The Story of Varian Fry. The man who saved the artists on Hitler's death list
Varian Fry arrived in Vichy France in 1940 with $3000 strapped to his leg and a list in his pocket of 200 artists, Nobel scientists, writers and politicians - the cultural elite of Europe, all at risk from the Nazis. In this book, Andy Marino reveals how Fry fought to save them, and what happened when his organisation came up against the Nazis and their Vichy collaborators.
It is an incredible story of the American who saved more lives than Schindler - great literary, scientific and artistic figures such as Andre Breton, Heinrich Mann, Marc Chagall and Max Ernst and others who represented the political and cultural elite of Europe. This is one of the last great untold stories of World War II.
Varian Fry was an outsider, a flawed man who was transformed by the advent of war in Europe, finding his purpose as the savior of hundreds of people facing death under the Nazis. Marino traces the progress of a seemingly impossible rescue operation, revealing the charismatic personality of Fry, and tells the story of those who helped him. It is a tale full of surreal and heart-stopping episodes: a novelist smuggled out of a concentration camp right under the noses of the guards; the "secret" escape route up a mountainside in full view of the entire population of Cerbere.
This is the first time his full, true story will be told, with the benefit of the author's access to archives and the cooperation of those who best knew Varian Fry.
