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."

Words into the whirlwind

Varian Fry’s first career was as a journalist. At 27 he decided to go where the news was: In 1935, that was Berlin. Just appointed editor of The Living Age, a venerable political journal, he cabled what he saw and heard across the Atlantic and onto the prestigious pages of The New York Times. Fry’s account of the events of July 15, appearing July 17, was the first that Americans would read of Nazi brutality toward Jews.

Told that an anti-Jewish demonstration was being held in the Kurfürstendamm district, he hurried to the site. There, he wrote, a "crowd was stopping all cars in which Jewish-looking men or women were riding and dragging out the Jews and beating them up.

"I saw one man brutally kicked and spat upon as he lay on the sidewalk, a woman bleeding, a man whose head was covered with blood…."

The police did nothing to help the victims, Fry reported, but merely directed traffic.

Meanwhile, he wrote, "All along the Kurfürstendamm, the crowd raised the shout ‘Jude!’ whenever anyone sighted or thought he had sighted a Jew…. If he could not prove himself a good ‘Aryan’ he was insulted, spat upon, roughly handled, and sometimes knocked down, kicked, and beaten."

In a follow-up piece July 26, Fry was interviewed on his return from Germany. He said he’d been told by Ernst Franz Sedgwick Hanfstaengl, Hitler’s chief press adviser, that the cause of the riot, the "hissing," ostensibly by Jews, at a screening of an anti-Semitic film was purposely done by storm troopers (also called Brown Shirts or S.A. men; the initials stand for Sturm Abteilung, meaning Storm Section). The hissing did what it was intended to do. It was excoriated in a popular newspaper, which urged its readers to "show the Jews a hard hand," Fry said.

He expanded on the brutality he saw — and heard — saying it had been directed by the Brown Shirts, singing the infamous Nazi song that begins "Wenn Judenblut vom Messer spritzt," "When Jewish blood spurts from the knife." Years later Fry would recall, "I heard them chanting their terrible song…."

But the most telling information Fry brought from Germany was not about the recent rioting but an intimation of the Holocaust to come. He said that Hanfstaengl told him that two anti-Semitic groups were vying for power, a relatively moderate one that wanted merely to segregate the Jews and a radical one that wanted to exterminate them. (In a short piece appearing the next day, Hanfstaengl said that Fry’s account of their conversation was "fiction and lies from start to finish.")

Fry later wrote in "The Massacre of the Jews" (The New Republic, Dec. 21, 1942), "One reason the Western world failed to rouse itself more promptly to the Nazi menace was surely this tendency to dismiss as impossible fantasy the many warnings the Nazis themselves gave us….

"According to a report to the President by leaders of American Jewish groups, nearly 2,000,000 European Jews have already been slain since the war began, and the remaining 5,000,000 now living under Nazi control are scheduled to be destroyed as soon as Hitler’s blond butchers can get around to them."

He provided devastating figures for Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Netherlands. And he described various killing techniques, in plain language that nevertheless sears the page: starvation, deportation, gassing, working to death, burning alive. "And there is the good old-fashioned system of standing the victims up, very often naked, and machine-gunning them, preferably beside the graves they themselves have been forced to dig. It saves time, labor, and transportation."

He quoted letters from people who knew they were doomed. He cited affidavits, cables, reports attesting to the "massacre of the Jews."

He wanted Roosevelt and Churchill to speak out; he wanted the churches to take a stand, the pope to threaten "with excommunication all Catholics who in any way participate in these frightful crimes…."

And finally, he wrote, "it is a little thing but at the same time a big thing, we can offer asylum now, without delay or red tape, to those few fortunate enough to escape from the Aryan paradise….

"Despite the fact that the urgency of the situation has never been greater, immigration into the United States in the year 1942 will have been less then ten percent of what it has been in ‘normal’ years before Hitler…. There have been bureaucratic delays … [that] have literally condemned to death many stalwart democrats….

"This is a challenge which we cannot, must not ignore."

‘Without Fry, we would not be here’

Why do you want to know about me?" Isi Canner asked with a disarming smile. "I want to tell you about Varian Fry."

Fry, who has been called the "artists’ Schindler" for having saved hundreds of such well-known figures as Marc Chagall and Jacques Lipchitz from the Nazis and their Vichy France collaborators, also saved more than 1,000 equally precious but not particularly famous lives, including those of Canner, now 91, and his late wife, Frida.

"He was a good person," said Canner, whose first name is pronounced "Izzy." "He was ready to go to France and save people. He was one of the few who intervened, a special person, because no one, including the [U.S.] government, was ready to help…. He did everything — [provided] forged papers, forged documents, to try to save."

In his Teaneck home, surrounded by his wife’s paintings and sculpture, Canner told how the couple were saved by a man they never met.

In 1935, just about the time Fry was in Berlin, witnessing Nazi brutality against the Jews and writing about it in a dispatch that made The New York Times, Canner, a printer, was also there, and also trying to publicize the evils of Nazism. He and his Socialist Zionist group Borochov — named for Dov Ber Borochov, the founder of the Po’alei Zion party in Russia — published a pamphlet attacking Julius Streicher’s anti-Semitic weekly Der Stürmer. "Der Stürmer was almost pornographic," Canner said. "It was so vicious that we decided to produce Anti-Stürmer." Its only issue "appealed to the German people not to listen to Streicher and to fight his anti-Semitic propaganda, which would only harm both Germans and Jews."

An artist produced the type, and "hiding in a small room," said Canner, "I set it."

The group printed about 500 copies, which the communists then distributed. The Gestapo was looking to find out who published it, Canner said, but not in his group’s direction. "The Gestapo thought the Communist Party produced it. They did not think that Jewish people could do something like this. Thank God," he added, "or they would have immediately located us, without looking very hard. We were very naïve." He was all of 20.

In 1937, the Canners, fearing for their future in Germany, embarked on a long, arduous, and eventful odyssey. They lived for a time in Paris as undocumented aliens and Canner was twice arrested. (His wife had a valid Polish passport.)

"We had no choice but to leave France," he said, "so we smuggled ourselves to Belgium," and when Belgium fell, fled back to France. Canner eventually was sent to St. Cyprien, a prison notorious for its horrendous conditions and high death toll, in southern France. He escaped some months later, rejoined his wife, and received an emergency visa with the help of the International Rescue Committee.

Hiram Bingham, the U.S. vice-consul who was recently honored with a commemorative stamp "was very generous," Canner said. "He gave us visas for the United States." Frida Canner’s Polish passport was no longer viable, and Bingham gave the couple a document with which they could travel in lieu of a passport — but men between the ages of 16 and 49 were not allowed to leave the country without permission.

(Bingham also provided a visa for Canner’s sister, who was living as an undocumented alien in Toulouse with her 2-year-old daughter. An older daughter had been sent to Britain via the Kindertransport.)

"That is where Fry came in," Canner said. Someone from Fry’s organization told the young couple — he was 25 and she was 23 — how to cross from France into Spain and gave them a sketch of the route they should take.

All should have gone well, but they and several other couples were arrested and put in prison.

Fry wrote of that episode in "Surrender on Demand" (Random House, 1945): "[S]everal of our protégés were arrested in Spain. Like so many before them, they had crossed the frontier from Cerbère to Port-Bou. What happened to them afterward, and why they were arrested, we didn’t know. We only got postcards from them — read and stamped by the Spanish military censor, as is all mail in Franco Spain — saying that they were in the prison at Figueras, a town near the border, and asking us to get them out. Had they been arrested because their names were on a Gestapo list? Or was it only because they had gone deep into Spain without reporting at a frontier post, as we had warned them to?"

Fry went in person to the Seguridad, Franco’s security service, in Madrid, to find out what had gone wrong. It turned out that the couples had neglected to go through customs.

"Since he was American," Canner said, "he could talk right away with the security service, and they told him to come by again on his way back from Lisbon," where he was headed. He did, and finally arranged for the couples to be released. "Without him," Canner said, "we would have stayed there for the rest of the war."

"While we were in prison," Canner added drily, "the German consul came to ‘help’ us come back to wherever we came from, promising the best, promising work. None of us responded."

Fry’s organization gave the freed refugees money, Canner said, and he was asked, "When do you want to leave?" He said, "Today, on the next train." The Canners did indeed leave on the next train.

The couple arrived in the United States in 1941, settling in Manhattan. Canner served in the Army in New Guinea and Manila and in 1949, he and his wife moved to Teaneck, where they brought up their two children, Daniel, who died last year, and Judith.

Canner has five grandchildren. It is, he said, paging through a photo album, "a small mishpocha."

"All the boys I worked with [on the Anti-Stürmer] — they disappeared. My father disappeared. My wife’s mother, sister, aunt. My uncles and aunts went to Auschwitz or otherwise disappeared. Without Varian Fry, we would not be here."

‘Assignment: Rescue’: to rescue the rescuer

Why are the Yankees called heroes," asks Catherine Taub, "when Varian Fry was a true hero?"

Taub has made it her mission to tell the world — and the village of Ridgewood, where she lives and where Varian Fry grew up — about Fry’s heroism.

Her efforts culminated in the dedication last year of a Ridgewood street as "Varian Fry Way," exhibits at the Ridgewood Library, and a scholarship in Fry’s name at Ridgewood High School.

Taub first learned of Fry’s exploits about nine years ago, touring an exhibit about him with her daughter, Alison, at the Jewish Museum in New York. Learning about a traveling version of the exhibit, she found out what it would cost — close to $2,000 — to bring the exhibit to Ridgewood, wrote up a proposal, and delivered it by hand to the superintendent of schools, the mayor, and the director of the library.

The response was immediately and overwhelmingly positive.

"We met at the library to discuss costs," she recalled in an interview last week, and someone suggested that Jewish organizations, like synagogues, raise the money. But she told them, "It’s not just a Jewish story, it’s a humanitarian story. There should not just be Jewish fund-raising." The word then went out to the Jewish community and beyond — to churches, organizations, and schools.

"The money more than covered the shipping," Taub said, and what was left over went to a Varian Fry portrait from the Smithsonian Institution and a living memorial — the Varian Fry Humanitarian Scholarship at Ridgewood High School. This is awarded to the student who writes the best essay about performing good deeds — "tikkun olam," said Taub, "repairing the world, the great virtue of caring and making a difference."

Fry’s is "a humanitarian story to hold up to our children," Taub said. "He was a person who did such amazing good. We need more examples of that."

She stressed that the scholarship is "not based on grade-point average or financial need but on following the example of Varian Fry." This year there were 29 applicants.

On June 1, at the high school graduation, Taub awarded the fifth Varian Fry Humanitarian Scholarship to Ryan Michael Thomas Commins.

Ryan wrote about a friend, Nick, whose "cancerous tumor was discovered the day before he was to leave for college and he had to ... begin chemotherapy immediately."

Ryan knew that his friend was "a huge baseball fan," and he sponsored a wiffleball tournament to raise his spirits and raise money — more than $11,000, which "went to Tomorrows Childrens Fund at the Hackensack University Medical Center in Nick’s honor."

Unfortunately, Ryan wrote, "Nick didn’t make it. He died on Nov. 3, 2005. The tournament did not save his life but I believe that it helped resuscitate his spirit and delivered a much-needed message of love, concern, and community support that helped Nick battle on for several tough months."

Ryan, who will enter the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, plans "to repeat the tournament this spring and, hopefully, every spring, in Nick’s memory. This time," he wrote, "the money we raise will go to fund Ewing’s sarcoma research."

Donations to the Varian Fry Humanitarian Scholarship Fund may be sent to the Ridgewood Board of Education, 49 Cottage Place, Ridgewood, NJ 07451.

— Rebecca Kaplan Boroson

Marc Chagall had been living in an ancient stone house in the half-abandoned town of Gordes, to the northwest of Marseille. He hadn't wanted to leave France when I first wrote him, because he had been nationalized French some years before, and he didn't see any reason why he should go. As it is a serious responsibility to uproot and transplant a great artist, I didn't press him. But after the adoption of the anti-Jewish laws, he was so disgusted that he changed his mind. Almost the first question he put to me was, "Are there cows in America?" When I said yes, there were, I could see from the look of relief on his face that he had already decided to go.

‘A wonderful way to honor him’

They did not paint, sculpt, compose, or write. You would think there was nothing about them to attract the attention of the "artists’ Schindler."

"I wonder why myself," said Jeanette Berman, who lives in a Brighton Gardens apartment in Saddle River. "But there is a word in Yiddish, ‘bashert.’ I think it was meant to be that he was able to help us."

In 1933, when Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany, Berman’s father, Louis Klein, lost his job as bookkeeper for a public utility. The little family, including Berman’s mother, Ida, moved on to Brussels, where they ran a small business that sold gift items. Jeanette, who was 12, learned French much faster than her parents did and handled the correspondence.

And then, in 1940, the Nazis overran Belgium. Men of German descent were ordered to register at the police station. Klein did as he was told — and was not released.

Jeanette and her mother, not knowing what had become of him but suspecting he had been taken to France, set off to try to find him. Each carrying one suitcase, they hitched a ride that took them to Limoges. Needing permits to enter Vichy France, they went to the police station to get them and were detained and held for three days, along with 50 other refugees, in a closed porcelain factory.

Then they were brought to Gurs, an internment camp near the city of Pau. "We were not physically abused," she wrote in an account of her experiences she provided The Jewish Standard, "but nevertheless were treated like prisoners. We were poorly fed and lots of people got sick." Berman lost 20 pounds in the two months she and her mother were imprisoned.

Eventually they got news of her father. He was in St. Cyprien, the same prison where Isi Canner was held, although their paths did not cross.

And they eventually were allowed to leave Gurs because they were able to show that they would not need public assistance.

They immediately went to Perpignan, to be close to Berman’s father. They were able to visit him in St. Cyprien, and to bring him food. Then, Berman wrote in her essay, "my father discovered that some of the French guards took bribes to let the men escape at night. He fled the camp."

The family, having heard that help might be found in Marseille, made their way there. While Berman’s father, a fugitive who would be arrested if caught, hid in their hotel room, she and her mother made the rounds of refugee organizations.

They heard about Fry "from the grapevine," she said, and met him at a café. "There were a lot of people around us," she recalled, "so he said to my mother and myself, ‘Let’s walk.’ We walked on a very busy street and he told us what he felt would be best for us. He told us to go to the Siamese consulate, with which he must have had a relationship to help people get out." And then he told them to go to the Portuguese and Spanish consulates.

The consulate of Siam (now Thailand), she explained in her essay, "issued visas. These were actually fakes and one could never enter that country, but the Portuguese and Spanish consulates recognized them as valid and issued transit visas through their respective countries.

"Now we faced the biggest problem: how to get my father out of France. For my mother and me it was not hard to obtain an exit visa, but for my father, being a fugitive, the story was different."

Fry instructed them to meet one of his aides at a café at the French-Spanish border town of Cereberes. That man, Berman said, "told us to go to a hotel across the street, go to sleep, and early in the morning, before light, take two suitcases, walk along the road, pass a cemetery, and start climbing….

"I don’t recall how long the climb took, but what I recall is that I walked in front of my parents and I came to a stone wall that was between three and four feet high. I shouted to my parents, ‘I think I found the border’ — and looking over the wall I saw a man working in a vineyard, and I called over, ‘Espana?’ And he answered, ‘Si.’"

From Spain the family went to Lisbon, where they applied for and were denied a visa to the United States.

After much traveling — including a brief and frustrating stay at Ellis Island — and a five-year stay in Ecuador, they finally came to live in the United States.

Berman and her late husband, Peter, lived in Maywood for 35 years and raised two sons there. She has five grandchildren — two living in Jerusalem — and, she said with a laugh, "three and a half" great-grandchildren. One and a half of those — the birth is due in August — are in Jerusalem.

Bashert? She wonders. "A stamp would be a wonderful way to honor him."