In Defiance of Hitler: The Secret Mission of Varian Fry (review)

For some Americans in 1940, the writing on the wall foretelling the fate of Jews, Communists, and other anti-Nazis in Europe was perfectly legible. Varian Fry, who had witnessed anti-Semitic rioting in 1935 Germany, volunteered to become an agent for the Emergency Rescue Committee, whose mission was to identify and save prominent artists, scientists, and other European notables who were in danger of arrest in Vichy France. What was planned as a two-month effort to contact the listed names and help them across the border turned into a far larger project that would span a year, endanger Fry’s life, ruin his marriage, implicate a broad circle of co-conspirators, smuggle over a thousand lives to safety, and provide financial and political aid to thousands more. The mission is heroic, and Fry’s brushes with arrest (which could mean death) are chilling indeed. Unfortunately, McClafferty’s retelling is not quite up to speed. Background on Fry’s life is spotty and the account of his efforts in France pocked with repetitions, bursts of accolade (the photo of Fry with a rescued robin is a bit over the mawkish edge), and passages of marginal relevance that hobble the pacing. Moreover, McClafferty omits any discussion of the criteria behind the ERC’s choice of people to save, a thorny issue indeed. Background on the Vichy government and the process for emigration through neutral Spain and Portugal and on to any welcoming political haven is first rate, though—clear enough for a middle-school audience, and even illuminating for any adult who gets lost in the plot twists of Casablanca. Plenty of black-and-white photographs put faces to the names of Fry’s equally brave colleagues, and end matter comprising bibliography, index, quotation sources, and an appendix discussing the later years of ERC members will be useful for student research.