchitz, Heinrich Mann, Walter Mehring, Otto Meyerhof, Hans Sahl, Franz Werfel, and Alma Mahler Werfel. In total, Fry and his collaborators helped to save around 2,000 people.

Varian Mackey Fry was born in New York City on October 15, 1907. He graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Classics in 1931. Fry then returned to New York City, where he attended graduate classes in political science at Columbia University and worked as a journalist.

Following the defeat of France by Nazi Germany in June 1940, a group of political liberals in Eleanor Roosevelt's circle formed the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC), to help European intellectuals escape Nazi persecution by both legal and extra-legal means. At the time, many countries, including the United States, had immigration laws hostile to refugees. Fry traveled to Vichy France in August 1940 as the ERC's representative. He organized the Centre Américain de Secours, which provided financial and emigration support to refugees fleeing Nazi Germany, in Marseille.

The Centre first operated out of Fry's room in the Hotel Splendide. As its operations expanded—and Fry realized that his work would take much longer than the month the ERC originally planned—the Centre moved into an office at 60 Rue Grignan. Fry himself moved from the hotel to a rented house outside the city, Villa Air-Bel, along with some of his closest collaborators: Daniel and Theodora "Théo" Bénédite, Miriam Davenport, and Mary Jayne Gold. Some of the Centre's highest priority clients, the writers André Breton and Victor Serge, also stayed at Villa Air-Bel with their families while waiting to leave the country. Serge nicknamed it "Château Espère-Visa" ("hope for a visa"). Other Surrealist writers and artists visited regularly: Oscar Dominguez, Benjamin Péret, Wifredo Lam, and Victor Brauner.

Fry and the Centre's other staff members worked through official channels wherever possible. Sympathetic consulate officials, including the American vice-consul Hiram Bingham IV and the Czechoslovakian consul Vladimir Vochoč, provided visas to refugees, often in contravention of their respective countries' official policies. Financial support was provided by the wealthy American expatriate Mary Jayne Gold, among others. However, Fry also used forged passports and visas, exchanged currency and gold on the Marseille black market, and helped refugees who could not escape by other means to cross the Spanish border on foot.

As the United States had not yet entered World War II, State Department staff feared that Fry's underground activities would violate the country's policy of neutrality. The American consulate in Marseille collaborated with Vichy authorities to pressure Fry to leave France. In the fall of 1941, the consul finally confiscated Fry's passport, forcing him to return to the United States.

Daniel Bénédite, Jean Gemähling and Charles Wolff led the Centre Américain de Secours after Fry's departure, until the French police ordered it to close in June 1942. The Emergency Rescue Committee merged with the International Relief Association in 1942. The resulting organization adopted the name International Rescue Committee.

Fry published a memoir of his days in Marseille, Surrender on Demand, in 1945. He worked briefly in educational film production in the 1950s and then in advertising. In 1951, his application for security clearance for a proposed Department of Defense film project was denied on the grounds that Fry had allegedly been a member of the Communist Party since 1937. This was untrue: Fry was a staunch liberal who had categorically refused to help Communist refugees in Marseille, and resigned from the editorial staff of the New Republic in 1945 because he felt his colleagues were too sympathetic towards the Soviet Union. The security clearance denial was reversed after Fry and his supporters sent letters and affidavits to the House Un-American Activities Committee. However, the FBI continued to maintain files on Fry's activities throughout his life.

From 1964 until 1967, Fry again worked for the International Rescue Committee to solicit lithographs from artists—including those who had been refugees during World War II—for a fine art book to benefit the IRC. (The work was published after Fry's death and is known as the Flight Portfolio (1971).) He was made a Chevalier of the French Légion d'Honneur in April 1967 in recognition of his rescue work in 1940 and 1941. He died at his home in Connecticut on September 13, 1967.

In 1991, 24 years after his death, Fry received his first official recognition from a United States agency, the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. In 1996, Varian Mackey Fry was the first American named as "Righteous Among the Nations" by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Heroes and Martyrs Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem.

Varian Fry married Eileen Avery Hughes in 1931. They had no children, and divorced in 1943. He married Annette Riley in 1950; they had three children. Though Varian and Annette Riley Fry had separated at the time of his death in 1967, she was instrumental in preserving and promoting his legacy.

Catalog record:

View in CLIO

Local call number:

MS#0461

Processing information:

Cataloged Christina Hilton Fenn 06/--/89. Processed by Bernard Crystal 6/92. 2004 addition processed by Bridget T. Lerette 11/2005. 2005 addition processed by Bridget T. Lerette 12/2005. 2007 and 2020 additions processed by Patrick Lawlor.

Collection reprocessed by Celeste Brewer in May-July 2026. A concordance documenting changes made during reprocessing is available upon request. Please contact the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at rbml@columbia.edu for more information.

Reprocessing work was undertaken to relieve overstuffing, provide better physical support to deteriorating materials, and add information about collection contents, in order to help researchers locate relevant materials and reduce handling of this heavily used collection. Polyester sleeves had been used to support damaged and deteriorating paper at some point in the past. However, the addition of the sleeves had caused many boxes to become overstuffed, further damaging their contents. In order to relieve overstuffing, folders were shifted between boxes and four more boxes were added to the collection during reprocessing.

Dates of materials, series- and folder-level scope and content notes, and folder numbers were added to the finding aid. The boxes were also renumbered to a single consecutive numbering scheme. (There had previously been boxes numbered 10A, 13A, 13B, and 16A, probably as a result of past efforts to manage overstuffing.) Additions to the collection in 2004, 2005, 2007, and 2020 that had been processed as new series were integrated into Series III, IV, and VII, based on their respective contents, but remained in the last box of the collection.

It is not always clear why certain materials are grouped together or located in certain series of the collection. However, because there is no documentation of the collection's original order, and the collection has been heavily used and cited for decades, no other significant changes to the arrangement of the collection were made.

Two folders of photographs titled "9378-9399" and "9378-9399 (duplicate)" were integrated into a single folder; the photographs in the latter did not appear to be duplicates, and it was unclear why they were previously separated. The resulting single folder is Box 22, Folder 9. Postcards with content on the backs previously had their fronts and backs described separately in the finding aid, with letters A and B distinguishing fronts from backs (for example, 9717A and 9717B). The letters A and B were removed during reprocessing and description of the front and back of each physical item was combined in the finding aid.

The collection was first processed in 1968. In 1991, it was reorganized by Alexandra Pisar (GSAS 1992) and Pierre Sauvage. Sauvage was president of the Friends of Le Chambon, an organization to which Annette Riley Fry had apparently given the negatives of Varian Fry's photographs from Vichy France. He created a catalog of the photographs, including item numbers, detailed captions, and notes about whether negatives of the prints existed among those given to the Friends of Le Chambon. Pisar organized the papers in the collection.

In September and October 2023, Relly Robinson (BC 2024) compared Sauvage's catalog to the photographs found in the collection at that time, listed those not present, and transcribed Sauvage's captions for the online finding aid. Those captions were retained during reprocessing in 2026.

Acquisition information:

Source of acquisition--Fry, Mrs. Varian. Method of acquisition--Gift; Date of acquisition--1969. Accession number--M-69.

Gift of Annette Riley Fry, 1969, 1974, 2004, 2005, and 2007.

Correspondence on a lithograph for the Flight Portfolio by Marc Chagall: gift of Benjamin Harshav, 1998 September 10.

Varian Fry autopsy and toxicology report: gift of James D. Fry, 2020 January 3.

Arrangement:

This collection is arranged into 7 series. Series I is cataloged; the remainder are arranged.

Accruals:

No additions are expected.

Related material:

Walter Samuel Lentschner papers, 1923-1986: Lentschner fled Germany in 1933 and became a client of the Centre Américain de Secours in 1941. This collection documents his displacement in Europe, his emigration to the United States, and the legal steps he took to obtain reparations from Germany. At the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

Spanish Refugee Relief Association Records, 1935-1957: Varian Fry was briefly employed by the Press Bureau of the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy in 1937. The Spanish Refugee Relief Association records also include documentation of the conditions in refugee internment camps in the south of France in the late 1930s and early 1940s that complements material in the Varian Fry papers. At the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

Annette Fry papers: Primarily photographic materials and correspondence documenting Varian Fry's work for the Emergency Rescue Committee in France, some of the artists and intellectuals he aided, and his travels around Europe. At the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.

Unitarian Service Committee. Executive Director. Records, 1940-1951: Records of the Unitarian Service Committee, an organization with which the Emergency Rescue Committee collaborated to assist refugees during World War II. Box 20, Folder 4 contains a complete list of the Centre Américain de Secours' clients, which has also been digitized. At the Harvard Divinity School Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Varian Fry's letters to Daniel Bénédite, 1941-1955: in the Archiv der sozialen Demokratie der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn, Germany (1/DBAA).

International Rescue Committee records, 1946-1989: Records of the organization formed by the 1942 merger of Fry's organization, the Emergency Rescue Committee, with the International Relief Association. At the Hoover Institution Library and Archives, Stanford University, Stanford, California.

Alternative form available:

The bulk of the contents of Boxes 1-19 are on microfilm.

Rules or conventions:

Describing Archives: A Content Standard

Preferred citation:

Identification of specific item; Date (if known); Varian Fry papers; Box and Folder; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries.

Access and use

Restrictions:

This collection is located on-site.

This collection has no restrictions.

Terms of access:

Reproductions may be made for research purposes. The RBML maintains ownership of the physical material only. Copyright remains with the creator and his heirs. The responsibility to secure copyright permission rests with the patron.

Much of the paper in the collection is acidic, brittle, and in poor condition. Please do not bend or fold papers, and do not remove items in polyester sleeves from their sleeves.

Location of this collection:: Rare Book & Manuscript Library

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Collection