Photo courtesy U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Annette Fry Varian Fry

Varian Fry--Assignment: Rescue, 1940-1941 has opened at the IU East Library and will run through Aug. 19.

The exhibition includes reproductions of photographs and journal excerpts that convey the story of Fry, the American intellectual who risked his life to save many refugees in France at risk under the "surrender on demand clause" of the Franco-German Armistice in the early 1940s.

Fry took a leave of absence from his editing job at the Foreign Policy Association and was sent to Marseilles, France, as a representative of the Emergency Rescue Committee, the forerunner of the International Rescue Committee. The committee was dedicated to helping European intellectuals escape the threat of the Nazi regime. He arrived in August 1940 with a list of 200 names of persons in need of help in escaping. He had volunteered for a three-week mission.

Thirteen months later, Fry was expelled from France. Under the shadow of the legitimate relief agency, the Centre Americain de Secours (CAS), he and his associates created an underground escape organization. Risking his personal security, Fry was able to save many; when CAS was closed permanently in June of 1942, he had assisted more than 2,000 in escaping the Nazi Gestapo, which could ask the Vichy government in France to "surrender on demand" any non-French person for deportation, usually to concentration camps.

Among those he saved were artists Marc Chagall and Max Ernst, sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, biochemist Otto Meyerhof and political scientist Hannah Arrendt.

Fry was arrested in August 1941 and forcibly escorted across the French border. In 1945, he published a book entitled Surrender on Demand, which documented his experiences with CAS.

Although Fry's heroism is recognized today, he was not broadly recognized for his efforts at the time. He did, however, receive the Croix du Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor from the French government, but no other recognition came to him before his death. He died on Sept. 12, 1967, surrounded by manuscript pages that described his months in France.

The U. S. Holocaust Memorial Council honored Fry's memory with the Eisenhower Liberation Medal in 1991 and opened an exhibition of Fry's experiences in Marseilles, in 1993. In 1996, the Holocaust Heroes and Martyrs Remembrance Authority, Yad Vashem, honored Fry as the first American "Righteous among the Nations."

Varian Fry—Assignment: Rescue, 1940-1941 is being circulated by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The exhibit in Richmond is open during library operating hours, 8 a.m.-8 p.m., Monday through Thursday, and Friday, 8 a.m.-5 p.m.