Having lived in the United States for my nineteen earliest years and then spent sixty-seven years in Australia (minus a five-and-half-year interlude in Canada) I’ve been fortunate to live in places not directly affected by the wars of my time. Readers should excuse me for opening with these words about myself, but I’m old enough now to recognise that not only is war a constant of human existence but also, more often than not, old wars have a habit of giving birth to their successors.
I was less than a year old when Germany invaded Poland and the second world war began, and not quite two when in June 1940 the Wehrmacht invaded France, occupying its northern regions and soon establishing the puppet Vichy state in the south. By that time many of Hitler’s designated enemies — artists, writers and leftists, a good proportion of whom were Jewish — had sought refuge in France but now found themselves trapped there.
Across the Atlantic, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had begun his third presidential term but hesitated to extend emergency visas while American isolationist sentiment remained strong. That’s when Eleanor — FDR’s better angel — entered, and the result of her efforts was the small, modestly funded Emergency Rescue Committee, or ERC.
Uwe Wittstock’s Marseille 1940 is the fascinating account of the thousands of rescues conducted by this committee — and most particularly by its indefatigable leader, a man scarcely known today and seemingly unsuited for the task. Wittstock admits that while this group is his focus, “countless unknown persons faced the same dangers, but the traces of their lives have been lost in the chaos of war and flight.” I’d add that his story of desperate refugees has resonance for us today — an assertion I’ll return to later.
Varian Mackey Fry is a name reeking of American East Coast establishment. But, as Wittstock tells us, its owner had an “unpredictable, rebellious side” and was “not one for compromise.” Arguably the book’s hero, Fry was an early predicter of the dangers posed by Europe’s rising fascism.
In 1935, aged twenty-five, he sent the New York Times an eyewitness account of a brutal Nazi attack on a group of Berliner Jews — an attack a Nazi press officer took pains to inform him had been fomented by party provocateurs. It was the government’s firm policy to rid Germany of its Jews one way or another, the press officer hinted. This searing event preceded Kristallnacht by three years, yet until Fry’s dispatch no mainstream American news outlet had been prepared to make much of a possible European war while the United States was reeling from the severity of the Depression.
By May 1940, with Germany poised to invade France, Fry was back in Manhattan as chief editor for the Foreign Policy Association, publishing a range of political books including several by himself. It was the perfect job for him, intellectually rigorous yet well-enough funded that he didn’t need to bother about sales. Then, out of the blue, he received a phone call that would change that cushy trajectory forever. An escaped German-Jewish psychoanalyst using the pseudonym Paul Hagen, founder of the fledgling American Friends of German Freedom, told him what was happening as Germany swept across Europe:
In the wake of the advancing military, Gestapo search parties systematically comb through the country. Furnished with prepared lists, they track down Hitler’s adversaries, arrest them, deport them to concentration camps, or murder them then and there. In Poland, which Germany invaded the previous year, they have now proceeded to kill off not just the resistance fighters, but also the country’s entire elite: physicians, teachers, merchants, politicians, engineers. Only a nation of worker-slaves is meant to survive.
Fry readily understood that a generation of European cultural stars was in danger. Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Heinrich Mann, Franz Werfel, Lionel Feuchtwanger, Anna Seghers, Alfred Döblin and Walter Mehring were among the names he and Hagen discussed. Others, such as Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin, will come to readers’ minds.
Fry knew he had to act quickly, but how? By June the Gestapo had entered Paris. Unoccupied Vichy appeared the only answer. Through a network of connections, including Heinrich Mann’s brother Thomas, who was safely working in Princeton, a fundraising event was organised. More money was raised in Hollywood, Eleanor Roosevelt was conscripted, and the ERC was born.
Fry and Hagen knew they had to set up in Vichy, for as soon as word of the ERC’s existence spread through the underground the hunted would find their way to them. The Foreign Policy Association gave Fry a few weeks leave, and by mid August 1940 he was in Marseille looking for a place to house the ERC headquarters, meeting some of the people whose rescue he was to organise, and enlisting the people who could help him.
It all sounds so easy, but it was anything but. Neither, I imagine, was Wittstock’s task in putting it all together in Marseille 1940. For this is a marvel of narrative art: over the 291 pages through which he weaves his story, there’s not a page where my interest flagged, and this in a text with a veritable cavalcade of characters, each of whose stories warrants a book in itself, and in many cases actually have.
Many of those rescued had first to escape from France’s hideously barbaric detention centres before they could reach Marseille. Most were without papers. The American consul himself was notably uncooperative, even if some of his staff were accommodating.
There were only two routes for fleeing — on land through the rugged Pyrenees or by sea from Marseille, itself often blocked. Either way was dangerous, and some indeed perished; one, famously, by his own hand. And it’s more than likely that few of us would have heard of Walter Benjamin if Hannah Arendt hadn’t grabbed the precious manuscript he’d been carrying and taken it with her to America.
Arendt became a noted public intellectual in America, influential for The Origins of Totalitarianism and other publications and because of her apposite warning that if Jews were to establish a state of their own in historic Palestine it would necessarily become another Sparta. Today we are witness to the tragic accuracy of her prescience. Although the phrase “Never Again” has been the catch-cry, for Israel and its supporters the lesson of the Holocaust seems to be for Jews alone, not for the rest of humanity.
My own researches for my last novel brought me to the same conclusion, which is why a decade ago I joined a small group called the Northern Beaches Committee for Palestine with a simple task: to train two lifesavers from Gaza at Manly’s North Steyne Surf Lifesaving Club so they could establish a Nippers program at home. Israel’s periodic “mowing the lawn” had destroyed most of Gaza’s recreational facilities and some young people were drowning on its beaches.
The lifesavers went back, started up two programs, and were well on their way to building their own surf club. Then came 7 October and Israel’s illegal and wildly disproportionate retribution. Within days, two young members of the Nippers were killed, along with their families. The lifesavers and their families, forced out of Gaza’s north, were living in tents in Rafah.
Before long came the news that the father of one of our members had died from an unattended heart attack. We directed our efforts to doing what we could to get our lifesavers and their children out and bring them to Australia. With the help of our local MP and the previous immigration minister, one of the lifesavers was able to leave with his wife and three children the day before Israel closed the Rafah crossing. After being shunted hither and thither, our other lifesaver was last heard trying to buy another tent in Rafah.
It was a small operation, scarcely comparable with what Varian Fry pulled off from Vichy eighty-four years ago. Yet there are things I’ve learned from it. First, about wars being progenitors of their successors. If there hadn’t been a Holocaust, there might never have been an apartheid Israel; there might indeed have never been another genocide. Second, go with your heart and sense of justice. As an old kabbalist wrote, “the source of all evil in the world is too much head, and not enough heart.”
This is what Uwe Wittstock has done with Marseille 1940, which is not to say a lot of meticulous research hasn’t gone into writing it. As for me, the reader, it has it all — characters, stories, places, history. What happened to Varian Fry? Buy the book and see. Take my word for it: it’s the very best book I’ve read for quite a while. •
Marseille 1940: The Flight of Literature
By Uwe Wittstock | Translated by Daniel Bowles | Polity Press | $51.95 | 319 pages
