But unlike the humble peasants of Le Chambon, Varian Fry felt oddly familiar to me. Not just because he was young and American, but because he was very much the kind of young American I know best. Like me, he grew up in a commuter suburb in northern New Jersey; he graduated from Harvard in 1931, sixty-eight years before I did. In photographs, he looks a lot like the guys with whom I went to college: thin, awkward, but handsome in a dorky way, his then-stylish glasses and carefully knotted ties a failed but endearing attempt at coolness. His personal letters, which I read in Columbia University’s Rare Book Room, are well written and irreverent in a tone I recognize from my college friends—full of witty references to nerdy things ranging from the Aeneid (“I was surprised to find so many more / had joined us, ready for exile . . .”) to Gilbert and Sullivan (“I am never disappointed in them [the rescued artists]—what never? Well, hardly ever!”). If he hadn’t been dead for more than fifty years, I might have dated him.

  What felt creepily familiar about him, too, were his motivations. Unlike Le Chambon’s pious French peasants, who spoke of living lives worthy of Christ, Varian Fry went to France with a far more secular goal: to save Western civilization. The Emergency Rescue Committee that Fry worked for in France had evolved from an activist organization called the American Friends of German Freedom, a group of prominent American intellectuals from many fields. The Emergency Rescue Committee was formed after France fell to the Nazis, out of the fear that European culture itself was about to be lost forever. American writers, curators, and scholars took great pains to compile an A-list of great brains in need of rescue.

  It did not appear to occur to anyone at that time, as premier American minds argued over which premier European minds to include on the list, that there was a sort of eugenics to this anti-Nazi exercise as well—though later it would very much occur to Varian Fry. But when Fry volunteered, it was precisely the mission’s elitist nature that excited him. In the introduction to his memoir, titled Surrender on Demand, Fry admitted it as one of his main reasons for going to France. “Among the refugees who were caught in France were many writers and artists whose work I had enjoyed: novelists like Franz Werfel and Lion Feuchtwanger; painters like Marc Chagall and Max Ernst; sculptors like Jacques Lipchitz,” he wrote. “For some of these men, although I knew them only through their work, I had a deep love; and to them all I owed a heavy debt of gratitude for the pleasure they had given me. Now that they were in danger, I felt obligated to help them, if I could; just as they, without knowing it, had often helped me.”

  Yet the part of Fry’s story that I found most unsettling was that this “debt of gratitude” turned out to be less than mutual. The mystery of why so few people today have heard of Varian Fry—despite his Americanness, his youth, his good looks, his Harvard degree, and the fact that the people he rescued were the guiding lights of Western civilization—seems linked to a peculiar lack of gratefulness among the many famous people whose lives he saved. The stories about how most of these rescued celebrities later avoided or ignored him are numerous and detailed. One of the more glaring examples is Hannah Arendt. Arendt, her mother, and her then-husband were on Fry’s lists. As it happened, Arendt and her family left France after Fry’s expulsion, saved by the Emergency Rescue Committee’s remaining French staffers before the committee itself was shut down by the Vichy police. Yet despite spending a lifetime writing about the philosophical implications of fascism, Arendt never once acknowledged in a single public word that she owed her life to Fry’s committee—nor, it appears, in a private one, even when presented with the opportunity. In a collection of letters between Arendt and her fellow public intellectual Mary McCarthy, McCarthy told Arendt about her experience meeting Varian Fry at a friend’s home in 1952, describing him as a “perfect madman” and elaborating on that insult in ways both inaccurate and cruel. Arendt replied to McCarthy’s letter, but said absolutely nothing in response to the ad hominem attack on the person whose organization had saved her life. Even if Arendt didn’t know who Fry was (which would be difficult to imagine, given his immense renown among refugees in Marseille, where Arendt lived while waiting to emigrate to the United States), it is nonetheless remarkable that her Holocaust-related writings, many dealing directly with righteous Gentiles, never mention that she was among the rescued.

  Sauvage, who deeply admires Arendt, appeared truly pained when he shared this detail with me. “In one of her letters, Arendt says that ‘A writer is his life,’ ” he said, in the tone of a confessional. “How can you spend your whole life without acknowledging this part of your life? Not one word about Fry, or about the attempt to save a culture of which one were a part?”

  It was, indeed, very odd. Because of the people Fry saved, New York became the international center of the postwar art world; because of the people Fry saved, American universities became the premier research institutions on Earth; because of the people Fry saved, Hollywood was reconfigured into global hegemony. Varian Fry, essentially, saved not only thousands of people but the culture of Europe. Weren’t we supposed to have seen this movie already?

  I asked Sauvage who had been involved in Fry’s mission, and he ticked off the various American players who had worked with Fry in France. Every one of them had already died, and Sauvage was the only one who had filmed interviews with them. So I decided to explore the only evidence left, in the hopes of unraveling the mystery of Fry’s heroic actions—as well as the darker mystery of why the culture he saved has largely forgotten him. The answers were far more disturbing than I could possibly have imagined.

  In 1935, Varian Fry was twenty-seven years old, spending a month in Berlin as the editor of the American magazine The Living Age, when he witnessed how a modern civilized country executes a pogrom. Near the end of his trip, storm troopers engineered a riot that happened to take place right outside his hotel. Hearing shouting in the streets from inside the lobby, he stepped out onto the Kurfürstendamm, which at that time was among the city’s most expensive and fashionable streets.

  “I found a large crowd lined up on both sides of the street, forcing each car which came by to run the gauntlet, stopping all cars in which Jewish-looking men or women were riding, and dragging out the Jews and beating them up,” he reported by phone for the Associated Press. “I saw one man brutally kicked and spat upon as he lay on the sidewalk, a woman bleeding, a man whose head was covered with blood. . . . All along the Kurfürstendamm, the crowd raised the shout ‘Jude’ whenever anyone sighted or thought he’d sighted a Jew. The cry sent the crowd converging on the poor victim, who was asked for his identification papers. If he could not prove himself a good ‘Aryan,’ he was insulted, spat upon, roughly handled, and sometimes knocked down, kicked, and beaten.” Since gore is now routinely depicted in the news, I found it difficult to appreciate the level of brutality Fry was describing when I first read this article in the archives of the New York Times, in which it ran on July 17, 1935. It turned out that Fry, or maybe his editors, had understated the violence for the benefit of delicate New York readers, who perhaps preferred a minimum of blood with their morning coffee. Several of those Fry saw being beaten had died of their wounds by the following day.

  But what astonished Fry was less the raw cruelty than the organized spectacle of it. “At times,” he reported, “a chant would be raised . . . ‘the best Jew is a dead Jew’—precisely like a Christian liturgy, with a leader speaking the lines first and the crowd chanting them over and over again, line for line, after he had finished. Everywhere the people were in a holiday mood; in fact, one German youth said to me, ‘This is a holiday for us.’ Old men and young men, boys, Storm Troopers, police, young girls of the domestic servant type, well-bred women, some even in the forties and over—all seemed to be having a good time.”

  The parallels with Christianity that Fry reported for the Associated Press and the Times—the liturgical chanting, the sense of a “holiday”—were not the only ones to come up during his stay in Berlin. Mary Jayne Gold, one of Fry’s co-rescuers, wrote in her memoir of Fry telling her of another incident he witnessed in 1935 Berlin that later motivated him to return to Europe. “At a café, Varian watched a pair of storm troopers approach the table of a Jewish-looking individual,” Gold recalled. “When the poor man reached nervously for his beer, with a quick thrust of his knife one of the storm troopers pinned the man’s hand to the wooden table. The victim let out a cry and bent over in pain, unable to move. . . . I think the mental image of that hand nailed to the table beside the beer mug had something to do with [Fry’s] decision to go.” I read this story and could not help but notice what the hyperliterate Fry had surely noticed himself. He’d witnessed a crucifixion. It was, of course, too gory a tale for the New York Times.

  Visiting the Nazis’ foreign press office the day after the pogrom, Fry was granted an interview with Ernst Hanf­staengl, the Nazis’ chief foreign press officer. Hanfstaengl was delighted to speak with Fry, because he and Fry had much in common. Like Fry, Hanfstaengl was an American—and like Fry, he was a Harvard alumnus. Also like Fry, he was passionate about the creative arts: Hanfstaengl was a talented pianist and composer, and in his younger days he had written several popular fight songs for the Harvard football team. In his current job, he had used his talents again, adapting his Harvard fight songs into anthems for the Hitler Youth. Hanfstaengl cheerily informed Fry that there were two groups within the Nazi Party: a “moderate” wing that wanted to expel the Jews, and a “radical” wing, led by Adolf Hitler, that wanted to murder them. Fry’s report of this conversation also appeared in the New York Times. In 1942, in an article for the New Republic titled “The Massacre of the Jews,” Fry admitted that “when Hanf­staengl told me, in his cultured Harvard accent, that the ‘radicals’ among Nazi party leaders intended to ‘solve’ the ‘Jewish problem’ by the physical extermination of the Jews, I only half believed him. I learned better in November 1938.” The “cultured Harvard accent” of this Nazi leader haunted Varian Fry, but what haunted me were the Harvard fight songs. It would take me much longer to fully understand their implications.

  In 1940, what American intellectuals viewed as an “emergency” finally arose. In June of that year, the Germans took over the northern half of France. With the June 14 fall of Paris, which had become a capital for refugee intellectuals, thousands who had fled Germany suddenly found themselves in what Fry would later call “the greatest man-trap in history.” These refugees fled Paris (as did much of the city’s population) for France’s southern “unoccupied” half, where the French government then herded any German nationals they could find—most of whom were Jews or political refugees—into French-run concentration camps, ostensibly to prevent German espionage. When France surrendered to Germany on June 25, the Nazis established a puppet government based in the southern city of Vichy in exchange for complete collaboration with the Nazis. In Article 19 of the armistice terms, the Vichy government agreed to “surrender on demand all Germans named by the German Government in France”—that is, anyone who was on the Gestapo’s list, a list that would quickly expand beyond German Jews and anti-Nazi activists to include just about anyone the Nazis didn’t like, including many well-known “degenerate” artists. The window for escape from Europe was closing, but the refugees had nowhere to go. Few countries wanted them, even though they were some of the premier artistic, scientific, and intellectual minds of the world. As Herbert Pell, then the U.S. envoy to Portugal, put it, “There is a fire sale on brains here, and we are not taking full advantage of it.”

  The Emergency Rescue Committee was created in New York the day after the French surrender—at a prescheduled benefit event for the American Friends of German Freedom—to provide emergency visas for prominent refugees and to escort them out of France. Ingrid Warburg, niece of the German Jewish financier Felix Warburg and a well-known patron of the arts, took the reins in developing lists of endangered European artists as well as in raising money for the cause—mainly, as she told Sauvage decades later, from Jewish donors. Curators at the Museum of Modern Art assembled lists of artists thought to be most in danger. The Nobel Prize–winning German novelist Thomas Mann, teaching at Princeton, provided lists of similarly endangered German-language writers; the leaders of various universities compiled their own wish lists of scholars, thinkers, and scientists.

  The committee proposed many people for the job of traveling to the “unoccupied zone” and distributing visas to those on the genius lists, but anyone qualified to do it—those with personal connections to the intellectuals to be rescued, or those who had been refugees themselves—would by definition also be in danger. When no one else stepped up, the committee reluctantly said yes to a thirty-two-year-old volunteer, a nobody who had no relevant experience and no qualifications for the job: Varian Fry.

  But who was he?

  This is a question that confused me—and it seems to have confused Fry too. One could call him a journalist, but that descriptor would be only somewhat true. He worked for several American magazines, but he never held any such job for more than a year or two, barely ever worked as a reporter, and abandoned journalism entirely before he turned forty. One could call him an intellectual, but that also doesn’t quite fit, as the term is usually reserved for academics, pundits, or prolific critics, and Fry was none of these. His teaching was limited to high school, and the vast majority of the writing he would publish in his life was for school textbooks or Coca-Cola Company reports. One could call him a lover of the arts, and that is surely true, but it hardly counts as a profession or an identity—and he was not a patron of the arts, except in the sense that he saved artists’ lives. One could call him a WASP blue blood, but that isn’t accurate either; while he was certainly a WASP, he had grown up in a comfortable but not terribly wealthy family, with no pedigree to speak of and no fortune to finance his whims.

  Pierre Sauvage insists that rescuers “almost uniformly had a role model that influenced them, because if one doesn’t have an image of how one should behave in a similar situation, one simply doesn’t know what’s possible.” If Fry had any such person in his life, it was his grandfather, a man who worked for the “orphan trains,” a Children’s Aid Society operation that collected abandoned children from city streets and exported them to foster homes in the American west. Fry’s second wife, Annette, who divorced him two weeks before his unexpected death in 1967, claimed that Fry was very much inspired by his grandfather’s work. (She herself was clearly inspired by it; she published a children’s book about the orphan trains thirty years after Fry died.) But as I picked my way through Fry’s vast personal papers at Columbia University, to which Annette had donated them after his death, I found no mention of this wonderful grandfather who supposedly inspired the greatest act of Fry’s life. Andy Marino, who wrote one of the two biographies of Fry published in the past twenty-five years, points to Fry’s experience being bullied at the prestigious Hotchkiss boarding school as a defining moment for him; Fry’s hazing there, which included being forced to traverse a room hand-over-hand hanging from a scalding steam pipe across the ceiling, supposedly made him drop out. But this life-changing instance of teenage torment isn’t something I could find Fry ever mentioning either—and if being bullied in school motivates people toward heroism, there ought to be a whole lot more heroes in the world. And all of Fry’s supposed marginalization did not prevent him from graduating from Harvard, where he not only earned a degree in classics but also co-founded a nationally important literary journal, Hound and Horn, with Lincoln Kirstein, who later co-founded the New York City Ballet and was an important member of the planning committee for Lincoln Center. The more I learned about Fry, the less I believed that he was a noble loner isolated by his principles. His personal correspondence covers multiple microfilm reels, featuring many, many people. For an outcast, he sure seemed to have had a lot of friends.

  After college Fry moved to New York, where he had a job writing Reader’s Digest–style books on current events for a publisher and think tank called the Foreign Press Association before taking the position at The Living Age. At twenty-three, in 1931, he married thirty-one-year-old Eileen Hughes, an editor at the Atlantic. Their marriage was childless and, by all accounts, challenging. It became even more difficult when Fry left for France in August of 1940, planning to bike around Provence and bird-watch while delivering visas to the people on the Emergency Rescue Committee’s lists. He expected the job to be completed in four weeks. As it happened, he stayed for more than a year.

  In our current century, it is difficult to appreciate the vast renown of many of the people on Varian Fry’s lists, only a few of whom are still household names. Today, for instance, few readers outside of Germany have heard of the German Jewish novelist Lion Feuchtwanger. But by 1940 he was the most widely read German-language writer in the world and, in translation, one of the most widely read writers in the world, period—a fact especially noteworthy because nearly all of his pre-1940 novels deal with explicitly Jewish themes. The book that catapulted him to fame was Jew Süss, published in the United States as Power, a fictionalized biography of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, a Jewish financier for Prussian royalty in the eighteenth century. Oppenheimer’s sentencing on fraudulent antisemitic charges included hanging and “gibbeting,” or the public display of his hanged corpse in a suspended human-size birdcage for six years. Refusing a last-minute conversion that would have averted his death sentence, Oppenheimer died al kiddush hashem, in sanctification of God’s name, reciting the Sh’ma, Judaism’s central statement of faith in one God. Oppenheimer’s story had been fictionalized before and was later the subject of a Nazi film, but Feuchtwanger’s 1925 version, in which Oppenheimer is a complex figure forced to choose between power and dignity, became an international bestseller. When Feuchtwanger’s close friend Sinclair Lewis won the 1930 Nobel Prize for Literature, Lewis declared in his acceptance speech that Feuchtwanger should have received the prize instead.