ONE THIS DAY IN 1907, VARIAN FRY—THE FIRST AMERICAN TO BE RECOGNIZED AS “RIGHTEOUS AMONG THE NATIONS”—WAS BORN: Varian Fry was a bookish Harvard grad, who came of age in the era when a certain level of anti-Semitism was common among the WASP elite to which he was born. It seems not to have infected Fry. Or if it did, it didn’t prevent him from risking his own life to save the lives of thousands of Jews.

Fry had become an ardent anti-Nazi after visiting Berlin in 1935 as a foreign correspondent for The Living Age. There he was appalled by the violence against Jews that he witnessed. When war broke out, Fry founded the Emergency Rescue Committee. He initially hoped that the Committee would find somebody “more qualified” than he to travel to Europe to undertake rescue operations. But nobody stepped up.

Instead, it was Fry himself who left for Marseille with $3000 strapped to his leg in 1940.   He had a list Jewish (and some non-Jewish) anti-Nazi dissidents and avant-garde artists. They were considered to be in imminent danger of Nazi arrest.

In Marseille, Fry worked with a crew of improbable allies—including American art student Miriam Davenport, Chicago heiress and bon vivant Mary Jayne Gold, and Gold’s lover, Raymond Couraud, a local gangster (and later a war hero).  Over the course of just a few months, they managed to smuggle thousands out of the country, mostly to neutral Portugal (and from there to the United States and other New World destinations.)

Crucial to their success was the help of Hiram Bingham IV, an American vice consul there, who issued visas, some of which were legal, but most of which were issued without legal authority.

Not all of those rescued can be described as anti-Nazi dissidents or avant-garde artists. But many were, including Hannah Arendt, André Breton, Marc Chagall, and Jacques Lipchitz.