‘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."