About the Book

Varian Fry was a World War II hero and Holocaust rescuer. In 1940, this young American went on a secret mission to Marseille to save Jewish refugees and others who had fled Nazi Germany and were now trapped in southern France. Thanks to this American Schindler, the men and women smuggled out of France became survivors of World War II instead of victims.

Sheila Isenberg's biography of Fry, A HERO OF OUR OWN, tells the story of this WW II rescuer. The only American "Righteous Gentile" honored by Israel's Holocaust Memorial, Fry is also known as the "artists' Schindler." Among the 1,500 World War II refugees that he saved from the Holocaust were renowned artists such as Max Ernst, Marc Chagall and Jacques Lipchitz, as well as philosopher Hannah Arendt and Surrealist Andre Breton.

Named one of the "Best Books of 2001,"* A HERO OF OUR OWN is "a must for WW II collections."**

* St. Louis Post-Dispatch
** Booklist

In 1940, a young Harvard-educated American named Varian Fry, inexperienced and not at all certain that he possessed any courage, went on a secret mission to Marseille. There, with only three thousand dollars and a list of names, he was to help those who had fled Nazi Germany and were now trapped in southern France.

The list he took with him had been prepared by, among others, the Museum of Modern Art and Eleanor Roosevelt. It included most of the premier writers, painters, and scientists of Europe, many of them Jews - people like Marc Chagall and Max Ernst, Jacques Lipchitz, Marcel Duchamp, Hannah Arendt, Franz Werfel, Andr Breton, Andr Masson, and other Surrealists, and hundreds more. When Fry witnessed their plight, he became determined not just to give them immediate aid but to find ways for them to escape. Slowly he built up a group of people who could help, forging passports and finding secret paths across the Pyrenees into Spain and then to Lisbon.

Fry himself was constantly in great danger, but he seemed to experience a divine inspiration, achieving greatness and glimpsing immortality by acting as the hero he never thought he could be. His own government tried again and again to stop him and send him home, but he managed to continue his rescue operations for more than a year.

Only recently has the world begun to honor Fry, who died in 1967. He was for many years the only American honored at Israel's Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, as "Righteous Among the Nations." Today there are three Americans honored there, out of some 17,000 non-Jews who saved the lives of Jews in the Holocaust.

Using letters and records unavailable to anyone else, as well as interviews with numerous survivors, Sheila Isenberg has given us an inspiring story of how the brave and determined actions of one individual can help change the world.

"The story of Varian Fry is important on many levels, historical and personal. Skillfully evoking a crucial moment in recent history, Sheila Isenberg tells the compelling and dramatic story of how an ordinary person, thrust into a situation of extreme danger, did extraordinary things for one year in wartime France, then drifted almost lost through the rest of his own life. It is also a story of institutionalized bureaucratic stupidity that must never be forgotten so that it is never repeated."
-- Richard Holbrooke

"Varian Fry, the only American honored at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, played a crucial role in rescuing more than 1,000 European refugees from the Nazis in the early 1940s. With his Emergency Rescue Committee, Fry rescued Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Hannah Arendt, Heinrich Mann, and other intellectuals, political activists, and what the Nazis called 'degenerate' artists, many of them Jews. Yet, up until the late 1990s, few in this country had heard of Fry. This highly readable biography tells the exciting escape stories of the underground railroad he organized to lead refugees from southern France across the Pyrenees to freedom. Isenberg sets the rescue stories against the background of American isolationism and anti-Semitism at the time, documenting her dramatic narrative with more than 70 pages of fascinating notes, including references to letters, interviews, personal papers, and government reports. The drama here is in the thrill of rescue, the realistic portrait of a complex leader, and the decidedly nonheroic truths about WWII at home... A must for WWII collections..."
-- Booklist, Sept. 1, 2001, by Hazel Rochman