During the Holocaust, there were thousands of unknown rescuers, some of whom paid with broken careers, social ostracism or even their lives.
Among them, Raoul Wallenberg and Oskar Schindler may be the best-known names, but their ranks include 63 diplomats from 24 countries.
A fresh entry in this genre is “Varian’s War,” a two-hour docudrama that will air over the Showtime Networks on April 22 at 8 p.m.
The title character is Varian Fry, a non-Jew classicist and scholarly editor, who in 1940, when most Americans still ignored the Nazi threat and opposed the admission of Jewish refugees, decided to launch his own rescue operation.
As an envoy of the New York-based Emergency Rescue Committee, he made his way to Marseilles, in unoccupied Vichy France, where thousands of refugees were clamoring to escape Hitler’s juggernaut.
Fry had a specific mission: to rescue the great artists and intellectuals, “the soul of Europe,” and bring them to the United States.
On his list were painters Marc Chagall and Max Ernst, writers Franz Werfel, Lion Feuchtwanger, Heinrich Mann and Hannah Arendt, and scientist Otto Meyerhof.
To achieve his goal, the scholarly 32-year-old Fry, played by William Hurt, found himself knee-deep on forged documents, illegal financial transactions, and games of bluff with Vichy and German officials.
He is aided by Miriam Davenport (Julia Ormond), a sexually liberated American woman, U.S. vice consul Harry Bingham (Ted Whittall), a shrewd refugee (Matt Craven), a skilled forger (Alan Arkin) and a feisty Alma Werfel-Mahler (Lynn Redgrave).
Fry’s job was not made easier, at least in this version, by Chagall, who insisted that as a French citizen and famous artist, he was immune to Nazi persecution.
In a climactic scene, Fry leads his famous charges across the Pyrenees Mountains to safety in Spain.
The writer-director of Varian’s War” is Lionel Chetwynd, whose TV credits include “Sadat” and “The Man Who Captured Eichmann,” and the screenplay adaptation of the movie “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz,” taken from the novel by Mordecai Richler.
He has drawn generally satisfying performances from an able cast, including Hurt, who starts out as a rather pale figure but gains in strength and authority as the film progresses.
Documentary filmmaker Pierre Sauvage (“Weapons of the Spirit”), who is preparing his own documentary on Fry for PBS, has posted a critique of “Varian’s War” on his Web site, charging minor and substantial errors in chronology and character depiction.
Chetwynd acknowledges that some of the characters represent composites and that he has striven for “a dramatized presentation of reality.”
But what matters to Chetwynd, he says, is that “here was a man who put his body between the culture of Europe and the darkness of Europe.
“In that sense, Fry saved a little bit of all of us. Anyone who, for instance, has seen the Chagall windows in Jerusalem will agree to that.”
During an earlier news conference, Chetwynd was asked if the networks, cable and movie studios weren’t producing an overdose of Holocaust-related productions.
“No,” responded Chetwynd, “When you rotate the prism of that era, time and time again, each moment comes up with a different picture.”
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
