Behind Fry’s angst was something far more profound than the boredom of a war hero living out his days behind a picket fence. He was genuinely anguished over the fate of the thousands, even millions, whom he had been forced to leave behind—and in his anguish I saw what was missing from Sauvage’s interviews with his smiling colleagues decades later. “I have tried—God knows I have tried,” Fry wrote in his memoir’s unpublished preface, “to get back again into the mood of American life. But it doesn’t work. . . . If I can make others see it and feel it as I did, then maybe I can sleep soundly again at night.” After his expulsion from France, he tried in every way he could to continue fighting. He tried to enlist in the army, but an ulcer kept him out. The Office of Strategic Services, the CIA precursor that had run covert operations in Europe during the war, didn’t want him either; his work in Marseille had involved too many contacts with possible Communists. He then tried screaming his head off about what was happening in Europe. In 1942, he wrote a cover story for the New Republic titled “The Massacre of the Jews,” reporting with hard evidence on the murders of over 2 million Jews in Europe. “There are some things so horrible that decent men and women find them impossible to believe,” he wrote. “That such things could be done by contemporary western Europeans, heirs of the humanist tradition, seems hardly possible.” He pleaded for the one thing he knew would have saved the Jews of Europe: offering them asylum in the United States. His plea was roundly ignored, to the tune of 4 million more murders. He then devoted himself to writing Surrender on Demand, his memoir, in the hope that it would bring more attention to those he had abandoned in Europe. But the war had been won by the time it was published, and the book received little attention. Americans wanted to hear about their own heroism, not about their failures.

  What was perhaps most painful for Fry after his return from France was the dissolution of his relationships with the artists and intellectuals he had saved—or, rather, the revelation that these relationships were themselves a sort of fiction.

  Franz Werfel, whom Fry had personally escorted out of France, refused to return Fry’s wife’s phone calls on Fry’s behalf while Fry was still in Marseille. Walter Mehring, the celebrated German poet who had been not only Fry’s client but also a personal friend of Fry and his staff, settled in Los Angeles and signed a lucrative contract to write screenplays for Warner Bros. Fry’s committee had advanced him 30,000 francs to establish a new life in the United States. Refugees were not expected to pay back such loans, but Mehring’s deadbeat status became harder to swallow when he began cruising around Pacific Palisades in a pricey new convertible while Fry’s committee was still scrounging for money to save more lives. When Fry found a publisher for his memoir, his former client Lion Feuchtwanger wrote him a complimentary note: “Your narrative of the events is so impressive that the reader can’t help experiencing them with you.” But the narrative was apparently not impressive enough for the world-famous author to offer Fry any help getting the book reviewed or read, or even a blurb for the jacket. Their personal correspondence begins and ends with that congratulatory note. Feuchtwanger’s lack of gratitude toward Fry’s mission actually dated back to 1940, when he first stepped off the boat in New York. At the pier, he began giving interviews in which he thoroughly detailed his escape from France, down to the route he took over the Pyrenees. The risk this posed for Fry’s committee’s safety, along with that of Feuchtwanger’s fellow refugees, can hardly be measured. But Feuchtwanger couldn’t have cared less. Soon he would be living in a model home built by the Los Angeles Times, with his wife and turtles.

  The refugees’ ingratitude became painfully clear in 1966, the year before Fry’s death. That year Fry decided to raise money for the International Rescue Commission—a philanthropic group loosely evolved from Fry’s Emergency Rescue Committee—by putting together a fundraising album of original lithographs from the artists the committee had rescued. Fry thought this would be simple; after all, he had saved these people’s lives.

  It wasn’t.

  Reading Fry’s papers from that year is an enraging experience. Nearly every page involves some frustrated effort to convince refugee artists to support the group that had saved their lives. There are endless telegrams and letters back and forth in 1966 and 1967 between Fry and Chagall, Fry and Chagall’s agent, and Fry and Chagall’s second wife, all of whom provide various excuses as to why the renowned artist was unfortunately unable to provide Fry with the time of day. Chagall, whom Fry had not merely supplied with a visa but even personally sprung out of jail when the French police were about to hand him over to the Gestapo, finally did agree to provide a lithograph—but refused to sign it, deliberately reducing its value by orders of magnitude. Fry asked André Breton, with whom he had lived at Air-Bel along with Breton’s wife and young daughter, to write an introduction to the album. No amount of begging could convince Breton to do it. In a letter to a friend, Fry tried to justify the failure of so many artists to respond to him: “Artists don’t answer letters, usually, if they even read them; and the telephone is no substitute for physical presence—repeated physical presence.” He began searching for funding for a trip to France. After seeing Max Ernst’s show at New York’s Jewish Museum, Fry begged Ernst to participate, eventually yelling at him by mail, I DO NOT WANT THE ALBUM TO COME OUT WITHOUT SOMETHING FROM YOU IN IT!

  Ernst would ultimately have even more reason to be grateful to Fry. As I read through Fry’s maddening correspondence from 1966 and 1967, the last two years of his life, I came across an incident that I had not seen reported anywhere else. In 1966, a German newspaper published an article claiming that Ernst, who was not Jewish, had deliberately abandoned Luise Straus, his Jewish ex-wife and the mother of his son, to the Gestapo—while he trotted off to fame and fortune in America. In reality, Ernst had offered to remarry Straus for visa purposes, despite being involved with Peggy Guggenheim at the time. Fry was concerned that a fake marriage by the likes of Max Ernst would endanger the whole rescue operation, but in the end he was willing to try it. The only unwilling party was Luise Straus, who preferred taking her chances with the Nazis to remarrying Max Ernst. (She died in a Nazi prison camp.) When Fry heard of the smear against Ernst, he went to tremendous lengths to clear the artist’s name. I saw how Fry had dug up copies of the receipt for Luise Straus’s American visa, and then how he had solicited affidavits on Ernst’s intentions from the former U.S. consuls and vice consuls, from the curators of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and from witnesses who had been with them in Marseille. But Ernst still largely rebuffed Fry’s requests for a lithograph, capitulating only when Fry arrived in France in September of that year to beg him in person. The stress of pleading with Ernst and many other artists during his trip to Europe became so severe that it landed Fry in a French hospital with his first heart attack.

  Part of this ingratitude was mere celebrity vanity. As Fry once wrote to his wife, “Mrs. Guggenheim says Chagall is a shit. (Jewish ladies are so outspoken!) I guess she’s right.” But the lack of graciousness was not unique to celebrities. Pierre Sauvage, recalling his research in Le Chambon, pointed out to me that many of those rescued declined to even acknowledge their rescuers in later years. This was partly because they simply wanted to forget the greatest horror of their lives.

  But there is also something inherently shameful in the rescuer-rescued relationship—the humiliation of being reduced to depending on another person for survival—and that shame expresses itself in resentment toward rescuers. “Gratitude is what makes you hate someone,” Hannes Stein, a German Jewish journalist with whom I shared my bafflement about the legacy of Varian Fry, told me. Stein argued that this type of resentment was completely natural, and he offered his own country as a prime example. “Germans hate America,” he went on. “They have three reasons to be grateful to America: America saved them from themselves, rebuilt their country after the war, and saved them from the Soviets. And that’s exactly why Germans hate America.” If we are honest, we must admit that there is a profound shame in the fact of the Holocaust from the Jewish point of view as well—and I wondered if my discomfort with rescuer stories came directly from that shame. How on earth, Fry’s rescued Jews and dissidents must have wondered, could we wildly successful adults have gotten ourselves into this pathetic situation—where our lives suddenly depend on the religious commitments of a pig farmer, or the intellectual ambitions of an oddball like Varian Fry?

  The shame is only highlighted by the enormous difference in the experience for the rescuers and the rescued. For those rescued, it was the worst time of their lives, when their lives had the least significance. For the rescuers, it was the best time of their lives, when their lives mattered most. Everyone Fry saved had been living a nightmare. Yet as he left France, Fry wrote to his wife, “I have had an adventure—there is no other but this good Victorian word—of which I had never dreamed.”

  That good Victorian word, and the literature it evokes, brought me back to the question raised for me when I’d read Fry’s New Republic article on the massacre of the Jews, in which he marveled that such atrocities could be committed by the “heirs of the humanist tradition.” It was to preserve that very tradition, of course, that Fry had gone to France—to, as he put it, SAVE CULTURE EUROPE STOP. As I peered into the chasm between rescuers and rescued, I saw that there was something equally strange about this grand goal of saving Western civilization. What, after all, did that “humanist tradition” consist of? What were its greatest achievements, its highest values? What did those rescued intellectuals actually believe? And when Fry was trying to save European culture, what was he trying to save?

  Searching for answers, I looked to the writings of one of the Emergency Rescue Committee’s biggest success stories, Hannah Arendt—and realized that I had somehow managed to reach adulthood without ever reading Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, the book for which Arendt is best remembered. Amazed by this gaping hole in my education, I read it on my flight to Los Angeles, and then read it again on my way home. Based on Arendt’s reporting for The New Yorker on the trial of the high-ranking Nazi, the book is most famous for its assertion of how “banal” the accused appeared, that Eichmann was not a cackling evil genius but rather a boring bureaucratic man, and that this sense of tedium was itself the Holocaust’s prime novelty of horror. I knew this before opening the book; more than half a century later, this insight has become almost banal itself. But Arendt’s chief argument in that book, I discovered, is actually to convince her readers that the source of Eichmann’s—and by extension the Nazis’—evil was Eichmann’s “inability to think.” “He was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché,” she writes, and later elaborates: “He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing. . . . It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of the period.”

  Yet Eichmann as Arendt describes him, spewing clichés at his trial, did not appear to me at all as a person with an “inability to think.” He seemed rather like the opposite—that is, someone who had spent a rather astonishing amount of time thinking, absorbing ideas and translating them into action. It was just that he had been thinking about bullshit, and in the process had become buried so deep in it that extraction had become impossible. Arendt did refine this idea in her later writings, but as I read and reread this book in my airless middle seat on my cross-country flights, I found myself wondering why it was so important to her to claim that Eichmann wasn’t capable of thinking. What if he were?

  Arendt also claims that the premise of Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, where he was tried not only for crimes against humanity but for “crimes against the Jewish people,” was fundamentally flawed, because for the Jews, as Arendt put it, “the catastrophe that had befallen them under Hitler . . . appeared not as the most recent of crimes, the unprecedented crime of genocide, but on the contrary, as the oldest crime they knew and remembered.” Arendt calls this “the misunderstanding at the root of all the failures and shortcomings of the Jerusalem trial.” But I couldn’t help wondering if the Petliura pogroms in Ukraine in 1919–20, in which more than fifty thousand Jews were murdered in an explicit attempt at genocide, hadn’t looked incredibly unprecedented; or if the vast totalitarian brainwashing of the Inquisition, as it used creative rhetoric to convince people to turn their Jewish neighbors in to be burned at the stake, hadn’t seemed impressively novel at the time; or if the populist innovation of the Roman Empire, turning the torture and murder of rabbis into public stadium-filling spectacles, didn’t strike a philosopher or two as “the most recent of crimes.” I thought of more examples like this—two or three per century, just off the top of my head—but it soon became tedious, and I bored even myself. “Evil” may or may not be banal, but killing Jews sure is.

  I finished Arendt’s book wishing I had liked it—and worried that my failure to appreciate her perspective was a reflection of my own “inability to think.” I went to my local library and read a collection of her essays titled Responsibility and Judgment, which was on the shelf next to Ayn Rand’s The Virtue of Selfishness. In her 1971 essay “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” Arendt reflects on the disappearance of morality in Nazi Germany: “All this collapsed almost overnight . . . as though morality suddenly stood revealed in the original meaning of the word, as a set of mores, customs and manners, which could be exchanged for another set. . . . Did we finally awake from a dream?”

  As I returned the book to its place beside The Virtue of Selfishness, I recalled that the American Yiddish poet Yankev Glatshteyn had thought the opposite: For those who had been awake enough, there had never been any dream at all. Born in Poland in 1896, Glatshteyn was a secular man, and American enough to have enrolled in law school at New York University. In his searing April 1938 poem “A gute nakht, velt” (Good night, world) he wrote:

  Good night, wide world

  Big, stinking world.

  Not you, but I slam the gate.

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  Go to hell with your dirty cultures, world.

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  Flabby democracy, with your cold

  compresses of sympathy.

  Goodnight, electric impudent world.

  Back to my kerosene, tallowed shadows,

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  To my pages inscribed with the divine name, my biblical books,

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  To judgment, to deep meaning, to duty, to right.

  World, I step with joy toward the quiet ghetto light.

  Good night. I’ll give you a parting gift of all my liberators.

  Take your Jesusmarxes, choke on their courage.

  Croak over a drop of our baptized blood.

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  From Wagner’s idol-music to wordless melody, to humming.

  I kiss you, cankered Jewish life.

  It weeps in me, the joy of coming home.

  This poem has haunted me since I first read it as a twenty-year-old student at Harvard—a place, I slowly came to understand, that could teach me many things, including how to think, but that could not teach me goodness. Not because it taught the opposite, but because moral education is simply not what secular Western education or secular Western culture is for.

  Varian Fry, my fellow alumnus, had noticed this too. When he’d interviewed the Nazi press official Ernst Hanfstaengl in 1935 in Berlin, he was alarmed to discover that Hanfstaengl saw him as a fellow Harvard man. An American with German parents, the clearly bright Hanfstaengl graduated from Harvard College twenty-seven years before Fry and later earned a doctoral degree. Like many Harvard-educated children of immigrants, Hanfstaengl decided to return to his parents’ native country in its time of trouble in order to improve it, to do the most good he could with his education. He soon became a personal friend of Hitler’s and rose to the level of chief foreign officer at Joseph Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda. The American had done well for himself, and for his parents’ country.

  In 1934, a year into his job as head of Hitler’s foreign press department, the Harvard Alumni Association appointed Hanfstaengl vice marshal at Harvard’s commencement for his twenty-fifth class reunion—in recognition of his achievements as a high-ranking official overseas. Though Hanfstaengl declined the honor after much controversy, he did attend his reunion, trailed by dozens of reporters and a security squad of local and state police. The Nazi regime’s attitudes were no secret by 1934; 1,500 protesters met him at the dock in New York. But at Harvard, the sanctity of free intellectual inquiry prevailed, along with hallowed respect for diversity of opinion. The Harvard Crimson urged the university to give him an honorary degree. When Hanfstaengl withdrew from the vice-marshalship, he made up for it by donating $1,000 to the university as a “Dr. Hanfstaengl Scholarship,” for students to spend a year in the new Germany. In his letter to Harvard president James Conant accompanying his donation, Hanf­staengl wrote, “It is my profound conviction that my years at Harvard have since given me incalculable advantages, not the least of which consist in a knowledge of America and the world and in the spirit of discipline and fair play.”