Stamp campaign begins

In 1940, Varian Fry taped a list of 200 stranded political and artistic refugees to his body, hid $3,000 on his person, and headed to Vichy France to help them get out. Both the list and the money had been provided by the ad hoc Emergency Rescue Committee, whose members included Nobel laureates Albert Einstein and Dorothy Thompson. Fry, a journalist, had volunteered for the job; no one else would do it.

During the next 13 months, thousands of desperate refugees learned of his mission and besieged him. With the help of the organization he built up and U.S. Vice Consul Hiram (Harry) Bingham, whom he called “my partner in the ‘crime’ of saving lives,” he ultimately rescued an estimated 2,000 people, among them the painter Marc Chagall and his wife Bella, the novelist Arthur Koestler, the Nobel laureate Dr. Otto Meyerhoff — and Isi Canner of Teaneck and Jeanette Berman of Saddle River.

The U.S. Postal service dedicated a Bingham commemorative stamp May 30 at the World Philatelic Exposition in Washington, D.C. And while Bingham clearly deserves this honor, Fry’s admirers — including the staff of The Jewish Standard — want his face on a stamp as well. Fry is already fairly well known locally; a street in Ridgewood, Varian Fry Way, was dedicated in honor of the hometown hero, who died in 1967, and the Ridgewood library mounted a major exhibit about his career in 2001. Another exhibit is scheduled for October.

Sheila Isenberg, the author of the Fry biography "A Hero of Our Own" (Random House 2001), noted in an interview near her upstate New York home that Fry helped refugees "over the foothills of the Pyrenees, got them out on ships, gave them money, hired forgers to create documents, used the black market to obtain all kinds of documents."

The editor of the Foreign Policy Association’s Headline Books, Fry "risked his life and gave up his livelihood," said Isenberg, "to go to Europe and save people who were at risk of being murdered by the Nazis. He was risking his life because he was carrying on illegal operations — illegal from the perspective of Vichy France and the Nazis."

Isenberg, who lectures about Fry, stressed that Fry also had to oppose the U.S. government, which wanted to maintain diplomatic relations with France. "He had to work in an atmosphere of secrecy and danger."

Through a money-laundering arrangement with gangsters in Marseille, dollars were handed over to their connections in the United States and Fry was given francs with which to help his refugees — after the gangsters got their cut.

Among those he was able to save were the world-famous author Franz Werfel, who would go on to write "The Song of Bernadette," and his wife Alma, one of whose previous husbands was the composer and conductor Gustav Mahler (and whose music manuscripts she smuggled out of Germany); and Jacques Lipshitz, the creator of powerful sculptures.

"He chose to save the people who were most at risk," said Isenberg. "If they were anti-fascists, ‘degenerate’ artists, or Jews, they were at risk."

Fry was the first American named a righteous gentile by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem. (In a ceremony at Yad Vashem on June 12, Martha and the Rev. Waitstill Sharp will become the second and third Americans to be given this signal honor, for rescuing hundreds, perhaps thousands, from Czechoslovakia and Vichy France.)

In 1996, Warren Christopher, then secretary of state, planted a tree in Fry’s honor on Yad Vashem’s Avenue of the Righteous. At the ceremony, in a statement Isenberg characterized as "an apology," Christopher acknowledged that Fry’s "heroic actions never received the support they deserved from the United States government, including, I regret to say, the State Department."

Indeed, said Isenberg, the State Department hampered Fry. "He was a troublemaker, trying to save refugees, and the American government and people did not want to even acknowledge what was happening.

"It’s high time," she continued, that Fry’s "actions receive the acknowledgement that they deserve from his own country. Christopher’s apology was in 1996 and it’s 10 years later, and what has the American government done" to make amends?

To many people, issuing a commemorative stamp would be one way to do that.

Annette Fry noted in a telephone interview from her home in New York that as well as having been honored by Yad Vashem and the State of Israel, her late husband had been awarded the French Legion of Honor. But the United States has yet to honor its own hero of the Holocaust.

"I want to see that he’s given his due," she said. "People should know more about the work he did in France. If Hiram Bingham deserves a postage stamp, certainly Varian Fry does."

The Standard and the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies are co-sponsoring a drive to get a stamp named for Fry in time for the centennial of his birth, Oct. 15, 2007. (See accompanying petition.)

The Pennsylvania-based Wyman Institute — named after David S. Wyman, author of "The Abandonment of the Jews" (1985) — researches and teaches about the U.S. response to the Nazi genocide.

Dr. Rafael Medoff, director of the Wyman Institute, said, "Varian Fry’s rescue of an estimated 2,000 Jews and other refugees from the Nazis stands out as one of the few bright spots on the otherwise disappointing record of America’s response to the Holocaust. Every American should feel proud of this man who upheld America’s noblest humanitarian ideals, and every resident of New Jersey can take special pride in the fact that their fellow-New Jerseyan is one of the very few people who can be described as an American hero of the Holocaust."

Medoff, an occasional contributor to the Standard’s Op-ed page, added: "America’s postage stamps feature a wide array of images, from scenery to cartoon characters to entertainers and political leaders. Surely there is room for a stamp honoring a brave humanitarian."

Now, said Isenberg, "the United States Postal Service has to be battered and barraged and hammered by a number of officials and people like you and me. A stamp would raise people’s consciousness and make them aware that a man named Varian Fry existed and that he was a true American hero, a hero of our own."