VARIAN FRY

Varian Fry – Feature Film

Screenwriter and author: Dan Franck

New York, 1940.

A man in his thirties is received at the White House by Eleanor Roosevelt. The wife of the U.S. President is horrified by the "Nazi leprosy" spreading across the European continent. She provides funding for an organization founded by a group of intellectuals who had fled Hitler’s Germany—including Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, and Hermann Broch—known as the Emergency Rescue Committee, which was tasked with aiding artists and politicians persecuted by the Nazis.

The First Lady’s visitor is a journalist named Varian Fry. He has just returned from Europe, where he witnessed the full scale of the catastrophe. He is preparing to return to France with a list of two hundred prominent figures threatened by the "brown tide" sweeping across Europe. He needs a safe-conduct pass from the American authorities, and Eleanor Roosevelt promises to help him.

On August 13, Varian Fry arrived in Marseille. During that tragic summer, thousands of refugees wandered along the Canebière. They were German, Austrian, Czech, Polish, Belgian, and British—paratroopers or survivors of Dunkirk—hailing from all walks of life and backgrounds. They had come from the north, driven by the Nazi advance, only to find their path blocked by the sea. Women, children, men, and the elderly; communists, social democrats, soldiers, veterans of the International Brigades, downed airmen, and writers who had escaped the Les Milles internment camp. All of them paced back and forth between the port and the cafés, seeking a way out, hoping for a guide, a boat, a car, or a smuggler—hoping for a series of miracles.