Documentary
A Year That Mattered Varian Fry and the Refugee Crisis Marseille, 1940-41
formerly And Crown Thy Good
Upcoming in 2023-24
In 1940-41, after the fall of France to the Nazis and during the acute refugee crisis of that time, a New York intellectual named Varian Fry led a private Marseille-based American rescue effort that defied American anti-refugee policies and helped save some 2,000 people—many of them among the creative luminaries of Europe.
Sponsored initially by the Emergency Rescue Committee in New York, the Fry mission was in the most ambitious and most successful private American rescue operation of the Nazi era. Indeed, Fry, who died in 1967, was to become posthumously the first American to be honored as a Righteous Gentile.
Filming began for this documentary in 1998, allowing the mission 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. Virtually all of these witnesses are now gone, but recount these events for posterity..
Among these witnesses are several remarkable and colorful Americans who joined with Fry in Marseille, France: the beautiful heiress Mary Jayne Gold, the intellectual art scholar Miriam Davenport Ebel, and the swashbuckling moral adventurer Charles Fawcett.
The full documentary 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, 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 the major challenge during that time to the closed-doors policies of the West.
Mary Jayne Gold with Pierre Sauvage during filming of his documentary, “A Year That Mattered – Varian Fry and the Refugee Crisis”
Varian Fry in Marseille
by Pierre Sauvage
Varian Fry in Marseille
Most viewers of the PBS series by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein, The U.S. and the Holocaust, will learn for the first time about the remarkable rescue effort run in Marseille, France in 1940-41 by a young intellectual named Varian Fry.
In the summer of 2000, filmmaker Pierre Sauvage, President of the Chambon Foundation and its Varian Fry Institute, was among scholars from thirty countries invited to participate in London and at Oxford University in the second “Remembering for the Future” conference, which sought to grapple with the legacy of the Holocaust and the meaning of genocide in the modern world.
What follows is adapted from Pierre Sauvage’s paper for that conference. The material is at the heart of the upcoming feature documentary, A Year That Mattered Varian Fry and the Refugee Crisis Marseille, 1940-41.
Viewed within the context of its times, Varian Fry’s mission seems not “merely” an attempt to save some threatened writers, artists, and political figures. It appears in hindsight like a doomed final quest to reverse the very direction in which the world—and not merely the Nazis—was heading.