Rescue & flight: American relief workers who defied the Nazis

R ESC U E

& F L IGH T

R ESCU E

Susan Elisabeth Subak a f t e rwo r d b y w i l l i a m f. s c h u l z

FLIGH T american relief workers w h o d e f i e d t h e na z i s

University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln and London

© 2010 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America ∞ The views or opinions expressed in this book and the context in which the images are used do not necessarily reflect the views or policy of, nor imply approval or endorsement by, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Library of Congress Catalogingin-Publication Data Subak, Susan Elisabeth. Rescue and flight : American relief workers who defied the Nazis / Susan Elisabeth Subak ; afterword by William F. Schulz. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8032-2525-1 (hardcover : alkaline paper) 1. World War, 1939–1945 — Civilian relief — Europe. 2. World War, 1939–1945 — Refugees — Europe. 3. Unitarian Service Committee — History. 4. Unitarians — Europe — History — 20th century. 5. War relief — Europe — History — 20th century. 6. War relief — United States — History — 20th century. 7. World War, 1939–1945 — Religious aspects — Unitarians. i. Title. d809.u5s88 2010 940.54'77873094 — dc22 2009040225 Designed and set in Ehrhardt by Nathan Putens.

To the rescued and the rescuers in my family — Carl, Ilse, Margit — and to Robert, Elisabeth, Lewis, and Harriet Dexter.

List of Illustrations Preface

Contents

ix

xi

Introduction 1. Prague, 1939

xvii 1

2. Marseille and Lisbon, 1940 25 3. Lisbon and Marseille, 1940 54 4. Marseille, 1941

84

5. Marseille, 1942

119

6. Geneva, Lisbon, and Marseille, 1943 153 7. New York, Lisbon, Paris, and Prague, 1944–45 187 Conclusion 217 Afterword by William F. Schulz 233 Acknowledgments 239 Notes 241 Bibliography 275 Index 281

photographs 1. Robert Cloutman Dexter, 1931

Illustrations

xvi

2. Harriet Dexter, 1937 xviii 3. Elisabeth Anthony Dexter, ca. 1927 xxvi 4. Martha and Waitstill Sharp, 1939

2

5. Norbert Capek, ca. 1917 12 6. Front page, Boston Evening Globe, January 14, 1940 27 7. Varian Fry, 1941 37 8. Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger, 1934 49 9. Walter Meyerhof, 1941

77

10. Refugees arriving at Lisbon train station, 1941 83 11. Herta Field, Charles Joy, and Noel Field, 1941 85 12. René Zimmer 87 13. Dispensary, Unitarian Service Committee 110 14. Fanny Zimmer and Margot Stein 15. Preschool class, Rivesaltes Internment Camp, 1942 120 16. Children outside Rivesaltes Internment Camp, 1942 121

111

17. Nurses, Unitarian Service Committee clinic 122 18. Patients and staff, Unitarian Service Committee clinic 123 19. Margot Stein, ca. 1941

124

20. Herta and Noel Field, ca. 1941 127 21. Donald Lowrie and Helga Holbeck, spring 1942 142 22. Ilse Subak, Karl Subak, and Harriet Dexter, winter 1942–43 167 23. Herta “Jo” Tempi, 1946

199

24. Clothes depot, ca. 1945

201

25. Robert Dexter, summer 1955

218

map Southwest Europe, 1940–42 29

Preface When I was growing up, my father had regular visits from a long-haired academic from New England named Lewis Dexter. The era was the 1960s, but the way he wore his hair, his small rectangular glasses, and the woolen coats chosen from rummage sales reminded me more of an eighteenth-century scholar. He was plain spoken and given to talking a great deal about his polymath learning. He was also highly indulgent of my juvenile challenges. One of them was to pull out a long, dull book and ask him whether it was really true that he could read anything from cover to cover in under two hours. I never proved him wrong. It was only later that I learned that his family had a large part in my father’s immigrating to this country, a story I knew nothing about. My grandparents had died of tuberculosis, I thought, and for all I knew, my father had hiked over the Austrian Alps to Switzerland like the Von Trapp family in The Sound of Music. By the time I was in college I knew that Lewis Dexter’s parents — Robert and Elisabeth — had written the affidavit in 1938 for my Jewish father to come to the United States and that they had founded an organization — the Unitarian Service Committee — that had worked in Europe during World War II. I took a class in the history of the Holocaust and read a total of three examples of rescue — the stories of Raoul Wallenberg, Oskar Schindler, and the French village of Le Chambon — and wondered if there were more. I wrote my term paper on the American government response to the Holocaust and looked for a description of what the Unitarian Service Committee or any other private American organization had done, but did not find one. Instead, I found just a brief confirmation that the Unitarian and Quaker groups had had a presence in Europe at the time.1 A story of American rescuers did not seem to exist in the literature, I concluded from my not-very-thorough exploration. It seemed that history had forgotten that there were any. After Lewis Dexter died in 1995, an essay he had written in honor of his mother — Elisabeth Anthony Dexter — came to me.2 Elisabeth

was the grand-niece of Susan B. Anthony, and Lewis was mainly interested in his mother’s accomplishments as a historian of early American social history. She had published studies of women’s roles in the economies of Colonial America and, even at the end of her life, she was best known for this work.3 Part of Lewis’s paper was a short but intriguing section on his parents’ work with the Unitarian Service Committee, which led me to several thick folders at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. These papers were stamped “Confidential” and “Secret” and sometimes showed the signature of Allen Dulles, the deputy director of the Office of Strategic Services (oss). The espionage link was exciting but, I suspected, not as interesting as the Dexters’ work with refugees, of which I still knew little. At this time, I also began to learn about the extraordinary work of Varian Fry, the only American — by the end of the twentieth century — to have been honored with the Righteous Among the Nations award by Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. This story was full of adventures — forged passports, paths over the Pyrenees, safe houses in France — and a list of celebrity and less famous clients that stretched beyond two thousand people.4 But when I left the genre of biography and read more deeply in Varian Fry’s correspondence, the Unitarian Service Committee’s name was all over it. Although this chapter in American Unitarian institutional history seemed to have been largely forgotten, clues that remained suggested that the story was very rich. My original interest in this story started in part with my fondness for Lewis Dexter. But it is because of his sister, Harriet, that the Dexters wrote the affidavit that allowed my father to come to the United States and escape a likely death. For Robert and Elisabeth Dexter, my father’s affidavit was the first they ever wrote. If their daughter had not pressed them to help my father to come to the United States, the Dexters may never have had an interest in directly helping refugees, and my father would not have had the opportunity. These developments were the result of a chance meeting between Harriet Dexter and my father in 1937 at a summer camp in England. In the following year, after Hitler’s annexation of Austria, Harriet appealed to her xii | preface

parents to help her friend. Her brother, Lewis, who was in graduate school at the University of Chicago, where he had been an academic protégé as an undergraduate, also started exchanging letters with my father and made his own pleas to his parents.5 Robert and Elisabeth said that they would consider it. In July 1938 my father decided that he could not stay in Vienna any longer. The last straw was a sign on a park bench that said Nicht für Jüden (“Not for Jews”). His American visa had not yet come through — indeed, he did not know if it would ever arrive — but he decided to immediately leave for one of the few places Jews could go without visas, to Riga in Latvia. He set off with a young traveling companion, who introduced him to some friends of hers, a Jewish family in Riga. Although the family was large and had only a modest living space, they made room for him. That he had found such friendly hospitality was fortunate because his stay in Riga stretched out indefinitely in those uncertain months of 1938. After spending a few months in Riga hoping that his U.S. visa application would arrive, my father received a reassuring letter from Elisabeth Dexter sent on October 12. She wrote that she understood that his U.S. visa application was now complete, that she had sent her letters on his behalf, and that they were looking forward to seeing him in the United States one day. She went on to write about her and Robert’s idea to start a new organization. “We are very much distressed over what is happening in Czechoslovakia. It is just possible that Mr. Dexter may go next week for a short trip there, to make plans for help from the United States — such as the American Friends have been doing in Vienna.”6 During the next year, 1939, the Unitarians would convert their aspirations into an overseas program for more widespread rescue. However, for my immediate family the one and only rescue was completed in that year with my father’s arrival in the United States. In 1938 my grandparents, Ernest and Marianne Subak, also faced the decision as to whether to try to leave the country. Doing so would have meant giving up all their possessions and roots of a lifetime. They were already in their fifties. The chance that they would both receive U.S. visas was not high. Because he was born in Moravia, Ernest would preface | xiii

have to apply for a visa as a Czech national, which meant fitting within a much smaller quota number than that for Austrians and Germans.7 Ernest had been an officer in the Austrian army during World War I. They held out some hope that their lifelong loyalty to the Austrian state would mean that they would have some rights as citizens. Marianne’s uncle Theo Zerner, a prominent physician, and his wife had already decided that a future in Vienna would be impossible. They chose to take their own lives that summer. In the course of the research for this book, I came across letters, journal accounts, and telegrams from Robert and Elisabeth Dexter about their efforts in 1941 to bring my grandparents over. Discovering this material was a painful jolt, and I did not want to explore it very deeply. I believe that by the time my grandparents had moved high up the waiting list for a U.S. visa, new U.S. State Department rules in 1941 destroyed their chances. This informal rule, called the “Relatives Clause,” barred U.S. visas to applicants who had close relatives who would be remaining in German-controlled regions. March 6, 1941: This latest cable was a thunderclap of bad news for them because they have been working every way to get their parents here and now it looks impossible. I wish that I could understand the cable but no one seems to know just where the Chase Bank fits into the picture.8 April 24, 1941: dexter here cable 1200 dollars subaks glaser tickets 9 May 11, 1941: In addition I have finally gotten most of the money sent (although the Subak’s money, which I wanted most of all, is still held up).10 June 1, 1941: There is still great difficulty in getting passages. Nothing for the Strausses [Subaks] yet. If they were here I could get them space at the last moment, but they cannot get a visa until their passage is reserved, and so far I’ve been unable to wangle one in advance.11 July 1, 1941: subak transportation arranged but visa refused presumably account relatives awaiting details punkt.12 xiv | preface

After my grandparents’ deaths in 1942, my father and Robert and Elisabeth Dexter did not see each other for many years. The weight of a sense of guilt sat heavily on all of them for a long time and was never entirely lifted. Among the lists of refugees and the correspondence, I was surprised to come across records that showed that the Unitarians had tried to help at least two other families that were related to me. These families were not in touch with each other or with my father and grandparents at that time and each would have encountered the Unitarian staff on their own. Gerda Subak and her children, John and Frank, were refugees from Prague and met the Unitarian staff in Lisbon and probably in Agde, France, where Martha and Waitstill Sharp were helping the families of Czech soldiers. Gerda and her family were able to leave for New York after a few months’ wait in Portugal. Another relative, Erwin Subak, from southern Czechoslovakia, had help with his visa application to the United States, which was filed as a Unitarian case at the U.S. State Department but with no further information.13 He died in 1941 in Slovakia, but his wife and daughter survived him. That all these people relied on the Unitarians in some way struck me at first as a remarkable coincidence, but eventually it drove home how small the world of rescue really was.

preface | xv

1. Robert Cloutman Dexter, 1931. Courtesy of the author.

Introduction In August of 1937 Robert and Elisabeth Dexter and their daughter, Harriet, traveled to England on a trip that began as a family vacation. Robert Dexter was an officer of the American Unitarian Association and was heading to Oxford for a meeting of liberal Christian congregations and then to Prague. The Dexters had traveled to similar meetings in previous summers and enjoyed them a great deal, beginning with the impressive meals served on the trans-Atlantic crossings. The American Unitarians maintained direct ties with their fellow congregants at the British Unitarian Association, and both the American and British Unitarian associations now shared more than a century of history and friendly exchanges but also a similar problem of declining numbers. Unitarian membership had fallen sharply in Great Britain during World War I and stood at no more than about twentyfive thousand members.1 In the United States, Unitarian congregations and membership had declined during the Depression years.2 Although influential in New England, the Unitarian Church numbered fewer than sixty thousand members in the United States at that time.3 In both countries Unitarian leaders sought ways to make the denomination’s generally optimistic perspective appear more relevant to its times. American Unitarian ties with congregants in other countries tended to be with those who practiced a liberal form of Christianity that was pluralistic and broad ranging in its interests. That had been the case with their relations with Christians in Germany, but the American Unitarian Association had severed ties after Hitler’s putsch in 1933.4 Before they left for Czechoslovakia for meetings with liberal religious leaders in that country, Robert and Elisabeth dropped off Harriet at an English holiday camp in the countryside northeast of London. Harriet was nineteen years old and had finished her freshman year at Oberlin College in Ohio.5 After a number of days spent around the swimming pool at the camp, Harriet met a young man there who shared her interest in exploring some of the surrounding East Anglian countryside. He was a slender, fair-haired eighteen-year-old from Vienna named Hans

2. Harriet Dexter, Camp Kessingland, England, 1937. Courtesy of the author.

Subak. Ordinarily, a holiday camp in the flatlands of southern England would not have been his idea of a great vacation. However, his parents were aware of the disturbing developments in Germany and had the idea that this would be a good time for their Jewish son to improve on his English. Over the next weeks, a friendship developed between Harriet and Hans. A photograph from that summer shows Harriet standing in front of one of the camp outbuildings. She is wearing a simple sweater over a solid knitted skirt and has dispensed with any jewelry. She has a large forehead like her father’s but her eyes are merry. The effect is wide-open and friendly, and she is looking very happy. When the month was over, Harriet returned to college and Hans to Vienna. During that autumn and winter of 1937, Harriet and Hans kept in touch. In March of 1938 Hans and his family’s worst fears came true when Hitler completed the German annexation of Austria, with the overwhelming approval of most Austrians. For Hans, circumstances were not immediately desperate. The director of his program allowed him to continue his studies and even his stamp club ignored instructions to immediately expel all Jewish members. By April, however, he clearly saw the need to emigrate, and he wrote to the only American he knew — Harriet Dexter. Harriet immediately contacted her parents and pressed them to help her friend. Hans had sent in an application for a U.S. visa, but he needed an American sponsor who would attest to his “morals” and make assurances that as a refugee he would not be an economic burden on the American public. In her unpublished memoirs, Elisabeth Dexter wrote of this moment, of her and Robert’s initial hesitation and their decision to at least meet the young man during their upcoming trip to Vienna and Prague. “Our children urged us to sign an affidavit for him, but we elders, who did not know Karl [Hans], hesitated about assuming such a responsibility. As we were going to Europe that summer, however, we made an opportunity to see him and his family.”6 The Dexters were aware of the actions being taken against the Jews in regions controlled by Germany, but helping individual refugees had never been the mandate of the American Unitarian Association. During their 1937 visit with liberal church leaders in Czechoslovakia, the introduction | xix

Dexters had heard a great deal about the anti-Semitic developments in Germany. Germany had already passed its “racial purity” laws known as the Nuremberg Laws, which forbad Jews from marrying Germans and denied Jews the basic rights of citizenry.7 The end of 1937 saw a sharp turn in anti-Jewish policy in Germany as the Nazi state began to attack all aspects of Jewish economic life, beginning with boycotts, then dismissal of Jewish civil servants and professionals and expropriation of Jewish-owned businesses.8 Many German and Austrian Jewish refugees were now living in Czechoslovakia. In fact the Dexters did visit Hans Subak during that summer of 1938 and met his parents, Ernest and Marianne Subak. During the day, they made their visits, and for two evenings they stayed with the Subak family and discussed plans for Hans’s efforts to emigrate. The Dexters spoke only basic German but the two families were able to communicate with each other in French.9 Elisabeth found in Marianne Subak a like-minded person with two grown children and a lifetime of serious reading habits. Both Dexters seemed to like the young man that their daughter had met the summer before and recalled in their memoir, “We were so pleased with them all that our hesitations vanished.”10 Staying with the Subaks, the Dexters could not help but learn more about the extreme distress being faced by Austrian Jews at that time. Robert Dexter sent this description home to the American Unitarians: The lot of the Jew in Austria today is far worse than it ever was, or is at present, in Germany. Many go daily to Dachauer [sic], the worst of the concentration camps, their families knowing that in all probability their next word will be a brief form letter — “Please come get the ashes.” They will never know what happened. . . . Anyone whom the “Regierung” does not like, who cannot prove beyond dispute that he has no Jewish blood . . . must all go as there is not work for them, they can carry on no business, and even if they have funds enough to live on after September first, none but Jews can work for them.11 Robert’s reports also covered the frustration of Jewish applicants who were unlikely to fit into the U.S. quota, which the Unitarians already viewed to be overly rigid: “Sixty-five thousand from Vienna alone had applied for admission to the United States, and the total annual quota xx | introduction

for all Germany — including Austria — is twenty-seven thousand. These poor people can take no money out — no matter how much they may possess — ten to twenty marks is the limit. Consequently each immigrant must be guaranteed by an American. This is the problem the Friends are trying to solve and one in which I hope we may be able to help.”12 After their visit with Hans and his family during the summer of 1938, the Dexters continued on to Budapest and to Prague. In Czechoslovakia, Robert traveled to the area near the Sudeten German territory and observed Czech military preparations. In his report to headquarters he wrote, “There is no bitterness against the German people . . . but a deep hatred of Nazi philosophy and a fear of what Germany will do. [People] fervently hope that the other democracies will act before it is too late.”13 In Prague, Robert and Elisabeth met Norbert Capek, the head of the Czech Unitarian church and renewed their ties to some of the other Unitarian and liberal Christian ministers in the country. Robert now held the title of director for foreign relations, and he was feeling increasingly confident that he could enlarge upon his role as ambassador for American Unitarians and risk starting a new program. However, the international program that Robert Dexter represented was of a modest scale that had had the resources to do little more than attend liberal religious congresses and to maintain ties with Unitarian associations in Europe. Until this point, the American Unitarian Association had not considered any direct aid program overseas. Back in Boston in early October 1938, Robert Dexter spoke before the American Unitarian Association’s board of directors about his observations, focusing his presentation on the desperate situation of refugees in the Sudetenland and in the rest of Czechoslovakia.14 He took this opportunity to make a plea to start the new organization that had been taking shape in his mind since his recent travels. An eyewitness recalled years later: “His appeal was intensely moving and persuasive. It was accepted without dissent and with enthusiasm.”15 What Robert Dexter was arguing for was a new and large commitment to help refugees in Czechoslovakia.16 He was proposing that the Unitarians should gain experience in this work by proceeding with the Quaker organization, the American Friends Service Committee. The Quakers had had a presence in Europe since World War I when introduction | xxi

the committee was set up to provide young conscientious objectors with noncombatant roles with the Allies’ war effort.17 Next, Robert Dexter organized a meeting with the Quakers in Philadelphia. In his letter to them he explained his motivation: “The most important thing on my conscience at the moment is to see what there is if anything that we can do in cooperating with you . . . to help in the placement of the refugees from Austria and Germany.” Incidentally, Robert Yarnall, of the American Friends Service Committee, the recipient of Dexter’s letter, was already familiar with Hans Subak’s case, and Robert brought him up to date: “We got the documents off yesterday at the first possible opportunity for Hans Subak and I hope that everything will be all right at that end. I shall not feel certain until I see him on the dock.”18 Robert Dexter spent the next few weeks trying to rally some of the most prominent Unitarian leaders. He wrote a long letter to Louis Cornish, former president of the American Unitarian Association, saying that he felt that the Unitarians had a special responsibility for the Czechs: “We, more than any other American religious group, have kept close contacts with the Czechs and also in view of the advantage which we would have there because Mrs. Masaryk was a Unitarian.”19 He was referring to Charlotte Garrigue Masaryk, who was the wife of the former Czech president and a Unitarian from New York. Dexter volunteered to return to Czechoslovakia once more, this time traveling with Richard Wood of the American Friends Service Committee, or Quakers. Through his ties with a new organization to help Czech refugees, headed by Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of Columbia University, Robert Dexter had raised over twenty-nine thousand dollars to spend in Czechoslovakia on the joint Unitarian and Quaker mission.20 By October 1938 Robert Dexter had passed a decision through the board of directors to work with the Friends to send personnel and relief to Czechoslovakia. In November, he and Richard Wood toured the abysmal camps for refugees kicked out of the Sudetenland, many of whom were Jewish. He wrote to his home office that assistance from the West might help ward off the country’s “dangerous tendencies towards anti-Semitism and nationalism.”21 xxii | introduction

When Robert Dexter returned from Prague in December 1938, he wrote detailed recommendations on a program that he hoped would help the “non-Aryan Christians” in Czechoslovakia. He and his colleagues believed that they should start by finding a couple who would work in the country for at least half a year. Dexter helped push through a telegram to U.S. secretary of state Cordell Hull urging changes to the American immigration laws in order to admit increased numbers of German Jews: i suggest that you recommend to next session of congress necessary legislation for quota changes or revisions of immigration laws admit increased number german jews and thereby relieve present situation in germany resulting in injustice, persecution, and terror for jewish people. 22 The policies that Robert Dexter and the American Unitarian Association were now advocating were very different from Robert Dexter’s views during the 1920s when he wrote a college textbook, Social Adjustment, which defended the quota system and the restrictions of the 1924 U.S. immigration law.23 Whereas his earlier views seemed to reflect worries that some immigrants do not assimilate well enough, he was now focusing on the skills and contributions that this welleducated group of Europeans could bring to the American economy and culture. Over the next years, he became a strong advocate for the economic and cultural value of these new refugees. For support for his ideas, Robert Dexter did not have to go farther than his own congregation at the Unitarian Church in Belmont, located west of Boston. The minister there was a famous hymnologist named Henry Wilder Foote whose heart was very much with the Jewish victims of Nazism. During that autumn of 1938, after the widespread destruction of Jewish property in Germany on Kristallnacht, Foote wrote a long article entitled “The Deadly Infection of Anti-Semitism.” There is no prospect of any relief from the reign of terror for the Jews in Germany, and in all neighboring lands which the Nazis can intimidate. The avowed intention is to drive out all Jews who can be made to pay for their escape by the sacrifice of their property and introduction | xxiii

to exterminate those who cannot get away. Coming centuries will record this anti-Semitic campaign on one of the blackest and most discreditable pages of history. . . . In a small and barren country [Palestine], no larger in size and with smaller resources than the state of Vermont, it produced the greatest body of religious literature in the world. Its legislation was humane and enlightened far beyond that of its neighbors.24 Wilder Foote’s writings were based on newspaper accounts and, most likely, the firsthand impressions of his congregant Robert Dexter. His congregation was an important catalyst for the Unitarians’ new refugee program, and two of its members became board members of what would be the Unitarian Service Committee. Edward Witte, who became treasurer, was a businessman with a strong interest in international affairs.25 Seth Gano, who became vice chairman, worked in finance and was an art collector and philanthropist. Over the next years, Gano spent a great deal of time trying to bridge differences between the Boston and European staff, and through his elegant letters, smoothing increasingly ruffled feathers. The engaged sympathy of the Belmont congregation was unusual for a time in which isolationism and some degree of anti-Semitism were the norm. However, it is the small group of American Christians overseas — the Unitarian Service Committee senior staff and their collaborators, Varian Fry and Donald Lowrie — who risked their lives over many months living in hardship in Europe and who embodied rescue and flight. These people were among the first to meet new waves of refugees flowing through France and Portugal, and among the last to leave. These leaders of the Unitarian Service Committee included Robert and Elisabeth Dexter, Charles Joy, Martha and Waitstill Sharp, and Noel Field. Among the Unitarians, it is hard to imagine that a major rescue effort would have been initiated during World War II were it not for Robert Dexter’s dream for a rescue organization and his confidence in pushing the idea forward. A hardy traveler, he had been a diplomat for American Unitarians during the 1930s, possessing a friendly handshake and unaffected compassion for others. His hardy, roughhewn appearance was compared with “Wild Bill” Hickock, which belied the fact xxiv | introduction

that he had had a successful career as a sociology professor at Skidmore College during the 1920s. He was critical in his outlook toward others, and was ultimately disappointed in almost everyone other than his wife, but he tended to make a good impression, and most people who encountered him during this period, including his rivals, accepted his leadership as a given and a blessing. Elisabeth Anthony Williams Dexter was proud of her long and distinguished American ancestry, which included Roger Williams and some of Rhode Island’s most prominent families. She was dedicated to continuing her family heritage of religious and racial tolerance and taught for a time at Storer College, the historic “Negro” college in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, endowed by her grandfather. During the 1920s she earned a PhD in history, raised two small children, and worked as a professor at Skidmore College, along with her husband. By 1940 she was maintaining a large house in Belmont, Massachusetts, with an overgrown tennis court. Her career had languished, and she was thrilled to work with the Unitarian Service Committee. Like the Dexters, Charles Joy was over fifty years old by 1940, and his position on the leadership staff for American Unitarian congregations was a second career.26 A Harvard-trained theologian, Joy had come to the American Unitarian Association after serving for many years as a minister in various New England parishes. Joy seemed to lack any real hobbies, as did the Dexters, but when it came to his job he knew how to pace his tremendous reserves of energy and how to turn projects into institutions. After Varian Fry left France in 1941, Joy became the U.S. consulate’s top annoyance in France for his effective work on behalf of refugees. His paper trail — the Charles Rhind Joy archive of correspondence and essays — runs to thousands of pages and is a boon to the researcher. Unlike the other staff of the Unitarian Service Committee, Noel Field was a Quaker and socially experimental. For a time, he and his wife, Herta, tried out naturism and free love, but it is his long imprisonment behind the Iron Curtain, along with Herta, for which he is most remembered.27 Their kidnapping and detention was related to their work with the Unitarian Service Committee in France and Switzerland during World War II. In this story, however, years before the introduction | xxv

3. Elisabeth Anthony Dexter, ca. 1927. Bachrach Studios, Unitarian Universalist Service Committee Collection, bms 16076, Box 11, Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University.

Fields’ Cold War ordeal, they are widely admired in southern France for their work and self-sacrificing habits. In early adulthood, Martha Sharp looked like she was beginning a long life as the wife of Rev. Waitstill Sharp, spending her time planning pancake breakfasts and Christmas pageants. The woman who burst on the scene in Prague in 1939 and in southern France in 1940, however, was a star in the making. It was probably not necessary for an American to have been charming and beautiful to help refugees. It was just necessary to have been brave and persevering, but Martha was all of these. Although confident and intelligent, Reverend Waitstill fell mainly into the role of supporting the initiatives of his wife and her collaborators. With the exception of Noel Field, most of these representatives of the Unitarian Service Committee had as young adults chosen the Unitarian denomination. The Sharps and Dexters had left their liberal Baptist upbringing to join a Unitarian congregation.28 And if they were not exactly “born again,” they all had well-developed interests in promoting social and religious tolerance and in the type of social engagement practiced by their personal models, among them Jane Addams, Roger Williams, and Albert Schweitzer. The staff members of the Unitarian Service Committee were all people who viewed a strong work ethic as central to character. If the American response to the Holocaust reflects a colossal failure of mainstream attitudes and institutions, the story related here does not take exception to this point of view. Instead, the story of the U.S. government’s treatment of these organizations and individuals reveals another layer of failure. In the immediate years after the war, the machinations of Cold War paranoia had the effect of eroding the reputations of this small group of rescuers. But for the Unitarians, the relationship with their government was complex. In the late 1930s Unitarian leadership expressed their disagreement with U.S. immigration policy and lobbied the State Department for a less restrictive policy on visas and civilian shipping. However, after the United States entered the war, the Unitarian Service Committee began to influence some of the U.S. intelligence projects in southern France and the Iberian Peninsula. introduction | xxvii

Beginning in 1942, several in the group worked as informants and advisors for the Office of Strategic Services. Many of the Unitarians were willing to spy for the United States, but in return they expected that their refugee clients would benefit in some way, through communication links and funds for maintenance and health care. In turn, Allen Dulles’s ties with the Unitarians stretched his conservative reputation, for through them he came to collaborate with leftists with whom he had no prior introduction or interest. When the Roosevelt administration reluctantly took on a rescue mission late in the war, Robert Dexter’s role was formalized in 1944 with his appointment as representative of the War Refugee Board in Portugal. Other enclaves of dedication emerged among the small population of Americans living overseas. Following France’s surrender in 1940, many Americans still in the country boarded the boats waiting at Bordeaux. Others lay low for the entire war and some of these people found their way to the Unitarian Service Committee, depleted financially and otherwise, following Germany’s surrender. However, the Americans in this story did neither. The remarkable group included the Unitarians, the World ymca, the Americans who worked for the Jewish organizations in France and Portugal, and the Centre Americain de Secours, known as the [Varian] Fry Committee. Varian Fry had among his staff four American expatriates who had lived a very different life in France before the transformative experience of meeting Fry in 1940. Varian Fry, the Unitarians’ most important collaborator, was a Harvard-educated journalist who took a leave of absence from foreign policy reporting to start a rescue organization in Marseille, France, during the summer of 1940. Over the next year, Fry was able to help at least two thousand notable intellectuals, artists, and less distinguished people to leave Vichy France and emigrate to other countries. Apart from his own staff, the Unitarians were Fry’s only American friends in Europe. After he returned from Europe in 1941, he spent the remaining war years screaming — through his writing — at a mainly uninterested American public about the unfolding Holocaust. The original Varian Fry story, available through biographies and his own memoir, centered on the year that Fry spent in Marseille beginning in the summer of 1940 and then fading out with Fry’s frustrated xxviii | introduction

attempts to continue to steer the Marseille operation from his base in New York after the Vichy police pushed him out of France in 1941. In the longer story, related in this book, the organization that Fry left behind in Marseille turned into a clandestine network for hiding and supporting refugees and for resistance and espionage. Robert Dexter started the link by recruiting Fry’s staff in the summer of 1942, and the network continued until the liberation of France in 1944. The network was sustained partly with funds from the Unitarians and the oss after it had lost contact with Varian Fry. By 1944 Fry himself was no longer completely out of the picture. The Unitarians brought him back to work as a behind-the-scenes advisor to the U.S. government’s late-breaking rescue program — the War Refugee Board. Donald Lowrie of the World ymca was a Russian specialist from Ohio who had divided his adult life between Czechoslovakia and France. At home in France and possessing an unflappable demeanor, he came to coordinate the entire private relief enterprise in the French unoccupied zone between 1940 and 1942.29 His story is also closely tied to the Unitarians, especially at the start. The Unitarians’ American staff overseas and their chief American collaborators in Europe numbered some sixteen individuals, not counting the American Quakers who worked on compatible but different projects than the Unitarians.30 Most of these sixteen individuals tried to stay in France and Portugal as long as they could, but when they returned to the United States most spent the remaining war years raising money and awareness about the refugees. This book is devoted to describing the work of this exceptional group of Unitarians and the rescue networks they supported in Europe. The story starts in Czechoslovakia, moves to southern France and Portugal, and continues in Switzerland. It does not describe in any detail the deportations from southern France, although for the majority of the foreign refugees trapped in the country, that was their fate. Although rescue was only attempted for a minority of cases, the efforts and accomplishments of these Americans is the focus of this book. Together, they were able to help several thousand refugees to escape.

introduction | xxix

R ESC U E

& F L IGH T

1

Prague, 1939

on the morning of march 15, 1939, martha and waitstill Sharp hurried out of the door of the Hotel Atlantic in central Prague. This self-described first-class family hotel had given the American couple the red-carpet treatment on their arrival three weeks earlier. With some foreknowledge of their mission, the entire hotel staff had lined up on the sidewalk outside to greet them. Waitstill, a young Unitarian minister from Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts, and his wife still felt shy about this kind of attention. Although they had received it already in London, where British diplomats and parliamentarians interested in Czechoslovakia had greeted them warmly, the Sharps did not know if they could fulfill the high hopes set before them.1 They expected that at least the funds they had brought could be put to good use for food and medical care and, with the aim of saving money, they had planned to move into a vacant apartment that day. The prospect had suddenly fallen through, however, and they were unlikely to find an alternative. The city was filled with refugees, and as they were among the small group of volunteers and church workers in the city trying to help refugees to escape, they knew how tight housing was. For weeks the Sharps had followed the death throes of the Czechoslovakian parliament, the imminent secession of Slovakia, and the massing of German troops in Bratislava. They had a checklist in their mind — they had learned to avoid written notes — of what they would need to do the day the country was taken over. Today, breakfast was especially hurried. They had a particularly full day ahead of them. It was just months since Czechoslovakia surrendered the Sudetenland to Germany in the Munich Pact. Thousands of Sudetenland refugees had endured the winter in tents in the countryside and in

4. Martha and Waitstill Sharp embark for Czechoslovakia, February 1939. Unitarian Universalist Service Committee Collection, bms 01446, Box 198, Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University.

various makeshift shelters. Czechoslovakia also had tens of thousands of mainly Jewish refugees who had left Germany and Austria over the previous six years. Some of Europe’s most prominent writers had gratefully accepted a Czech passport when, as Jews or otherwise enemies of the Nazi regime, they had become stateless. Among these, Lion Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel, and Heinrich and Thomas Mann and their family members would all come to know Martha and Waitstill Sharp, who eventually played a part in their complicated journeys to the United States. The Sharps had set up in two large rooms in the Czech government’s new refugee institute.2 Their initial program was to help refugees from the Sudetenland resettle in other parts of the country. They decorated the office with a large American flag, which represented a 2 | prague, 1939

thread of hope for a real American presence — a presence that they knew was illusory. The Sharps may have been the only Americans in Czechoslovakia working on refugee emigration, but their consulate in Prague took no formal interest in what they were doing. Years later, Martha Sharp recalled the emotions of that day, March 15, when German troops entered Prague, how she watched the “endless ranks” of soldiers goose-stepping through the main square and then went with Waitstill to the Old Town Square where they saw “thousands of people standing or kneeling in the snow before the chapel of the Town Hall, bareheaded, praying, oblivious of the melting snow or the tears coursing down their faces.”3 She spent the evening finding a politician — one of the individuals on the short list of British priority cases. With her assured manner and wholesome good looks, the thirtyfour-year-old American was in her element on such assignments. Earlier that day at a meeting of the small community of volunteers working with refugees, Martha and Waitstill had learned that the roundup and arrest of social democrats and other anti-Nazis was underway. That evening Martha found a taxi, and noting that the driver had a companion in the front seat, she gave an address that was near but not exactly her destination. Ducking into the first dark entrance she encountered, she watched as the occupant of the cab looked up and down the street and walked in her direction. The driver honked and she realized that her follower must be a Gestapo agent. She flattened herself against the doorway, and in the darkness he walked right by and headed back into the cab. She soon found the address she was looking for and climbed the dark stairwell. The woman who answered the door on the top floor denied any knowledge of the name that Martha gave her, but when Martha insisted that there was little time, and produced her American passport, the man she was looking for soon appeared. Martha and her charge set out on foot in the cold and windy night, but when they reached the bridge over the Vltava, a Nazi soldier stepped out of the shadows to stop them. Martha was ready. “Americans,” she said, “en route to the U.S. embassy,” and pulled out her passport. “Gehen,” he said. At the other end of the bridge, they were met by another challenge from the first soldier’s counterpart, but the same strategy worked. They now had just prague, 1939 | 3

a half mile to go before the British embassy palace came into view, but a Gestapo patrol was stationed at the gate, Martha noted with dismay. As she walked forward, her charge just a step behind, Martha complained loudly that there were no taxis and that they would never have accepted the appointment with the secretary of the embassy if they had known that it meant walking. She politely asked the German guard if he knew whether Mr. Swanson was still in his office, and she apologized that they had been so delayed. “I don’t know,” he replied in English. Continuing her act, Martha pulled out her passport and asked, “Will you please tell Mr. Swanson that Mr. and Mrs. Sharp are here.” The agent replied, “I am not the embassy guard. He is there; you should ask him.” So they walked into the courtyard, rang the bell, and had themselves announced. After taking a cup of tea and allowing her relief to sink in, Martha set out for the home of Alice Masaryk, the daughter of the country’s former president, where she would meet up with Waitstill, who had been on a similar mission.4 Alice had been serving as a host to the Sharps during their stay in the country. Her mother, Charlotte Garrigue Masaryk, had been a Unitarian from New York, and her brother, Jan Masaryk, had already gone into exile to the United States and was the featured guest at Unitarian receptions in Boston. The Masaryk name — the family of the country’s first president — was still held in great affection among the Czechs, and consequently Alice Masaryk’s days in Czechoslovakia were numbered and she was hoping to leave for the United States soon. The relief program she had previously administered as head of the Czech Red Cross was now at risk. Waitstill, who had brought funds from the United States for the relief program, had happened to be at the Red Cross earlier in the day when a group of Brownshirts had commandeered the account books and taken over the offices.5 Martha and Waitstill offered to spend the night with Alice Masaryk in her apartment, but she told them that it would not be necessary.6 The Sharps went back to their office that night, defying the curfew, which was announced each evening with the barked words, “Achtung! Achtung!” Waitstill recalled how the trucks lined up before the shops that evening, and how the looting continued for months as the trucks 4 | prague, 1939

were filled with goods from shops, factories, and warehouses to be carried westward to the Third Reich. With his memory for quirky detail, Waitstill could describe years later the German officers carrying “beribboned cartons from the shops . . . intended to satisfy the German people that the overfed Czechs should yield this tribute to their benevolent German conquerors.”7 The threat to the Jews in Czechoslovakia was immediate. Martha learned that many of the people who had been in the refugee camps had run away into the woods and that many others were moving around Prague, hungry, and afraid to sleep in the same place twice.8 The Jewish organization hicem (an acronym for three different organizations) had been helping refugees but was now closed, and Marie Schmolka, esteemed head of their refugee work, had been arrested and jailed.9 On the night of March 15, the Sharps found more than seven hundred refugees and Czechs waiting in silent terror outside their office door, in the hope that an American presence would give them some protection.10 The Sharps had to decide what to do. British nationals were being called home, and many of the British working with refugees were leaving, although some were going to try to stick it out. The Americans in the country were down to about twenty individuals, most of them working at the consulate. The Sharps had originally agreed to stay in Czechoslovakia for about six months and did not feel at all ready to leave. They decided to take it one day at a time. They then took many of their papers, threw them in the furnace, and opened their office to the new refugees waiting outside their door. Martha Sharp found a number of young people — most of them Czech Jews — having the necessary language skills for Czech, German, and other languages to staff the office. She invited American students from Charles University to work as volunteers in her office, and several did.11 She shifted their program from resettlement of Sudetenland refugees within the country to that of helping all refugees to emigrate. Her project was to compile dossiers on refugees who wanted to emigrate to Great Britain and to deliver the applications directly to England, but she also advised them on the logistics of fleeing to neighboring countries. Their Czech staff interviewed the refugees in Czech, German, Polish, prague, 1939 | 5

or Russian, and, with Martha Sharp, developed case files in English and contributed to the refugee organizations’ master list. Martha usually went about her work with a sympathetic efficiency and tried to set up an appointment system so refugees could avoid the long lines to which they had become accustomed, but which exposed their refugee status to any Gestapo agent who chose to stroll by. Martha had the thirty-five hundred refugee families who were interested in the Sharps’ help fill out detailed forms and make appointments for an in-depth interview.12 During several trips that spring, Martha Sharp then carried by hand many of these dossiers to London, where the British government’s Home Office and more specialized committees considered the applications. On their initial stay in London en route to Prague, the Sharps had already met some of Great Britain’s strongest advocates for refugees. These included Eleanor Rathbone, who was the most outspoken member of the British parliament on the subject of supporting refugee emigration and relief. Rathbone had told Martha Sharp that she should consider herself a welcome addition to her own committee staff. Though not Jewish, Rathbone was used to taking unpopular positions, coming from a Unitarian and Quaker background and being one of the few female parliamentarians. In this case, she had pleaded the cause of refugees since Hitler’s putsch in 1933.13 The Sharps had also been welcomed by the lord mayor of London, whose Lord Mayor’s Fund, at about one-third of a million pounds, was the largest private fund put in the service of helping Czech refugees.14 Although the available visas for Great Britain fell far short of the demand for them, the number surpassed what would be granted by the United States or elsewhere. The U.S. visa quota for Czechoslovakia was twenty-eight hundred per year, which meant places for fewer than 1 percent of the endangered refugees in the new Czechoslovakia. Canada and Australia were not any more generous in their immigration policy. Britain, however, knew that when it signed the agreement with Hitler in Munich in September 1938 that the outcome would be tens of thousands of newly stateless and endangered people. There was enough outrage among the British populace and government at the outcome in Munich to loosen the country’s traditionally stringent emigration policy. 6 | prague, 1939

Despite the few available American visas, some of the refugees who visited the Sharps’ office had a chance at U.S. emigration, and the refugee questionnaire that the Sharps designed was geared toward registering refugees’ efforts to obtain an American visa.15 Martha presented to the U.S. consul files from people with American relatives or from those who were fairly high up on the waiting list for a U.S. visa.16 Often these people could not visit the U.S. consulate on their own because the overwhelmed consulate was turning away hundreds of waiting people each day. In some instances, Martha and her staff succeeded in getting people released from prison by presenting a letter from the American consul confirming that the person had some chance of obtaining a U.S. visa. Waitstill also was a regular visitor at the American consulate in Prague, where he would go to substantiate the applications of Czech academics hoping to get university jobs in the United States. The Sharps, for the most part, were not at all impressed by what they saw at the American consulate. “The authorities are too abrupt and summary in dealing with refugees,” wrote Waitstill. The Sharps felt that the American representatives were not even able to make themselves understood during their interviews with refugees. An exception, however, seemed to be found in a man who had recently transferred from Shanghai, a Consul General Irving Linnell, who helped the Sharps by serving as a confidential banker. “He’s all right,” Waitstill wrote.17 Later in the spring, Waitstill sent a letter from London to Robert Dexter, the Unitarian officer in Boston who was supporting their work. He explained that although most of the British volunteers had left Prague, he and Martha planned to stay because they felt that as Americans their presence was more likely to be overlooked. However, Waitstill could not resist adding that if they were “immobilized by the Gestapo,” headquarters should not “worry unduly.”18 Whatever money the Sharps spent in Prague, they would be keeping no receipts, Waitstill warned. The Boston office could hardly protest. The Sharps’ appointment to Prague had come out of the blue, and the Unitarians had been hard pressed to find anyone to go to Czechoslovakia at all, let alone people as instrumental as the Sharps. Robert Dexter wrote back that he thought that it was out of the “picture” for anybody to replace the Sharps after prague, 1939 | 7

they left. If Waitstill could hear what was being said about them, said Dexter, “ . . . your ears would burn. Everyone thinks both you and Martha have done a perfectly swell job.”19 when robert dexter pushed for the founding of the unitarian Service Committee in late 1938, he suggested that they hire an American couple to spend six months in Prague. He had not imagined how difficult the recruitment would be. Through the winter of 1938-39 the American Unitarian Association approached one prospect after another — most of them Unitarian ministers — and had been turned down.20 At the end of the 1930s, not many Americans were willing to live in Europe, even for a few months. After years of the economic depression, those who had a stable professional job were unlikely to agree to take an extended leave of absence, especially since, in most cases, their wives could not or would not go with them. Waitstill recalled that he had been the eighteenth choice. It also helped the Sharps’ decision that substitutes immediately presented themselves, both to take care of their congregation and to look after their two children. When the proposal was made to him, Waitstill had replied, “Now Ev, look out. . . . Who’s going to take the preaching? Who’s going to take the calling on the sick? The burying of the dead? The marrying of the connubially minded?”21 Everett Baker, who later became dean of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, volunteered to be the visiting minister at Waitstill’s church in Wellesley Hills, west of Boston.22 Old friends Marion Niles and Edna and Livingston Stebbins offered to take care of their children — Hastings, age seven, and Martha, age three. The Sharps were already intrigued. They had recently started an International Relations Club where members reported on various topics, and they were already fired up about what was happening in Europe. “Reading the frenzied speeches of Adolph Hitler only intensified our fear of Nazism,” recalled Martha. “On the other hand, the more we learned about Czechoslovakia, the more we admired this plucky little democracy.”23 Actually leaving their children and going to a country that was on the brink of war was another story, but it was not the first time that 8 | prague, 1939

Martha had rejected more comfortable alternatives. She had had a well-rounded college career as a philosophy major at Pembroke, the sister college of Brown University. In college she had managed some eighteen extracurricular activities involving sports and student government and was considered very popular although she did not seem to take her own social life very seriously. When she graduated, she did not stay in New England as her parents wanted her to do, but went alone to Chicago and worked in Hull House, the settlement house founded by Jane Addams. At Hull House Martha counseled and organized projects for young women in the community, some of them Jews from eastern Europe, others recently arrived families from the American South and Mexico. Martha had had an unusual childhood herself. She was born in 1905 in Providence, Rhode Island, to English immigrants James Ingham, a steelworker, and Elizabeth Whelan. Her parents had an unhappy marriage and her mother became nearly blind from a degenerative eye disease, which affected her ability to care for her children. Although the illness was not life-threatening, a relative adopted Martha when she was very young, and a family from the Inghams’ Baptist church adopted Martha’s sister. Her younger brother lived for much of the time in orphanages. Although her adopted family doted on her and she saw her birth parents frequently, the unstable family situation must have been difficult for Martha. While in college, Martha met a Unitarian couple in Boston named Livingston and Edna Stebbins. Livingston Stebbins was an influential publisher who had greatly broadened the title list for a Boston-based Unitarian publisher and had created the imprint Beacon Press.24 The Stebbinses introduced Martha to Unitarianism, which matched her interest in community service and her egalitarian instincts. It was they who encouraged Martha to work at Hull House, a move that caused her adoptive parents to disown her. Later the Stebbinses introduced her to Waitstill Hastings Sharp, the young director for religious education at the American Unitarian Association. The Sharps, an upper-middle-class family with an old New England pedigree, did not approve of a match with Martha, the daughter of a steelworker. Better than the Mayflower Society to which they prague, 1939 | 9

belonged, the family name Hastings was a reminder of their family’s participation in the battle of 1066. While not unaffected by his parents’ class-conscious outlook, Waitstill had already developed a personal idealism and an ambition to work in overseas service. He was immediately taken by the intelligent social worker, who was also classically beautiful, with thick, dark wavy hair and fiery dark eyes. When Martha met the sandy-haired young man with wire-rim glasses, he struck her as somewhat formal, but she was eventually won over by his sense of humor and quirky intellect, and they married despite his mother’s objections. In their wedding notice, Martha’s closest relatives were listed as Aunt and Uncle Stebbins, and she never fully reconciled with her original relatives. In their first years of marriage, they attended graduate school. Waitstill followed Martha’s undergraduate philosophy degree with his own master’s in philosophy from Harvard, and Martha kept pace with him by earning a master’s degree in literature from Radcliffe at the same time. Waitstill’s first ministry was in Meadville, Pennsylvania, and then the family moved to Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts. Now it was ten years into their marriage and comfortable life in Wellesley Hills, and the Stebbinses took Martha aside and urged her to throw caution to the winds and accept the invitation to work in Czechoslovakia. The Sharps left almost at once, taking a boat to London in early February 1939. Although they were unknowns in Europe, they were treated seriously by most of those whom they encountered. Their mission was rare enough, and they both possessed the personal confidence and tact that would allow them entrée to the many people whose help they sought. In Paris they met with Malcolm Davis, the European representative of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who gave them notes of introduction to a wide range of Czech leaders.25 when the sharps arrived in prague in late february 1939, the Unitarian minister Rev. Norbert Capek met them at the train station with a salutation reminiscent of one of his popular hymns. “Brother Sharp, Mrs. Sharp,” he said. “We are very glad and relieved to see you here. You’ve come to a nation in crisis.”26 In fact, the Sharps were met with scenes of distress from their first moments in the country 10 | prague, 1939

when they witnessed crowds of women and children weeping on the train station platform. When they asked Reverend Capek what they were seeing, he explained that the women and children were saying goodbye to their husbands and fathers, social democrats from the Sudetenland, who had been offered asylum in London.27 At Unitaria, the name for the Prague Unitarian church, the Sharps found the mood to be very depressed. At a women’s committee meeting, Martha was surrounded by people who considered themselves anti-Nazis and who had held out hopes that the country might be defended. These hopes were now entirely dashed. At the end of September 1938, Britain, France, and Italy had agreed to the Munich Pact, which allowed the immediate cession of the Sudetenland to Germany. These new frontiers would make the rest of the country indefensible, and the pact in effect recognized that the entire country would be under Germany’s political and economic control.28 The new country accepted defeat without attempting a fight. Their president, Eduard Benes, surrendered and the Czech army went into exile in France.29 The members of the Czech Unitarian church tended to be politically liberal and from middle-class and professional backgrounds, as were American Unitarians. Norbert Capek and his followers were most certainly not sympathetic to the racialism of Nazi Germany, which was now strengthening native Czech anti-Semitism. But for the Sharps, Unitaria was also an oasis. The charismatic Reverend Capek was the American Unitarians’ most important tie in Czechoslovakia and perhaps in the entire continent of Europe. Initial seed money for Capek and the development of the Czech Unitarian Church had come directly from the American Unitarian Association in Boston in the early 1920s.30 At that time, the Bohemian-born Capek had just finished a posting of many years as a Baptist minister in Newark, New Jersey, but turned to Unitarianism toward the end of his stay in the United States.31 Although of young middle age and the father of ten children, Capek’s large literary output, humanistic perspective, and energetic personality convinced the president of the American Unitarian Association, Samuel Eliot, to support Capek.32 When he returned to Czechoslovakia, Capek built up a church that combined liberal religious teachings with a vision of the “Czech soul” prague, 1939 | 11

5. Norbert Capek, ca. 1917. Underwood and Underwood studios, Unitarian Universalist Service Committee Collection, bms 01446, Box 25, AndoverHarvard Theological Library, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University.

and religious pluralism based on the legacy of the fourteenth-century Czech martyr Jan Hus and later Protestant adherents. These ideas appealed to many in the new nation, which had been established only in 1918 after centuries of dominance by the Habsburg Empire and the Catholic Church. By the early 1920s the Unitarian church in Prague 12 | prague, 1939

had an audience of several thousand, and over the next decade Unitarian congregations would be founded in several of the large Czechoslovakian cities, including Brno and Plzen.33 By the late 1930s Capek led a thriving, if financially challenged, liberal congregation in Prague. Ironically, during the 1930s the precarious financial position of Norbert Capek’s church ensured steady communication between the American Unitarians and Prague. The American Unitarian Association and British Unitarians had loaned the Czech Unitarians fifty thousand dollars — an enormous sum for them — for the purchase and restoration of a large eighteenth-century building known as the Poetting Palace, in the Old City near the Charles Bridge.34 The Prague church was also expecting some support from the government of President Tomas Masaryk, who had congratulated Capek on the growth of his congregation and on official recognition of the Unitarian Church in Czechoslovakia.35 With Czechoslovakia’s increasing investment in defense and military expenditures during the 1930s, however, there was little governmental support for the fledgling Unitarian Church.36 At the time of the Sharps’ visit, Unitaria was about twenty thousand dollars behind in its loan payments and faced foreclosure on the building. As a young Unitarian minister himself, Waitstill Sharp was very inspired by the personality of Norbert Capek and also became caught up in their financial worries. After the German takeover of Prague on March 15, Waitstill wrote to Boston suggesting that Capek and another Unitarian minister be given “professional invitations” to America, including a ministerial appointment or a stipend.37 The association president in Boston, Frederick May Eliot, agreed and sent the two invitations in late March of 1939.38 Capek’s wife, Maja, was already in the United States on a lecture tour to raise money for the joint Unitarian-Friends refugee program, and Norbert was sorely missing her. But Capek and his son-in-law, who had also received the invitation, both declined, explaining that they could not “desert my people in these days.”39 A minority of the congregants of Unitaria were of Jewish heritage. Several of these families managed to emigrate to Britain, including a Mr. Sonnenberg who before he emigrated left 1 million Czech crowns with Unitaria for their mortgage. The Sharps tried to get Unitaria prague, 1939 | 13

member Professor Albin Goldschmied out by recruiting American Unitarians to find a position for him in the United States. By August a place in the United States was found for the Goldschmied family, and Waitstill reported that for Martha and himself, the good news added “five years [to their life] expectancy.”40 This trip was the Sharps’ first close contact with Jews and Jewish life. Growing up in Providence, Martha’s friends had tended to be the children whose mothers belonged to the same Protestant auxiliary. Later, in high school and college, she had not had any close friends who were Jewish. Her new contact with her Jewish clients — who sometimes had her over for meals or showed her around the ancient Jewish quarter of the city — gave her a new perspective. Martha recalled years later how shocked she felt when she first saw, while walking on the streets of Prague, a man wearing the yellow Star of David on his coat.41 She saw it as the ultimate invasion of a person’s right to believe as he chose and began to rethink her earlier assumptions about Judaism. The Jewish way of life was fundamentally different, she felt, and under present circumstances, a person of Jewish heritage could not choose any alternative identity against a Nazi program that was racial more than religious. If Waitstill was immersed in the lives of the refugees, it was in a more indirect fashion. He was using his mobility as an American to travel outside the country, seeking jobs for their Czech clients. His travel cases bulged with curriculum vitae that he handed over to clearing agencies in Geneva and Paris. One of Waitstill’s first challenges was to protect their funds from confiscation by the Nazis. Most of the money the Sharps had brought originated with the American Committee for Relief in Czechoslovakia, and was called the “Butler Funds” after the committee’s head, Columbia University president Nicholas Murray Butler. Alice Masaryk had warned the Sharps that the Germans were likely to seize the money if it was deposited in a Czech bank. The Sharps would have to deposit the money abroad and find a way to convert the funds to Czech crowns. Waitstill devoted himself to protecting the money. He took the funds they had at their disposal in U.S. dollars and deposited the money in banks in Brussels, Paris, and Geneva. Within Czechoslovakia, Waitstill 14 | prague, 1939

spent many hours driving to an unobtrusive spot in the countryside outside Prague and negotiating with refugees desperate to convert their Czech crowns, which were not of any use outside the Czech Protectorate. He tailored his exchange rate to the wealth of the persons involved and offered a more generous rate to social workers, teachers, and others of more modest salary. He said later that his adrenaline was up and he drove a hard bargain with some people, winning an exchange rate of over one hundred crowns to the U.S. dollar, far higher than the official rate. Closing the transaction, he would give the refugee half of a business card on which he wrote the amount in dollars that the refugee had bought. The refugee could then draw his dollars from one of the banks abroad that had agreed to honor withdrawals to the bearer of half of Waitstill Sharp’s business card. In this way, Waitstill stretched out their original thirty thousand dollars to several million Czech crowns, and a number of refugees were able to get the currency they needed to emigrate. He was very proud of the deals and wrote to headquarters, “The money is all placed, against next winter’s serious needs, in the hands of the wisest social work experts of the Benes-Masaryk regime — of it by the express direction of Dr. Alice [Masaryk] herself. . . . I am terribly thrilled by the secrecy . . . of the undercover ‘catacomb’ gang of loyal Czechs working right under the snouts of the Gestapo.”42 He said later that he never told Martha about what he was doing because he was worried that they would be in great danger if the Germans found out he was “corrupting the currency” in this way. Waitstill noticed that many of the refugees were heading for Trieste. He did not know how they were going to reach the Adriatic city and may not have known the refugees’ ultimate destinations. Undoubtedly, some were planning to catch a boat in Trieste bound for Haifa in Palestine. Others would start on the long journey to Shanghai, where the international zone of the city was already crowded with thousands of central European refugees. That some of the refugees Waitstill bargained with did not receive a fair rate may have reflected the fact that for a refugee, any exchange was better than none, and that Waitstill was preoccupied with relief projects. He had made the rounds of the Salvation Army canteens and seen the prague, 1939 | 15

desperate people they were feeding. Alice Masaryk had also taken the Sharps to the tent encampments where the Red Cross was providing medical aid. Waitstill had met other former officials who had similar pressing cases for supporting health and food programs in Prague and in the countryside. He had in mind that the money would support such projects. They spent their first set of funds on the Salvation Army’s meal program for refugees from Austria and Germany, taking responsibility for feeding 350 people each day.43 In Prague, Martha was working in a different sphere of activity and spent much of her time at their office at the Refugee Institute and staying in touch with their “helping group” in London and Paris. She repeated her March 15 dash through the night as an escort for a political refugee in a larger mission on March 24, when she brought a group of thirty-five people — including men, women, and several orphaned children — to England. Martha’s route brought them through Germany to the Dutch border where German customs officials detained two of the journalists in her group. With her usual confidence, Martha waved a document with a United States seal and insisted that the men were under the protection of the U.S. government. She had already developed the practical attitude that Nazi police “only act on orders. If there is an unusual circumstance, they do not dare to use their own judgment.”44 Also at the border she found a group of eighteen refugees that had been stranded for some days while their travel documents to England were being reviewed. She left them with money since all of their own resources had been depleted.45 When she arrived in London Martha was able to arrange visas for them with the British committee so that they could complete their journey.46 Among the group Martha escorted were Frank and Anna Heller, the parents of one of her staff, Martha Heller. The Hellers began a new life in Brighton while their daughter continued to work for the Sharps in Prague and to wait for a British visa.47 Waitstill recalled that he knew as little about Martha’s work escorting refugees as she knew about his black market currency exchanges, and that they made a point of not finding out more. When she arrived in London, Martha spent some days setting up Unitarian bank accounts and meeting with relatives of Czech refugees 16 | prague, 1939

still stuck in the country. She wrote back to her U.S. colleagues that she wanted to spend their funds on direct assistance for refugees still in Prague and for emigration of children to Britain. She set up an account with the Welsh Unitarian minister Rosalind Lee to provide transportation and guarantees for children to come to Britain, although at present the Unitarians only had funding for about ten children. Rosalind Lee also represented the Lord Mayor’s Fund, and had worked alone through Christmas administering relief and case work. Waitstill Sharp described Lee as a distinguished Unitarian minister, who looked just as though “she’d stepped out of Mother Goose . . . a Welsh nationalist, down to silver buckles and her towering Welsh hat.”48 The Sharps became good friends with Lee, who proved to be a valuable British contact for the Unitarians throughout the war. In late March, the Sharps’ American secretary, Virginia Wastcoat, returned to Boston. In a detailed letter to Robert Dexter, she wrote that the only relief worth anything at this time was money for refugees to buy railroad tickets out of the country. “Let the Germans feed their own cannon-fodder. . . . The number of suicides are high,” she added. Her letter also made clear her belief that it was not hard for refugees to leave; the problem was that the United States and the other Western countries were not allowing refugees in. She had written out a number of letters inviting refugees to spend the summer with her in the United States, in the slim hope that such documents would be of any help at all. She vowed that when she returned she would “do anything to help obtain a flexible quota — particularly for children. It is enough to make one lose faith in democracy.”49 Waitstill was offended by Virginia Wastcoat’s position and desertion, but the episode was soon forgotten. The Sharps also collaborated with a pair of young British men working on child emigration — Trevor Chadwick and Nicholas Winton. Winton, a young stockbroker from London, happened to visit Prague in December 1938, which he had planned as a short break on his way to a skiing holiday. His visit coincided with that of Unitarian minister Rosalind Lee and British member of Parliament Eleanor Rathbone, and together they visited the refugee camps. Winton was so upset by what he saw that he never went to the mountains but stayed longer prague, 1939 | 17

and wrote to many of the governments of the Western world asking if they would take refugee children. Britain and Sweden were the only countries to say yes. Back in London, Winton spent his evenings and weekends during the next six months finding British homes for child refugees. Rosalind Lee had given him some money for postage and secretarial help, and Trevor Chadwick and the Unitarians sent him lists of refugee children whose parents would let them go.50 He arranged copies of photos of the children and let the British families choose a child. The Sharps had already met Winton’s partner, Trevor Chadwick, in March and had gone to the Prague airport to see the first group of twenty-two children off on March 14. On her visit to London in late March, Martha Sharp deposited ten thousand dollars at Lloyds Bank, some of it to be used for children’s emigration.51 A financial guarantee of fifty pounds was needed for each child, and additional money was needed for their travel expenses. Winton and Chadwick used stationery imprinted with the words “Children’s Section, British Refugee Relief Trust,” but in fact the two men were part of no organization until their work was nearly finished. By the summer of 1939, more than six hundred of the children on their list had arrived safely in London.52 In April the Gestapo began arresting and interrogating several of the foreigners working with refugees. One of those arrested was Beatrice Wellington, a Canadian woman who had worked all winter at the Czech Refugee Institute and was a close collaborator of the Sharps.53 She was interrogated for two days running, being forced to stand up and take questions for much of the day. When she was released, Wellington stayed on despite the difficult conditions and took up the responsibility to coordinate much of the refugee work. The Society of Friends had sent six of their members to Prague to work on relief and emigration. One of the British Quakers, Tessa Rowntree, worked a great deal with the Sharps, and like Wellington, had been detained and harassed by the Gestapo.54 After her ordeal, Tessa visited Martha and warned her that her interrogator had been very interested in what the Sharps were up to.55 Of course, Martha and Waitstill were well aware of the Gestapo’s interest because they often noticed their “protectors” shadowing them 18 | prague, 1939

on the street, in restaurants and in trains. The people searching their hotel room during the day were not professional enough to leave no trace, and the Sharps counted a number of occasions when small details gave away the presence of visitors.56 The Sharps had long since moved out of the Hotel Atlantic and now were staying at the Hotel Pariz. On the face of it, it was not an economic move because the hotel was one of the most elegant in town, but they were likely enjoying a discount, most likely due to a special rate offered them by the hotel owners, the family of Louis Brandeis. Despite the glamour of their surroundings, also shared by the British relief workers at the posh Hotel Alacron, the Sharps and their British friends had endured many meals surrounded by heel-clicking guests and quiet listeners who had positioned themselves at neighboring tables. The Sharps lost their office on April 13 when the Nazis threw their furniture out onto the ground, but they found new quarters in a bungalow. The greatest change for refugees was that the German invaders opposed the emigration of “political” refugees and encouraged — for a limited period of time — the exodus of the Jewish population. This was the opposite of the British government policies, which favored the “political” refugees. And the Jewish population in Czechoslovakia of three hundred thousand was increasingly impoverished as the new administrators started to put in place the brutal confiscation and expulsions they had accomplished in Germany and in Austria. The general attitude of Great Britain toward refugees after the Munich Pact was that their highest-priority cases were political refugees, especially Sudeten Germans who were social democrats or who had other affiliations that would show that they were anti-Nazis.57 Another priority group for the British were the “Old Reich” refugees, natives of Germany and Austria who were under added threat because the Germans viewed them as traitors for leaving their country of birth. Together, these groups numbered around forty thousand people, over half of whom were Jewish.58 Lowest on the list of British priorities were the “economic” and “racial” refugees. These included other Jews from the Sudetenland, Jewish refugees from other countries, and Jews native to Czechoslovakia.59 Though the British government understood the risk to the prague, 1939 | 19

Jews in Czechoslovakia, as they had already seen the brutality of the 1938 Anschluss in Austria and the violence of Kristallnacht throughout Germany in the autumn, they discouraged Jewish immigration, arguing that it would be difficult to resettle these refugees to further places such as Canada. The special categories they set up for Jewish immigration were very limited and amounted to preferences for female domestic servants, agricultural workers, and children seventeen years of age or younger.60 Despite these discriminatory policies, Great Britain offered places to about nine thousand Czechs and refugees in the country between the autumn of 1938 and the spring of 1939 and spent more than 2 million pounds on refugee relief and emigration expenses during this time.61 Although Britain had created this fund for refugees, they relied a great deal on private volunteers such as the Sharps to help screen refugees and administer relief within the country.62 Given the specific bias of British refugee policy, the most helpful service that a volunteer could provide a refugee was to argue the case that he or she was a bona fide political refugee, and failing that, to argue that they had outstanding qualifications to contribute to British society. If an individual belonged to a labor, youth, or women’s group, that was sometimes enough to qualify as a political.63 Writing dossiers based on an estimate of the individual’s actual endangerment would have been a naïve exercise. Under these circumstances, refugees were leaving the country in large numbers for any neighboring country that seemed safer or a transit point for eventual emigration elsewhere. During this period, thousands of Czech refugees fled to Poland. Waitstill recalled that when a refugee had given up on waiting for a visa, he or she would come to him and Waitstill would give them some money and ask them if they knew about Ostrava. Ostrava was a town near the Czech border with Poland in an area with extensive coalmines, which meant that it was possible to enter mine openings in one country and to exit in the other. Waitstill also recalled that helpers would offer refugees clothing to disguise themselves as railroad or postal workers and would organize truck transport on the Polish side to bring them to the port of Gdynia where some were able to board ships for England.64 20 | prague, 1939

In Poland, some refugees had a chance for a hearing by the British vice consul stationed in Katowice. Also, in Krakow an American named Hermann Field was representing the British government refugee program from a small office and making his own decisions as to whom to select among the refugees there.65 Some of these refugees did leave for Britain on chartered ships, but there were far more applicants than visas, and many of those who were admitted to Britain did so as “enemy aliens” and were interned on the Isle of Man or in other internment camps in Britain or in Australia.66 Others had a much worse fate, and under orders from Warsaw, local police rounded up some of the waiting refugees and delivered them to the Gestapo at the German border.67 One of the Sharps’ successful emigration cases had an unusual means of escape, which they did not divulge until after the war. Just before leaving the United States, the Sharps had met a young man named Karl Deutsch who, with tears in his eyes, asked them to do what they could for his father and mother who were in terrible danger in Prague. Deutsch’s mother, “Poldi” Scharf, was a senator in the Czechoslovak parliament and member of the National Socialist Party. Waitstill found out when he was in Prague that at the time of the German occupation, she had been rushed to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy. Waitstill tells the story of how she was wrapped as a corpse by friendly Czech nurses, placed in a modified coffin and removed from the hospital. Trading her bandages for a fur coat and a fake passport, she used this new disguise to make her way to the Polish border on a train accompanied by social democrats who vouched for her new identity. The transfer succeeded, and Poldi Scharf was able to recover in a hospital in Sweden and emigrate to the United States.68 Waitstill also remembers giving her husband what he needed for his boat ticket to Sweden, small bills, but important because they were in American currency. Their son, Karl Deutsch, became one of America’s most distinguished political scientists. The Sharps asked the Boston office to find someone who could work out of Poland with the refugees who came through. They found a Unitarian minister named Duncan Howlett from New Bedford, Massachusetts, who was already in Europe and asked him if he would leave for Poland as soon as possible. The intention was that Howlett would prague, 1939 | 21

represent the Unitarians and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and would survey current needs.69 Howlett was willing to go. He was recovering from a death in the family and set off for Poland on July 17. During the spring, Waitstill made several trips away from Prague to visit the banks where he had deposited the American dollars. He seemed to need these trips to remind himself that a more peaceful world still existed. From Geneva he wrote to his wife about “flowers in the parks and all the sweet influences of June working over time.” He wanted her to join him there for a few days but knew that she likely would not. From the distance of Switzerland he wrote her an admiring letter reflecting on her work and her potential, as he described it, to become one of the most influential women in America. Waitstill granted that she had earned a great deal of respect but that she should also expect to receive “some steady glances fixed your way whether you can lead and interpret as well as administer and manage.” He concluded that she should embrace her new role, “ . . . what is also growth and a sources of zest and joy in the same.” 70 It was also a gracious letter, recognizing that Martha was a natural leader and that one day her work would probably eclipse his own. back in prague, the czech unitarian church continued to hold services after the Nazi takeover, but in smaller towns they decided to meet in more informal gatherings.71 Attendance at Norbert Capek’s sermons swelled, although at least two Gestapo agents were present at every service.72 These agents were frustrated by sermons that seemed to contain subversive messages and even jibes at the occupiers, but which were hard to pin down. Norbert Capek was increasingly speaking in parables — calling, for instance, for people to plant trees in the desert, but using the odd phrase from the banned Czech national anthem and obliquely reminding the congregants of the deforestation wreaked by the German occupiers.73 Before he left Prague, Waitstill gave Unitaria several million Czech crowns, enough money to save the building from foreclosure and a larger sum than he spent on relief or emigration.74 Although Waitstill was able to save the Unitarians’ building, their leader did not survive 22 | prague, 1939

the war. One day in March 1941, Norbert Capek and his daughter Zora were arrested. The Capeks had been listening to foreign radio broadcasts, a crime under the Nazi regime. Several Nazi agents broke into his house while he was listening to the radio and arrested Capek and Zora after gathering up his papers and sermons.75 Although Norbert Capek was already seventy years old, he endured many months in prison in relatively good health while his family found lawyers to prepare his defense. In a trial presided over by ss judges, the panel cleared Capek of charges of subversion but ruled that he was guilty of the radio charge.76 Since he had already served about a year of time while waiting for his trial, the judge ruled that he needed to serve only one more month in prison. However, that short extension was calamitous for the Capek family. During that month, Reinhard Heydrich, who had been hand-picked by Hitler to administer Czechoslovakia, was killed by a group of Czechs who ambushed his car. In reprisal, Hitler telephoned immediate instructions to arrest “10,000 politically suspect Czechs . . . and shoot them in concentration camps.”77 Norbert Capek was included in that sweep and died in Dachau that autumn.78 The Sharps left their bungalow office on July 25, when the Gestapo ordered that all foreign refugee offices close.79 Those remaining were told to leave, and the Germans denied visas to British refugee officials in London hoping to travel to Prague to continue the work.80 The Sharps said goodbye to their office staff who had delayed their own emigration efforts to help other refugees. Their staff now had sent off their own visa applications to Britain but none had come through yet. Years later, Waitstill Sharp recalled that none of his staff were able to emigrate or to avoid deportation.81 Waitstill left Czechoslovakia on August 9, 1939, for an entirely different world — a liberal religious youth congress in Switzerland. He gave a talk at the meeting but later recalled that he was not able to leave his dark mood to say anything coherent. Duncan Howlett, the Unitarian minister from New Bedford, was in Poland at this time. He wrote that he thought that the British committee was processing refugees effectively in Krakow and Katowice, and he started to arrange for relief for the refugees waiting there. At the end of August, however, with German troops mobilizing at the prague, 1939 | 23

Polish border, Howlett jumped on the last train to cross the Silesian border back into Czechoslovakia.82 Most of the refugees in Poland did not find even temporary admission to Britain and scattered into the countryside when the German troops advanced into Poland a few weeks later. Martha Sharp continued on alone in Prague for about a week after Waitstill’s departure, but when she received a tip-off from a friendly contact in a government ministry that she was likely to be arrested the next day, she decided to call it quits.83 Before leaving, she stashed medical and food supplies underneath the floorboards at Palace Unitaria and said goodbye to Norbert Capek, whom she would never see again. She prepared her thoughts, which she hoped she would soon see in the American press. “Our greatest shame is that this small country, so nearly like our own in ideals and faith in the democratic way, should have had so little help from the United States,” she wrote for her Unitarian sponsors.84 Martha’s friends in Prague gave her a big sendoff at Wilson Station with flowers, gifts, and speeches, which made her nervous after months of working quietly and avoiding publicity.85 The American flag the Sharps had brought was rolled up in her luggage, and the sole American emigration office in Czechoslovakia was now closed. She never found out how many of the thirty-five hundred families on their list survived. She made it out, and on August 30 she and Waitstill boarded the rms Queen Mary bound for New York.

24 | prague, 1939

2

Marseille and Lisbon, 1940

the summer of 1939 had passed pleasantly for elisabeth and Robert Dexter on the south shore of Boston. Robert was the visiting minister at the Unitarian church at the seaside community of South Duxbury, Massachusetts. They had a comfortable house for their own use and a large garden, which they had set up for their favorite hobby — croquet — but Robert Dexter went into the office most days to check on any news from the Sharps in Czechoslovakia and to keep his fundraising letters circulating. In July, Hans Subak had arrived at the dock in New York City. After waiting in Riga, Latvia, for nine months, sheltered by a local Jewish family, his papers had come through and he had made his way to London and then boarded a boat to New York. Robert and Elisabeth Dexter went up to Boston to meet him when he arrived there, and Hans Subak then spent some of his first days in the United States in South Duxbury looking out at the ocean that he had recently crossed and playing croquet. When the Sharps returned from Czechoslovakia that August of 1939, they were greeted as returning heroes among the small circle of Unitarians and refugee support organizations. They were deeply concerned, however, over what they had seen in Europe. The misery in the shelters and on the streets of Prague was extreme, and there was no improvement in sight for refugees. On the contrary, at the end of the month, the German blitzkrieg pounded Poland, and most of Europe was now at war. Nazi policies had stripped the Jews of central Europe of their resources and rights of citizenship. As Germany expected, countries in the West did not open their gates to these newly impoverished people, and those now at war were sealing their borders. On the ship

journey returning home, Martha was laid low by depression, which for her was unusual — she hated wallowing. But when she arrived back in Boston, she put together a compelling speech about her experiences in Czechoslovakia and threw herself into a heavy schedule of public addresses, as did Waitstill. In October 1939 the American Unitarian Association decided to create the new refugee rescue organization that they had been talking about over the past year, and to call it the Unitarian Service Committee. The name resembled the American Friends Service Committee, the Quaker organization that the Dexters and other Unitarian officers had long admired. The association gave the founding of the service committee a high profile in its publications, and some of the most prominent New England Unitarians put themselves forward to join the board of directors. The board chair was William Emerson, tall and patrician in appearance and the emeritus dean of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s School of Architecture. Robert Dexter, who had gotten the idea off the ground during his 1938 visits to Prague and Vienna, was made executive director. The next senior hire was the Rev. Charles Joy. Enigmatic but productive, Joy had made a bid for the association presidency two years earlier. He had withdrawn his candidacy after coming to terms with the popularity of the other candidate — Frederick May Eliot — but Joy indisputably had a following of his own, and the Dexters would have to accept him on the committee. In January 1940 the Dexters went on another fact-finding trip, this time to many countries in western and southern Europe. The mere news of their travel plans was considered sufficiently important to the editors of the Boston Evening Globe to win placement on the front page. The article reported that the Dexters were going “on a mercy mission . . . to set up bureaus for refugees.” The photograph with the story showed the middle-aged couple sitting in their living room; the man, chin down, gazed deferentially at his wife, who appeared to be knitting. The article noted that they were the first couple from the Boston area known to be venturing into Europe since the war started, and that they were packing gas masks for their trip, which would be fraught with danger.1 The Dexters’ travels, in fact, were safely outside the war zones, and their actions fell short of actually setting up “bureaus for refugees,” 26 | marseille and lisbon, 1940

6. Front page, Boston Evening Globe, January 14, 1940. Courtesy of the author.

but, being among the few Americans abroad, they had a unique vantage point on the unfolding crisis. When they returned, they pushed the urgency of raising more money, pointing out that American contributions for refugees to date had been miniscule, except for those from American Jewish organizations.2 As before, the Dexters got the marseille and lisbon, 1940 | 27

attention of the Boston Globe, and that winter the newspaper ran a story about the plight of refugees in Prague and quoted Robert Dexter on the need to help them secure affidavits, passports, and money for travel. The article closed with instructions on how to send money to the Unitarian program.3 Within a few months these efforts and a letter campaign from Robert Dexter succeeded in bringing in about twenty-five thousand dollars. While this sum was not large, it was comparable to the entire Unitarian contribution to the American Unitarian Association’s annual budget.4 Unitarian budgets tended to be modest, austere even, like their leading families, who remembered their Puritan roots and their educated forbearers’ rejection of both ornament and ritual in their church. The Christian Register reminded their readers of this thriftiness in their lengthy account of the Dexters’ trip, noting proudly that they had traveled third class on the ss Manhattan.5 in may 1940 the american unitarian association officially founded the Unitarian Service Committee.6 The Dexters’ tour further convinced the committee that they should establish an office in Europe to help refugees in flight from Czechoslovakia, and so they started to look for a staff person who would spend six months in Europe in 1940. Robert Dexter and some of the committee members had in mind that Waitstill Sharp should go and bring along a “younger man.”7 However, organizational history somehow repeated itself at the annual meeting in May 1940 when Frederick Eliot, the president of the American Unitarian Association, announced that Martha and Waitstill Sharp would be working for several months for the Unitarian Service Committee out of Paris. The Sharps said later that they were shocked by the announcement, but it is probably the case that Martha was cool to the idea that Waitstill go with someone else and had dropped some hints that she might be talked into going back. Ultimately, Frederick Eliot and his arguments convinced them. With apparent anger he reminded them that because of their recent trip, they — more than anyone else — had the relevant European contacts and experience. This coming from Frederick May Eliot, the current association president, and a distant cousin of his renowned predecessor, Samuel 28 | marseille and lisbon, 1940

GER.

BE LG.

AT L A N T I C OCEAN 0

100

LUX.

Paris

FR A NCE

200 mi

SWIT Z .

Vichy Lyon

Bordeaux

VICHY (Unoccupied Zone)

Gurs Internment Camp

Lisbon

POR

Caldas da Rainha

TUG

AL

Toulouse ANDORRA

Madrid

ITA LY

Nimes Marseille

Rivesa Internmletens Banyul t Camp s

Barcelona

S PAIN Mediterranean Sea

1. Southwest Europe, 1940–42

Atkins Eliot, was probably not a little intimidating. The Eliot dynasty also included Samuel’s father, Harvard president Charles Eliot, and Frederick’s first cousin, a poet now living in England, T. S. Eliot.8 Any young New England minister would have been anxious about getting on the wrong side of the Eliots. As before, their friends offered to keep their home fires burning. Edna and Livingston Stebbins volunteered to help take care of their children, Hastings and Martha Content. Martha and Waitstill Sharp canceled the family vacation they had planned to spend at their house in New Hampshire and started packing for an extended stay in France.9 The trip was to begin on June 15, and like anyone else in their position, they were nervously following the news reports covering the progress of German tanks moving across Belgium. When Paris fell to the Nazi army on June 14, however, it was just a matter of relocating. By this time, the Unitarians and the Sharps had a marseille and lisbon, 1940 | 29

clear view of what they wanted to do. They would position themselves in Lisbon, Portugal, which was a neutral country that still maintained an important port, one of the few still open in continental Europe. Ships from Lisbon still embarked to the United States and other destinations. The city was the last hope for many refugees who had escaped from Nazi-occupied regions, and already thousands of refugees had found their way to Portugal. From Lisbon, the Sharps could try to reach France as well. Just before they left, the French consul in Boston came over with a large wreath tied with the tricolors. When he presented it to them, he broke down weeping and asked them to help France any way they could.10 On June 20 the Sharps arrived in Lisbon on “the Clipper,” a large seaplane run by Pan American Airlines but with government oversight of the passenger list. Flying on the Clipper was usually a difficult experience, at least for the first trip. Years later, Martha recalled being disturbed at take off by “the long horizontal push when it seemed we couldn’t possibly rise.”11 The fact that the Sharps were able to get tickets on the Clipper and at such short notice speaks to the clout of the Unitarian Service Committee. Committee vice chairman Percival Brundage, a senior partner of the accounting firm Price Waterhouse, had obtained them. Their possession of renewed passports meant that the Sharps’ mission had tacit permission from the U.S. State Department. In Lisbon, the Sharps studied the maze of paper requirements for refugees hoping to emigrate from France. With the German occupation of Paris in June, tens of thousands of refugees had poured out of Paris and northern France into the unoccupied zone. About 350,000 Jews were resident in the country at that time, as many as two-thirds of this number displaced from other countries.12 Most had to live surreptitiously under constant fear of arrest because they could be turned over to the Gestapo under the “surrender on demand” rules imposed by Germany. Vichy France was putting in place their own antiSemitic policies, although they had no direct orders from Germany to do so.13 In 1939 the French government had labeled thousands of Jewish and other central European refugees as “enemy aliens” and had placed them in concentration camps in the south of France.14 When 30 | marseille and lisbon, 1940

France surrendered, they released many of them, and others escaped in the ensuing confusion. Now, in the summer of 1940, many were rearrested, especially those without money, and placed again into camps. Although some refugees had both money and foreign visas, most had neither, having had most of their assets seized in their home countries, and having failed to secure one of the rare invitations to emigrate to the United States or elsewhere. With Germany’s impending military and ideological influence in the unoccupied region of France, most refugees recognized their situation as a death trap and turned to any possible means of escape. To transit Portugal and Spain, refugees needed a visa to a foreign destination. During the few weeks after the invasion of Paris, this was not a daunting requirement because many refugees were succeeding in buying visas for various countries that were not valid documents but still fulfilled the Portuguese requirement. Also, during this period an exceptional consular official named Aristides de Sousa Mendes was madly stamping the passports of refugees seeking his help. Mendes headed up the Portuguese consulate in the French city of Bordeaux, which at that time was overrun with refugees who had fled northern France. Mendes was a devout Catholic and a converso, because his ancestors had been forced to convert from Judaism. His decision to stamp thousands of Portuguese visas into passports and transit papers, however, was solely his own and contradicted the instructions of his government, which explicitly denied entry visas to Jews. Mendes was soon recalled to Lisbon and levied an enormous fine that stripped him of his life savings, but on his way to the capital, he stopped in two more towns and was able to get many more refugees through.15 In that short period, Mendes may have helped as many as ten thousand Jewish refugees and as many as twenty thousand other refugees to enter Portugal. Mendes’s actions and the general chaos that still reigned in the country in the weeks following the invasion were of tremendous importance. The number of refugees who did in fact escape to Portugal during that summer of 1940 was the largest number of Jewish refugees to escape the Nazis during the entire war period.16 In Lisbon, Martha and Waitstill Sharp opened an office at the Hotel Metropole on the city’s central square, now a boutique hotel. marseille and lisbon, 1940 | 31

Living conditions were very different from those in France, and food was varied and plentiful. Even simple pensions usually served a meal of many courses, which included fish and meat, soup, vegetables, dessert, and fruit. While the Sharps were getting their bearings, they decided that they would also organize a food relief project in France. Portugal enjoyed a fair degree of economic normalcy during this period, but France was already experiencing privation because Germany appropriated much of France’s agricultural output. A British blockade further limited food available to France, because some basic foodstuffs such as milk products were barred from export to the country. In their first weeks in Lisbon, the Sharps met with Madame Ame-Leroy, the wife of the French minister to Portugal, who pressed upon them the dire effects of the milk shortage on young children in France. They were very interested but first conferred with some of their trusted advisors, including Malcolm Davis of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, whom they had met the year before in Paris. Davis and others were enthusiastic about the idea, and the Sharps decided to go ahead with a project to purchase and distribute milk in the French unoccupied zone. It may also have been the case that Waitstill Sharp’s conscience was still aroused from his time in Prague, when he had provided some money to the Salvation Army for meals but later worried that he could have given more.17 While the Sharps were in Lisbon seeking an international driving license, an elegant woman came over to them and introduced herself as Orlena Scoville of Connecticut. She was curious to know what they were doing in Lisbon and why they wanted to drive to France given that “everybody else is going in the opposite direction.” Scoville was a long-time expat and the sociable inhabitant of a Renaissance palace located on a peninsula south of Lisbon. She was not a Unitarian, but she immediately decided that the Sharps were worthy of her help. That afternoon she introduced Martha and Waitstill to the director of the driving club that issued licenses, but that was just the beginning of her largesse. Over dinner that evening at her home, the Palacio da Bacalhoa, Orlena promised to negotiate with the Nestlé Company and with the Portuguese and Spanish railway lines, and to personally donate some money for the project.18 32 | marseille and lisbon, 1940

These plans for discounted milk and free train passage soon came about, and the Sharps went ahead to Marseille to decide where the milk shipment would go. Marseille was the largest city in the unoccupied zone, which stretched across most of southern France and had a puppet government in Vichy. After the takeover in June, thousands of refugees had headed to Marseille because it was a large port city, many harboring some hope that they would find boat passage to a foreign port or a visa to the United States from the Marseille consulate. The city was large and sprawling, had long hosted immigrants, and had an elaborate underworld that contributed to its anarchic reputation. It was fairly easy to hide in Marseille. In Marseille the Sharps met with Donald and Helen Lowrie, American friends they had met in Europe during the previous year. Donald Lowrie was from Ohio but had worked for the World ymca in eastern Europe since World War I, and his otherwise solid appearance was marked by a permanent furrow of worry on his brow. The Lowries had spent most of the previous decade in Czechoslovakia, and the Sharps had sought their help already during their 1939 visits to Paris and Prague.19 In the previous year, Donald Lowrie had aided the Czechoslovakian army, which since the surrender at Munich in 1938 had become a unit of the French armies. At that time, the ymca network looked after demobilized soldiers. Now neither the French nor Czechoslovakian militaries officially existed, but Lowrie was still trying to help Czech soldiers as representative of the ymca in France and for a network called Czech Aid. The Lowries had been living in Paris when the German troops arrived, and at the last minute they had joined the exodus of cars heading south from Paris. No doubt they told the Sharps about their harrowing journey. Donald Lowrie described the exodus years later: “History never saw anything like this solid caravan winding across the landscape,” he wrote in The Hunted Children. And all along the road catastrophe — an antique carriage broken down and abandoned: its occupants must have been picked up by someone else. Motorists standing with despair in their eyes because the gas tank was empty. This sort of driving meant gas consumption at three marseille and lisbon, 1940 | 33

times the normal rate. . . . Then there was the bombing. Before leaving Paris we had heard rumors that the enemy was machine-gunning the slowly moving lines from the air and occasionally there was the sound of a far-off bomb explosion, but on the second day we met reality. Near what was left of a railroad station there was spread a mass of refugees, alive and dead, wrecked cars and shattered bodies, with local folk helping to care for the injured.20 After about a week of driving, the Lowries arrived at Pau, at the foothills of the Pyrenees, where they had a rental apartment waiting. They had been at the tail end of the exodus, and already the town’s normal population was swollen to several times its prewar numbers. Thousands had arrived already from Paris, Holland, and Belgium — on foot or by bicycle, hitchhiking, or any way they could. Locals had organized lodgings in vacant schools, dance halls, and abandoned farms for the newcomers, and Donald and Helen Lowrie busied themselves by arranging to relocate a group of Russian children who were stranded in a summer camp in another part of France and could not return home. But the Lowries were becoming discouraged over their prospects and were beginning to doubt that they would find their feet in the present situation. Notice was given that all Americans needed to exchange their passports, so the Lowries went to Marseille to get their documents renewed, after which they planned to return to the United States. They had given up on staying because a U.S. consulate official told them that they might as well leave, as they would not be allowed to spend money in France anyway. The U.S. government was urging all nationals to go home, and the ss Washington was sitting in the port at Bordeaux waiting to take remaining Americans out of France. Lowrie cabled the ymca headquarters in New York to say that they should expect him soon. In Marseille, however, the Lowries had a sudden change of heart. Their plans to leave France vanished when they saw what Waitstill and Martha Sharp were doing. That these newcomers had already managed to organize a relief project in the midst of the chaos and fuel shortages may have caused Lowrie some chagrin. On the other hand, Martha and Waitstill’s purposefulness, and their ability to go about 34 | marseille and lisbon, 1940

their business without an air of competitiveness, won the Lowries over to the idea of joining up with them. Donald Lowrie advised the Sharps that although much of the unoccupied zone was in need, they should distribute their milk in the Pau region. Because the area had been near the front line of the advancing German troops and on one of the main refugee flight paths, it had been cleaned out of food supplies. It was also American Red Cross policy not to distribute food in a partly occupied province such as the department that included Pau.21 Martha soon devised a questionnaire that she and Helen Lowrie sent out to the midwives in the region asking them to name the children most in need. In this way, about eight hundred infants received milk, and by Lowrie’s estimate over half of these were children of refugees.22 Donald Lowrie wrote years later about the actual transfer of the milk and how the mayor of Pau was moved to tears when Martha presented him with the freight car filled with evaporated milk.23 As long-time Francophiles, this was a project that the Lowries enjoyed, and it was the start of a collaboration between these leaders in relief service and the Unitarian Service Committee that lasted until the end of the war. The milk aid project, however, was a far less popular idea back at Unitarian headquarters in Boston. Director Robert Dexter disapproved of it from the start, arguing that it ran counter to the Allies’ export restrictions to French territory and could jeopardize the committee’s emigration work. Dexter sent a number of sternly worded cables to the Sharps demanding that they cancel the project at once. The Sharps found the messages upsetting but went ahead with their plans. The Red Cross, ymca, and French politicians all supported the project, and the board chair William Emerson was sending them high praise. Given this support, Robert Dexter was outnumbered and soon gave in, but not before reminding the Sharps that their original mission was to help refugees to emigrate. The tiff over the milk delivery, however, remained a sore point with Waitstill. He wrote Martha that he had decided that he would put aside any thought of continuing to work for the committee. “I am done of it for good and all.” 24 Waitstill Sharp never forgave Robert Dexter, but he did continue to contribute to the Unitarian Service marseille and lisbon, 1940 | 35

Committee for some time, although never again as full-time staff. The milk project had been Martha’s idea, not Waitstill’s, but she shrugged off the conflict. By now she was deeply engaged in refugee work, and unlike Waitstill, she did not have a ministry job to return to. back in lisbon by early august, waitstill had a visit from an American journalist named Varian Fry who was representing the Emergency Rescue Committee based in New York City. The Emergency Rescue Committee had been formed only that spring, so it was even newer than the Unitarian Service Committee. Its original purpose was to help the most prominent of refugees, Europe’s most distinguished artists, writers, and intellectuals. It had come together as a project of social democratic émigrés and a number of the glamorous writers of the time including John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Dorothy Parker, and the politician Norman Thomas. The organization director was Frank Kingdon, president of the University of Newark (now part of Rutgers University). The director of the Museum of Modern Art had helped put together a list of artists to be helped, including Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Max Jacobs, and many others. After months of searching for a good candidate, the Emergency Rescue Committee agreed to send Varian Fry to southern France along with a list of two hundred refugees to save. Fry had studied classics at Harvard, and now, in his early thirties, he was an editor for the Foreign Policy Association.25 Unlike the Sharps, Varian Fry had been somewhat delayed in arriving in Europe. Fry and his organization had tried unsuccessfully to find a recruit for the job, and after some weeks, Fry agreed to go himself. First, he and his colleagues were not certain that he was suitable for the job, as Fry flamboyantly outlined in a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt in late June. “My French and German are both halting, I have published things which have aroused the ire of the German government, and I have had no experience whatever in detective work.”26 Second, he was somewhat held up in obtaining a passport. He had made the risky decision to again involve Eleanor Roosevelt in some of the details of his undertaking. “I wonder, therefore, if you would be good enough to speak to the President about my mission, and ask him to ask the State Department to grant me a passport immediately?” 36 | marseille and lisbon, 1940

7. Varian Fry in the French countryside, 1941. Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

suggested Fry.27 He went on to explain, “As I shall be going on an errand of mercy, I am sure that there will not be the slightest reason for hesitation on his part.” It says something about Fry’s bravado to have written such a letter, but also something about his connections, because FDR did in fact intervene for him at the passport office, and his papers soon arrived.28 Varian Fry and Waitstill Sharp were the same age and had in common a Harvard undergraduate degree, but their meeting was not the start of a personal friendship as much as a practical relationship. When Fry arrived in Lisbon, he made the rounds of most of the American refugee rescue organizations in town, including the American Friends Service Committee, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, known as “the Joint,” and the Unitarian Service Committee. Although Fry had less experience in humanitarian work than most of the small community there, including the Sharps, he quickly got everyone’s attention. For one thing, he made no bones about the fact that he was willing to try all sorts of methods including illegal ones. Fry spent much of his time in Lisbon with Joseph Schwartz of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Schwartz was a brilliant rabbi with a doctorate from Yale University who had started with the Joint in the previous year.29 A few weeks before, at the time of the marseille and lisbon, 1940 | 37

invasion, Joseph Schwartz and several of his colleagues at the Joint had jumped into a car in northern France and made typically painful progress through the French countryside until Schwartz decided to set up an office in Lisbon and a branch in Marseille. Now Schwartz was having breakfast with Fry every morning because he realized that Fry would try things that might get his organization and the other Jewish agencies expelled from southern Europe altogether. During his brief stay in Portugal, Varian Fry appraised the small community of Americans in Lisbon and decided that Waitstill and the Unitarians were his best bet for a formal collaboration. He was also impressed that Waitstill and Martha had been in Prague when the Germans marched in, and had done “a heroic job” there helping Czech and German anti-Nazis escape, as he put it in an early draft of Surrender on Demand.30 Also, Waitstill was taking his mission seriously and took the trouble to write up for Fry his own notes about the situation of various refugee intellectuals and his recommendations on how to help them.31 Waitstill had a legal method for importing currency that Fry had not known about. In Lisbon they had found out that their relief work entitled them to a claim for a special license to bring funds to France. Without this, they could be arrested on smuggling charges or lose much of their funds in the Vichy currency exchange. At Waitstill’s suggestion, Fry called on the French chargé d’affaires at Lisbon to obtain a license to take his money into the country.32 Waitstill Sharp soon agreed to Varian’s suggestion that he would be Fry’s “liaison man” in Lisbon. This meant that the Unitarians would look out for the Emergency Rescue Committee’s refugees when they arrived in Lisbon from France. In turn, Fry agreed to look out for the Sharps’ milk shipment, which seemed to have been stuck somewhere in Spain.33 Waitstill Sharp then wrote a letter for Varian Fry that introduced him to French officials in Perpignon and Montpellier as his friend, colleague, and fellow American, and asked the officials to assist Fry with any questions he might have regarding his service to “intellectual refugees.”34 Sharp also gave Fry some of the new business cards printed for the Unitarian Service Committee. As it turned out, the Unitarian milk shipment did turn up without Fry’s assistance, but Fry’s discussions with Sharp helped impress upon him the value of 38 | marseille and lisbon, 1940

carrying out a relief program alongside a rescue mission. This would help to maintain the benevolence of the French authorities. Waitstill had already given his program a French name, Le Comite Unitarien Pour Le Secours. Varian Fry soon gave his organization a similar one, Centre Americain de Secours. When Fry arrived in Marseilles, he soon met an important rescue worker, Frank Bohn. Bohn was representing the American Federation of Labor, which had successfully brought to the United States many labor leaders, democratic politicians, and thousands of Jewish professionals since the mid-1930s. Fry and Bohn agreed during their meetings in September that Fry would take over the artists and writers on Bohn’s list and Bohn would take on Fry’s “politicals.” Earlier in the summer, the president of Bohn’s organization, William Green, had coaxed from the U.S. State Department a new visitor visa category that would be available for “notable” refugees.35 The paper requirement was more realistic than the standard form because it did not ask for a police certificate of good character reference from the refugee’s original country.36 Varian Fry’s committee and the Unitarians made some use of this new visa category. while waitstill was still in lisbon, martha joined the lowries in Marseille. The Lowries had recently relocated from Pau and were now living in the Hotel Terminus at the Marseille railway station. The Lowries set up an office for the World ymca in Marseille and were able to receive funding from the Geneva office. As representative of the ymca, Donald Lowrie was seeking permission to visit the internment camps and to provide refugees with supplies. Although at the start of his career he had seen terrible conditions at the Eastern Front at the end of World War I, he was deeply shocked by the French concentration camps. Some of them included elderly and ill Jewish inmates who had been transferred by train from old-age homes in Germany. Others contained women and children separated from other family members. Some were labor camps where young men were beaten and half-starved. At that stage in the war, most interned refugees received a survivable but not generous food allowance. Lowrie’s first idea was to give the refugees something to do, to try to give them marseille and lisbon, 1940 | 39

a chance at retaining their sanity. He quickly went about collecting books, musical instruments, and shop tools. Before leaving the United States, Martha Sharp had agreed to represent another organization, the American Committee for the Care of European Children. This group wanted to bring French children to temporary safety in the United States just as some British children were being received in homes in the United States and Canada. Martha had already heard from French families worried that their children would be scarred from wartime conditions, and she agreed to the plan. She had agreed to find a number of French children who were suffering under wartime conditions or who were from families at particular risk of persecution by Vichy authorities. During her visits to French towns for the milk project, she looked out for such children. Her visits to French internment camps with Donald Lowrie gave her further opportunities. At one point, Martha visited the Recebedou camp with Donald Lowrie, which like the largest camp, Gurs, was a “lodging camp” for those who had little prospects of leaving France in the near future.37 While at Recebedou, Martha met two young Jewish boys from Vienna, Josef and Alexander Strasser, and their Polish-born father, Paul. The children’s mother was in the United States, and so, Martha reasoned, they had a chance at emigrating. She put aside some funds to get the family released to Marseille.38 This release came to pass and the family was able to move to better circumstances in the city. While Martha Sharp was organizing her children’s project, Waitstill was working out how they could get their adult emigration work started. The Sharps and Lowries had a special interest in the Czechs. They had all worked with Czech refugees in 1939 and felt a special responsibility toward this group. When faced with the many refugees stranded in Lisbon waiting for U.S. visas or ship passage, Waitstill Sharp decided that he would help the Czech refugees in Lisbon waiting to get to the United States. The waiting was taking place in an atmosphere of great anxiety, for the refugees feared an imminent invasion from Germany. Portugal turned out to be one of the safest countries in Europe, but early on in the war German troop movements at the Spanish border were regarded with terror. Waitstill spent many hours interviewing 40 | marseille and lisbon, 1940

Czech refugees and intervening with the U.S. consulates on their behalf. A challenge for the refugees was that although Portugal was fairly hospitable to those who arrived, their movements within the country were restricted, and many refugees were lodged in residence force in towns at some distance from Lisbon. Due to the inflexibility of U.S. consulates, refugees had to have their dossiers physically in Lisbon when their U.S. visa quota came up. Waitstill and his staff were able to help with this at the Lisbon office.39 When the small group of people based in Marseille and Lisbon set out to help refugees leave Europe, they and their organizations made their own choices of whom they would try to help. While they saw Eleanor Roosevelt as an ally, they did not receive specific guidance or help from the president and his wife, outside of a few exceptional cases. Among these exceptions was the rescue of Nobel science laureate Otto Meyerhof and his wife, the novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, and the family members of Thomas Mann, including his brother, Heinrich Mann, and his son, Golo, and the author Franz Werfel and his wife, Alma Mahler Werfel. The U.S. State Department issued special emergency visas for this select group, and several consulates in France and Spain were alerted to help as needed. In Lisbon, the Sharps made contact with a member of Franz Werfel’s family. The novelist’s sister, Marianne Reiser, along with her husband and child, had been detained in residence force outside Lisbon during the summer of 1940. The Sharps were able to move them to a Lisbon hotel, but they were refused a U.S. visa by Cordell Hull, the U.S. secretary of state. It was only after Waitstill begged reconsideration that the Reisers received their visas.40 Franz Werfel was still in France, and Marianne was putting some effort into finding him. “My brother Franzi can write great books, but he can’t get on a train without someone pushing from behind,” she told Martha. Marianne Reiser was also upset by what she took as Alma’s stupidity for insisting on traveling with her husband using the conspicuous name of Mrs. Gustav Mahler. Some weeks later, Marianne found out that Franz Werfel and Alma were staying in Lourdes, and Martha visited them there while traveling on her milk aid project. Alma and Franz greeted her warmly, and Martha noticed that Franz marseille and lisbon, 1940 | 41

Werfel had several telegrams sticking out of his pockets. Martha knew from Werfel’s sister that his Hollywood contacts were working on the production of his book, The Forty Days of Musa Dogh, and had cabled him to come to California. Martha asked him why he never answered the cables, and Werfel admitted that he had not been able to decide what to do. They had been on the run from their villa in Sanary on the French Mediterranean for about a year, first living in Paris and then staying in different French towns without succeeding in completing their papers for emigration.41 Werfel was at the point of emotional exhaustion. Martha looked him over — his hair was wild and he was very heavy — and decided that he really was confused and did need that push from behind. Alma had greeted them with a large bottle of crème de menthe, but now they finally began to talk and Martha told them that they had to get to Marseille and pick up their U.S. visas at the consulate.42 After listening for a while, Franz Werfel turned to Martha and asked her if she had been to the grotto in town, the place where Saint Bernadette had experienced her visions. Werfel took her to the shrine and started to tell the story with great feeling. Martha had tried some of the foul-tasting water from the Lourdes shrine and was not a believer herself, but she told Werfel that he should write up the story. He answered that he was too upset about his situation but that when they got him to America he would send Martha the first copy in print. A few years later, when The Song of Bernadette was staged in Boston, Werfel took her to see it. While in Europe, the Sharps were in contact with the American Friends of Czechoslovakia, which was working back in the United States to recruit Americans to sign affidavits. This organization sent out letters describing individual refugees and asked the recipients to choose one of the refugees on the list. The American Friends of Czechoslovakia, whose Boston committee chair was the Unitarian minister Samuel Atkins Eliot, assured the recipients that their representatives in France — the Sharps and Donald Lowrie — had selected many of the persons on the list. A sample letter included four persons to choose from — an editor, the wife of a Czech soldier, a farmer, and a cook. Three of the families had Jewish surnames, but they were all listed as Protestant or 42 | marseille and lisbon, 1940

Roman Catholic. The letter went on to say that if the recipients’ first choice was not available, they could select from a longer list of names, the majority of whom are Roman Catholics and Jewish because these faiths are especially persecuted by the Nazis.43 Most Czechs were now apatrides, or stateless refugees, who lacked citizenship and documents needed to emigrate. With his Czech contacts, Donald Lowrie was able to tip off Fry and the Sharps on how stateless refugees could get a passport through a Czech consular official in Marseille named Vladimir Vochoc. Vochoc provided Czech passports to refugees who wanted them, as well as to Jewish and other stateless refugees originally from Czechoslovakia. These documents were effective because Spanish and Portuguese officials tended to accept them even though the documents were brand-new and Czechoslovakia no longer existed. Vochoc was somewhat uncomfortable with distributing false passports, but like Aristides Mendes from Portugal, he recognized the refugees’ dire position, and as a Czech he decided that he was contributing to the eventual liberation of his country by aiding antifascists. Varian Fry made heavy use of the passports, and Donald Lowrie was the go-between for procuring them. Fry would have breakfast with Lowrie twice a week, bringing photographs and information for each refugee and money to cover Vochoc’s printing costs. Lowrie would hand over the passports completed since the previous meeting.44 The Sharps and the Lowries all felt a special responsibility toward the Czech refugees. Donald Lowrie, who had worked in Czechoslovakia for many years with the ymca and in Marseille, now resumed heading up an organization to help Czechs, both demobilized soldiers and refugees. His main mission during the summer of 1940 was to get the soldiers out of France — where they could be arrested and shot as enemy fighters — and into Britain. Lowrie recruited the Sharps to help with this task, and Waitstill met with British naval and military officials in Madrid, Barcelona, and Lisbon to plan escape routes.45 Lowrie arranged for small groups of Czech soldiers to pass over the trails of the Pyrenees each week, lubricating the palms of the Spanish police along the way. But these trips could help only a token number of the six hundred or so Czech soldiers still in unoccupied France, marseille and lisbon, 1940 | 43

and so Lowrie turned to a sea route. Many of Marseille’s fishermen were grounded because gasoline for the motorboats was so expensive. Lowrie had resources from Vochoc’s Czech bureau and was able to lease a trawler and several large fishing boats.46 According to Czech soldier Joseph Fisera, Waitstill Sharp undertook some of the most sensitive missions in the project to help Czech soldiers escape from southern France during 1940.47 Waitstill Sharp called the efforts “Project Number One” and used a code that spelled out “Agde,” the name of the internment camp where many of the Czech soldiers were staying.48 Martha helped with this project, too, especially the escape of the wives and children of the Czech soldiers. In the coastal village of Sette, if anyone noticed a French fisherwoman with an American accent, that could have been Martha helping with the logistics of boarding Lowrie’s boats.49 These boat trips slowed down at the end of August 1940 after a statement from Vichy that all boats leaving Marseille would be inspected by Germans and Italians, as well as by the French.50 Lowrie would have to think up another route, and this time he decided to try to work through official channels. He had by now developed some rapport with French officials, and when he proposed to set up a farm for Czech soldiers at a chateau near Marseille, where more than one hundred men could reside, Vichy answered in the affirmative.51 The chateau colony grew vegetables and raised pigs for export to Czechs in various camps and for French civilians, and ran other enterprises as well, such as a shoe-repair business. The Unitarians in Boston and Lisbon helped to transfer supplies to Lowrie for these projects.52 at the time the sharps arrived in portugal, the greatest obstacle for many refugees was that they could not leave France legally because France was granting few exit visas. Lacking exit papers, some of the refugees who had visas to Portugal were waiting anxiously in France for fear that they would be arrested at the French-Spanish border. France’s policy on exit visas may have been a deliberate anti-Semitic policy carried out by standing French authorities or the product of a sluggish bureaucracy that had no control over its own ministrations.53 In any case, refugees sending an official application to Vichy for a 44 | marseille and lisbon, 1940

French exit visa could not expect to ever get a positive response. The way around the exit visa problem was to try to cross the border on foot, bypassing the French border station in Cerbere or other French border towns. Once a refugee crossed the French border and arrived on the Spanish side, they could usually get their papers stamped with the necessary entrada at the Spanish customhouse. Weary of years of their own war, the Spanish government and citizens in the summer of 1940 tended to take a sympathetic, or at least relaxed, view toward the desperate refugees crossing their country from France. They were happy to ignore the absence of a French exit visa as long as this posture did not cost them anything. For those men lucky enough to be posted on the French-Spanish border, the refugees’ bribes were a source of unexpected riches. The guide for the actual walk over the border was an American working for Varian Fry — Leon Ball — known as “Dick.” He and his friend, another American named Charlie Fawcett, had worked in the American Ambulance Corps in France and, after the 1940 armistice, had made their way to Marseille after a number of exploits. Dressed as a German soldier, Fawcett had marched into a hospital in Paris where British soldiers were under French guard and shouted out orders in German that they must leave at once. The frightened French nurses ushered the British patients out to a waiting truck. As Fawcett spirited them away, he turned and announced that they should consider themselves liberated. Charlie’s friend Dick Ball, originally from Montana, was similarly daring and had the advantages of fluent French, the strength of a weightlifter, and a familiarity with the byways and back roads of southern France. He was believed to own a villa and a lard factory, which may have been a pig farm, but his detailed knowledge of the countryside came from years of traveling the region selling his lard. Varian Fry described him as “a rough diamond, a knight in overalls,” eager to help anyone he could.54 Starting in late summer, Dick Ball led small groups of refugees over the Pyrenees from the French town of Cerbere to Port Bou on the Spanish side. He made this trip at the rate of several excursions marseille and lisbon, 1940 | 45

a week. His first trip was with Otto and Hedwig Meyerhof, and later he led the party that included Franz Werfel and Alma Mahler Werfel. On one of his last trips, he met Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger and showed them the route. Unlike Charlie Fawcett, Dick Ball never went on to work as a Hollywood actor. After less than two months working as a guide for the refugees, Ball disappeared one day. Rumors circulated that he might have joined the French resistance but nothing was ever substantiated. All the Americans working with Varian Fry and the Unitarians in those days would reunite at various times in the future, but Dick Ball was never among them. It is possible that he was killed, perhaps by smugglers who also used the trails linking Cerbere and Port Bou and may have resented the extra traffic he was bringing along their route. Or he may have taken his own life after his attempt to lease a boat to take British soldiers out of Marseille fell through. Dick Ball’s death also could have been at the hands of border police who feared that he was compromising their work, or by Gestapo agents who knew about his activities helping the British Expeditionary Forces and refugees. Another fact of his disappearance was its anonymity. He was an American citizen and had American contacts, but no serious diplomatic effort was expended on finding him. Martha Sharp was still in Europe the week that Ball vanished, but neither she nor Varian Fry or Charlie Fawcett publicized the incident. Calling attention to the mountain paths that he used or his activities was something that they would have wanted to avoid. And if they assumed that the American consulate would not be very interested in the disappearance of a lard salesman from Montana, they were probably right. With Dick Ball gone, the Unitarians and Varian Fry’s team lost their brave and competent guide, but now the fear they all had tried to put aside — that they too could just disappear one day — was all the more real. One of the Unitarians’ first and most famous clients was the scientist Otto Meyerhof, who was now staying with his wife at the border town of Banyuls near Cerbere. The Meyerhofs were originally German citizens who had fled to France, but they had become separated from their son, Walter, in mid-May 1940 when he was drafted into a regional regiment of the French army.55 As a refugee, Walter had the 46 | marseille and lisbon, 1940

status of Prestataires Volontaires, which he humorously translated as “Voluntary Toilet Cleaners.” This title referred not so much to the conscripts’ duties as to their lowest rank in the French army. The parents were not interned because Dr. Meyerhof ’s biochemical research was deemed vital to France’s national interests. They escaped from Paris by taxi and headed to Bordeaux where they hoped to board a ship for England. Once there, they discovered that despite Otto’s international reputation, the British consul decided to deny them a visa.56 They were devastated by this rebuff, but like most other refugees they headed south and arrived in Marseille in late July. They chose to stay in the Hotel Splendide and turned their attention to trying to reunite with Walter, who was now interned in a camp. They were able to buy a forged demobilization order for him, and when it arrived, Walter sneaked away and joined them in Marseille. Through a fellow refugee scientist, Otto Meyerhof learned about Varian Fry, who happened to also be staying at the Hotel Splendide. When he went to see him, Fry said that although the scientist was not on his list, he was happy to help. Fry gave the Meyerhofs the name of a French customs officer who would accept a bribe to take them over the border. The Meyerhofs tried this, but when they found the customs official, the man refused when he learned how famous Otto Meyerhof was. Fry called up Waitstill Sharp who went to see them in Banyuls. By now Meyerhof was depressed and in a passive frame of mind, but he and Waitstill took a long walk on the beach and Waitstill argued that although Meyerhof was an expert in science, he, as a Unitarian minister, was an expert in ethics and could assure him that the ethical thing to do would be to make an illegal border crossing.57 At that point, Otto agreed to give the border another try. This time they would have Varian Fry’s trustworthy guide, Dick Ball. The group made it across the border but ran into trouble at the Spanish customs post when the officials did not want to give them an entrance stamp. Coincidentally a senior staff member of the U.S. consulate in Marseille — consul John Hurley — was at the border at that moment. Hurley had a reputation for complete indifference toward refugees, but he knew that his government was interested in the Meyerhofs and he pulled the necessary strings with Spanish customs to get them through.58 They were soon able to marseille and lisbon, 1940 | 47

make their way to Lisbon and then to Philadelphia, where Dr. Meyerhof had an academic appointment at the University of Pennsylvania. Another of the Unitarians’ famous cases was Lion Feuchtwanger. Feuchtwanger was a German Jew who had written historical novels with Jewish protagonists including the books Jüd Süss (Power in the English edition) and The Oppermanns, which were bestsellers in the United States and in Europe. In the early 1930s Lion was offered citizenship by Czechoslovakia, but he made his home in the south of France in the small fishing village of Sanary, which was more peaceful and affordable than the more fashionable stretches of the Riviera.59 His friend Aldous Huxley was already living in the village. In the early 1930s Thomas Mann also moved into a house in Sanary, and Berthold Brecht stayed there as well. In 1938 Franz Werfel and Alma Mahler bought a villa, and by then Sanary was known as the capital of German literature in exile. In 1939 Feuchtwanger was arrested as an alien and placed in a French concentration camp, revealing as prophetic his 1933 novel The Oppermanns, where the hero, a cultured, assimilated Jew, is physically destroyed in a prison camp.60 Feuchtwanger escaped the camp and returned to his beloved garden in Sanary but was caught again in 1940 and placed in Les Milles camp and then transferred to the squalid but less restrictive St. Nicholas camp. Feuchtwanger fastidiously recorded his daily experiences with depression, anxiety, and dysentery at St. Nicholas for his book The Devil in France. One day a bystander took a photo of Feuchtwanger through the barbed wire and sent it to the writer’s book agent, Benjamin Huebsch, at Viking Press. The photo passed from the agent to Eleanor Roosevelt and then to the president, who took an interest.61 Later in the summer, Feuchtwanger was visited by a young man from the U.S. consulate named Myles Standish. Like Eleanor Roosevelt, Standish was a fan of Feuchtwanger’s fiction and was very pleased to be helping with his escape. He had Feuchtwanger put on the dress and scarf he handed him and drove him away to the home of his boss, Hiram Bingham, the U.S. vice consul in Marseille. Hiram Bingham IV was in his early thirties and had devoted himself to his Foreign Service career and raising a large family, which already 48 | marseille and lisbon, 1940

8. Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger, Sanary, France, 1934. Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

numbered five children. He had been named after his father, the senator Hiram Bingham III. who had discovered the ruins of Macchu Picchu in Peru. Refugees soon discovered that Bingham was the only sympathetic U.S. consular official in Marseille or at least the only one willing to make his own favorable decisions on their behalf. With Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger now lodged in his villa, Bingham needed someone to bring the Feuchtwangers to Lisbon. Lion had all the handicaps of being famous, stateless, and a top priority of the Gestapo, and therefore he needed to travel incognito and soon. Varian Fry could not take him because he had already agreed to lead the Werfels and the Mann family over the border and to Lisbon at that time. Fry asked Waitstill if he would do it, and he quickly agreed.62 Waitstill Sharp was the obvious choice; he was an American and conveyed a sense of security, which could now be enhanced because his government was extending a level of diplomatic protection to Lion and Marta that was rarely bestowed on European refugees. The next day Waitstill Sharp appeared, “shining with confidence,” in Bingham’s garden where Lion and Marta were sitting, and introduced himself with a simple statement in German that translated as “I am here only to help you.”63 Marta was under the impression that Waitstill was sent by Stephen Fritchman, a Unitarian minister in Los Angeles with a connection to Eleanor Roosevelt. Waitstill had undoubtedly been invited there that day by Varian Fry and Hiram Bingham. Regardless, they both accepted Waitstill’s direction and spent the evening in the hotel next to the train station. Martha Sharp had chosen this hotel because she knew that it had a tunnel designed for transporting luggage to the station platform, and this narrow but useful passageway could be used to make an unnoticed entrance onto the platform.64 After meeting the Feuchtwangers, Martha Sharp wished them well. She had her own business to attend to, and Waitstill would be traveling back to Lisbon without her. Waitstill and the Feuchtwangers settled into the train that wended its way along the coastline toward Spain, a trip of many hours. On one side was the Mediterranean and small fishing villages, on the other the fields of Languedoc stretched on to the horizon. Waitstill had been in France long enough to know what lay behind some of the place-names 50 | marseille and lisbon, 1940

they passed, such as Argeles and Agde. His wife had already visited, with Donald Lowrie, the Agde concentration camp for refugees from the Spanish Civil War. When they arrived in the border town of Cerbere, Waitstill doled out bribes to some Spanish officials but told the Feuchtwangers not to count on it, because they might change shifts at any time.65 Dick Ball was waiting for them, but they had decided that the Feuchtwangers should try to cross the border on their own. Ball led them to the outskirts of town, showed them on his local maps the indirect route they should take, and wished them luck. The couple had no problems with the hike — Marta was very athletic and Lion was not in bad shape despite his recent difficulties. Marta had insisted during their years at Sanary that Lion join her on some of her excursions, and she was taking charge of this trip as well. On most of the train trip from Marseille she had stood up in the third-class carriage while Waitstill and Lion sat in the first-class compartment, but she showed no signs of tiring. Now they were approaching the Spanish customhouse, and Marta took out the packs of Camels that Waitstill had given her. She showered the cigarettes on the seated officials, saying that she did not want to take all of them on her trip and that maybe they could find some use for them. The grateful officials quickly stamped her papers. When the Feuchtwangers rejoined Waitstill at the Thomas Cook office in the Spanish border town of Port Bou, a new twist came up. Their travel funds were being held at the U.S. consulate, but it being Sunday, the consulate was closed. While for the ordinary refugee, most consuls were reluctant to even make themselves available during weekday business hours, in this case, the consul cheerfully roused himself when Waitstill called him at his private residence. The group made their way to the Port Bou train station, but as before, separate arrangements were made for Lion, who was traveling under the improbable but literal translation of his last name — “Wetcheek” — while Marta was still “Feuchtwanger.” For this last leg, Waitstill gave Lion his briefcase from the American Red Cross, with its large symbol emblazoned over the front, and waited with him while Marta stood some distance away. Even this part of their trip was not without mishap. Marta, standing on the platform waiting for their train, was startled suddenly by an marseille and lisbon, 1940 | 51

American woman who seemed to want to make small talk but who turned out to be a journalist. “Is it true that Lion Feuchtwanger is taking this train?” the woman asked. Marta professed not to recognize the name, but this only met with a loud exclamation of how “uncultivated” she must be not to know about the famous author.66 Hearing this exchange, Waitstill came over and was able to quiet the journalist down by reminding her that she could be putting someone’s life at risk. The group arrived in Lisbon without further incident and Waitstill introduced Lion and Martha to his colleague Charles Joy, who had just arrived from Boston. Joy told them that they must leave immediately for the United States. The city had many Nazi spies, he said, and people were disappearing. This may have been true, but the Feuchtwangers were the most high-maintenance of clients and it was a relief to see them off. Boat tickets were not available at short notice, but Waitstill found a ticket for Lion — it was probably Martha’s. Even if she had not given up her ticket, Martha Sharp could not have boarded the ship. She was still working furiously to bring her group of children back to the United States and would not leave with so many of the arrangements up in the air. Waitstill and Lion set sail for New York on September 28, 1940. Again Marta Feuchtwanger had to make separate arrangements and resigned herself for a wait in Lisbon of several months. Lion Feuchtwanger’s arrival in New York City was treated as important news, but in his interactions with the press, the famous author divulged many of the details of his escape. Soon after, Spain tightened the border by adding a review for transit visas, a hurdle that was blamed on Feuchtwanger but which turned out to be temporary and probably had nothing to do with his indiscretion in describing his escape.67 A year later, Lion Feuchtwanger published his experiences in a new book, this time making an obvious show of omitting the identities of those still working in Europe, but he gratefully acknowledged that without Waitstill Hastings Sharp and four other men, he could not have survived the dangers that he had had to “face in the vile hell into which our lovely France had been transferred.”68 During that autumn, Martha wrote to Waitstill regularly from southern France, but with the delayed mail, she was all but cut off from him during those months. Her project to bring children to the United States 52 | marseille and lisbon, 1940

seemed to be floundering under the paper requirements of Vichy and the countries she needed to travel through, but she was still hopeful that it would come to pass. The Sharps’ trip to Portugal and France had not ended as planned, but during their time in Europe they had completed projects and made alliances that would set the direction for the Unitarian Service Committee’s work for the remainder of the war. Waitstill’s collaboration with Varian Fry and Martha’s work with the Lowries were shaping a new triangle of rescue and relief that had the small group of Unitarians at its center.

marseille and lisbon, 1940 | 53

3

Lisbon and Marseille, 1940

charles joy arrived in lisbon in mid-september. the voyage was his first trans-Atlantic flight experience, but he went directly to Lisbon’s old square, where the Sharps had set up their offices in the Hotel Metropole. His first adjustment was to the noise of “the Rossio,” where the circling traffic and constant honking reminded him of New York’s Times Square more than Boston’s Beacon Street where the Unitarians had their headquarters. It was September 17, 1940, and Joy was not able to see Waitstill and Martha because they were in Marseille preparing to bring the novelist Lion Feuchtwanger and his wife to Portugal. However, he was not alone in the office, as several of Varian Fry’s staff who happened to be in Lisbon were at his service. These men and women were the first of many of Fry’s staff who were refugees themselves and found the Unitarian office to be a good place to hang their hats while they waited for their boat tickets to America.1 The next day, Varian Fry himself appeared in the Hotel Metropole. He had left Marseille the week before with Franz Werfel and his wife, Alma Mahler Werfel, and her fourteen suitcases containing her former husband’s original musical scores. Also, the novelist Heinrich Mann was in the party along with his wife, Nelly, and Thomas Mann’s son, Golo. Waitstill and Martha had helped bring this group together — the most celebrated gathering of Fry’s protégés — after Erika Mann had told them where to find her brother and her uncle. Golo and Heinrich had been together, lying low in southern France before the Sharps got in touch with them. The trip had not been without its problems. Both novelists were in poor physical condition, and Alma’s choice of a hiking outfit included a bright white dress and city shoes. Golo had the greatest fright when one of the officials at Spanish customs had recognized

the name Mann, but the man did nothing more than express his awe at meeting the son of Thomas Mann. The Manns and Werfels were now safely in Portugal after Waitstill had met them in Lisbon a few days earlier, ahead of Varian Fry, who had visits to make in Madrid. This trip to Lisbon was Fry’s first chance to see at close hand the Unitarians’ setup, and he was happy to see that the Unitarians really were looking out for the refugees that he sent. The refugees were able to send cables to the United States through the Unitarians, and the committee often took their part with the U.S. consulate and British embassy in Lisbon, and if necessary, the Portuguese International Police. Because communication from the United States to Portugal was easier and safer than cabling France, many of the travel arrangements could be handled directly between Fry’s organization in New York and the Unitarian office in Lisbon without going through Marseille at all. The Lisbon office was also in the best position to make bookings on ship sailings and on Pan American Airways. Ninon Tallon, their French office manager, was a multilingual film actress the Sharps had the good fortune to have found and hired that summer. Tallon could use her Portuguese, German, and English, in addition to her native French, to talk to all these agencies and with many of the refugees. Tallon was the niece of a former French premier, and although she had had a promising career as a film actress, she saw no future for herself in Petain’s France.2 Now Tallon was awaiting a visa to the United States and spending her time interviewing refugees and helping them with logistics. Aside from the literary celebrities that the Sharps and Varian Fry had escorted across the border, several dozen of their clients had arrived in Lisbon already. During the next week, Joy counted the refugees who had come through the Unitarian office during the previous month, and it numbered seventy-two people.3 Since the Sharps and Fry had arrived that summer, the mood in Lisbon had changed considerably. During the summer, refugees had been able to move about freely in the city, but many were now being sent to residence force, towns in the outskirts of Lisbon. Lisbon had accumulated more than eight thousand refugees since the French armistice, and these towns were Portugal’s response to the large number of foreigners in the city. The refugees could still complete their travel lisbon and marseille, 1940 | 55

arrangements from these towns, but they needed to rely to a greater extent on assistance from organizations such as the Unitarians and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. After the large influx of refugees during the summer, Portuguese authorities had put in place new requirements to limit their entry. The most difficult of these was the rule that refugees needed to show boat or plane tickets to a foreign destination before they could receive a visa to enter Portugal.4 Already in his first week on the job, Charles Joy had seen many refugees coming to the office in great distress. During that third week in September, Germany’s Wehrmacht troops were believed to be amassing in southeastern France in preparation for occupying Spain, and perhaps Portugal. The movements turned out to be related to an aborted plan to try to take Gibraltar from the British, but real information was hard to come by amidst the rumors.5 Many of those holding U.S. visas were desperate to leave as soon as possible, but usually could not because of the long waiting list to board a ship to New York. Charles Joy was obviously very moved by the refugees and wrote back to Boston, “Here in Lisbon, to which a little of the misery is now flowing, the whole attitude of America seems so selfish and cruel. It would be so easy to open our homes to every one of the endangered ones, with no hardship to anyone anywhere. But we will not.”6 Charles Joy and Varian Fry’s first meeting was perfunctory. Charles Joy was a good deal older than Fry. In his midfifties, Joy was nearly bald but had piercing eyes and a lean figure. He had four children, and unlike the other Unitarian senior male staff working in Europe, his wife did not join him on his overseas trips.7 Joy found Fry to be acceptable, but then he was not one to be judgmental about personalities. He had already seen and heard enough about Fry’s work in France with the Emergency Rescue Committee to know that they were doing an extraordinary job. He may also have seen in Fry something of a kindred spirit; Joy had been literary editor of the Unitarian journal, the Christian Register, and had aspired to be a writer in his younger days. In the previous year, he had published his first book, a Christian Bible reader, Harper’s Topical Concordance, designed to help ministers organize their sermons. Varian Fry’s credentials as a liberal pundit were related to various writing jobs 56 | lisbon and marseille, 1940

covering European politics from his base in New York City. Fry gave Joy grudging approval: “However much of a dafty Charles is, he has done social work, and he can get on with mayors and W.P.A. directors and people of that sort,” he later wrote to his wife. “He has also been to Harvard, so he can also get on with the Embassy snobs.”8 In fact, Fry had studied at Harvard as well, but he had already learned that his Ivy League education seemed to help little with his difficult relationship with the U.S. consulates in France. when varian fry returned from lisbon on september 26, 1940, he was relieved to learn that Waitstill Sharp’s trip with the Feuchtwangers had been successful and that Lion and Marta were safely in Lisbon and enjoying the lavish hospitality of the Werfels. After only about one month in France, Fry could be confident that he had an organization going that could get people out, and that he had found people like Charles Joy who would help him to continue with his plans. But when he arrived back in Marseille, Fry was slammed by the news that his own government seemed to be pulling out their support. Hugh Fullerton at the U.S. consulate in Marseille, who had until that time shown some tepid sympathy for Fry’s mission, read him a cable personally signed by the U.S. secretary of state in Washington. this government can not repeat not countenance the activities of dr. bohn and mr. fry and other persons, however well meaning their activities may be, in carrying on activities evading the laws of the countries with which the united states maintains friendly relations. cordell hull, u.s. secretary of state 9 The cable was vaguely worded. It did not say what laws were being evaded, whether illegal border crossings, document forgeries, or black market money exchanges. It could have been intended to soothe Vichy officials in a general way. Maybe someone in the Vichy government had lodged a complaint against Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee. But John Hurley, senior consular official in Marseille and unfriendly to the idea of helping refugees, did meet with Fry and told him it would be a good idea if he returned home. lisbon and marseille, 1940 | 57

When Fry looked at the rest of his mail, he was not reassured. The New York office was indeed calling him back. He became just as outraged with his organization’s disloyalty as he had with his government’s. He wrote another detailed justification of his program to his director at the Emergency Rescue Committee and added that if they still wanted to replace him he would need to stay in Marseille until his successor arrived. Several of Fry’s staff and colleagues also wrote to the New York office pleading that hundreds of lives would be put at risk if Fry was forced to return home. This response seemed to give Fry at least a temporary reprieve. He probably figured that his government was warning him but not really expelling him. Fry’s passport was good for another year, and Cordell Hull’s telegram did not provide specific instructions to change Fry’s status. However, Frank Bohn seemed to be another matter, because another part of Cordell Hull’s cable was specific on the point that Frank Bohn must return to the United States. Bohn had been active in the radical wing of the American labor movement for years, and his politics likely played a part in the State Department’s disapproval. He had been a cofounder of the Industrial Workers of the World in 1910, and in the mid-1930s he had authored the book The Great Change, about labor relations.10 Now in France, he was working to bring in refugees at the socialist end of the political spectrum. Bohn left Marseille almost immediately, knowing that he had already accomplished a great deal as representative of the American Federation of Labor. Varian Fry was not the type of person to buckle under intimidation, and he had already succeeded in extricating himself from difficult situations with his host in the past. During his prep school and college years he had earned disciplinary actions and suspensions related to elaborate pranks, and later, a flamboyant social life. These were overcome only after his family and friends had intermediated. In his current situation, the new obstacles only enhanced Fry’s resolve. At this stage in Fry’s work, the business cards that Waitstill Sharp had given him to represent the Unitarian Service Committee for the milk campaign came in handy, at least psychologically. While his own organization was pulling the rug out from underneath, Fry had these cards in his back pocket. Charles Joy was nervous about the situation but did not object.11 58 | lisbon and marseille, 1940

Fry had already decided that most of the staff at the U.S. consulate in Marseille were incompetent and callous. Many of his clients were being turned down in their requests for U.S. visas, and Fry and the others suspected that the U.S. immigration quota was not even close to being filled for several countries. Rejection of one from Germany and Austria, which had a higher quota, should have been a rare occurrence, but it was not. Varian Fry vented some of his frustrations by taking notes on the behavior he observed in the U.S. consulates in Lisbon and Marseille, which he later published in The Nation. “One of the vice-consuls at Lisbon received applicants with his feet on his desk, pipe in mouth. He never got up from his chair, even for women,” Fry wrote.12 The rudeness did not seem to be arbitrary, and Fry gathered that most of the consuls preferred people with money, those who were not Jewish, and those without a strong political affiliation. The consuls’ preferred applicants were not necessarily on the Unitarians’ and Fry’s lists. It was the case that both the Emergency Rescue Committee and the Unitarian Service Committee preferred refugees who were more like themselves, those who had a history of political involvement, the people whom the Dexters called their “illegals” and their “democratic anti-Nazis.” Within a short time of arriving in Lisbon, Charles Joy had come to the conclusion that he must go as far as possible to support Varian Fry without destroying the Unitarian Service Committee’s prospects of working in Europe. “My own feeling is that we should be in it [refugee emigration], though we should try to appear to be above it just now for reasons of camouflage,” he wrote.13 Joy sent an explanation to headquarters to the effect that the actions against Fry originated with French anti-Semitism and disclosed that a sympathetic French police inspector had secretly copied information from Varian Fry’s dossier at the prefecture, the government for the Marseille district, which said: Mr. Fry’s activities are embarrassing to the government because he insists upon interesting himself in Jewish refugees who are undesirable not only to the German authorities but to the Vichy government: However, Mr. Fry’s position is so strong in the United States that lisbon and marseille, 1940 | 59

he can not be subjected to an expulsion order. Such an effort to get rid of him would injure the relations between Vichy and the United States Government.14 Varian Fry, reading the document, observed that if the French prefecture knew how unknown he was in the United States, they would not have hesitated to expel him.15 To Charles Joy, the document meant that he could probably get away with continuing to be a part of Fry’s operations without endangering his position with his U.S. government contacts. at the time that charles joy arrived in lisbon, martha sharp was in Marseille with Donald and Helen Lowrie. The Lowries had opened a ymca office in the city and Martha was using it for her new project. Her milk aid had been delivered and now she was looking to bring French children to the United States. This was not part of the Unitarian Service Committee’s original mission to help “intellectual refugees,” but the project may have seemed to be a natural extension of the milk aid project. Furthermore, Martha Sharp received encouragement from one of the Unitarian Service Committee board members, Percival Brundage, who was working with an organization called the American Committee for the Care of European Children. Again Helen Lowrie worked as a volunteer for Martha and covered the Marseille office while Martha made several trips to the town of Vichy, the new capital of “unoccupied France,” to try to get permission for the French children to leave. Martha Sharp made her way to one government office after another, where Vichy officialdom was now working out of unheated summer hotel rooms. In these offices, the papers piled up during the day on top of the beds and were stacked underneath at night so the occupant could sleep. Other offices were located in shower rooms where the nearby water spigots threatened to wash over a day’s work. According to Helen, Martha managed to visit nearly every ministry and bureau in the government, “converting” everyone.16 Looking over the situation, Martha thought it no wonder that Vichy did not seem to be able to process their exit visas. On the other hand, she was being treated very cordially, contrary to 60 | lisbon and marseille, 1940

the experience of Varian Fry and Donald Lowrie. Lowrie described his Vichy contacts as “a lot of young fops with mincing steps and patentleather hair . . . who were manifestly incapable of action of any sort, positive or negative.17 In early October, after several weeks of effort, Martha’s French children’s project reached a dead end when Vichy officials informed her that French children could not possibly be separated from their parents and that, in any event, present conditions were fine for French families. Martha soon decided that she would start over again, this time with refugee children and children with an American parent or grandparent. Martha cabled the American Committee for the Care of European Children about her change of plans, and they said they would agree to it but added the condition that she needed to find some Catholic children to include in the group. Through her visits to different towns in France and to the internment camps Martha had already met a number of children with American relatives. There were the Strasser brothers, Josef and Alexander, Jewish children for whom she had gained a release during the summer from the Recebedou camp, along with their father. In Marseille she had met a Jewish couple from Vienna named Feigl, who had implored her to take their only daughter, fourteen-year-old Eva, to the United States. Martha had been charmed by a set of triplets — Amelie, Eveline, and Marianne Diamant — thirteen years old, also from Vienna, Austria, and she helped their Jewish father, Rudolf Diamant, and Catholic mother with their applications, which were eventually successful. Other Jewish children that she found were Wolfgang Fleischmann, Pierre Garai, and Hans Frank. A Russian-born political journalist named Vakar with two daughters, Anna and Catherine, had met Martha Sharp’s secretary by chance on the street in Marseille a few days before the entire group was due to leave.18 It turned out that Vakar’s daughters were able to join the group because two places had unexpectedly become available when two of the Jewish children, Christian and Bernard Sacher, had suddenly disappeared without explanation, along with their mother. That summer Martha Sharp had visited the town of Le Chambonsur-Lignon, which became famous many decades later for its success in protecting thousands of Jewish children and adults during the war.19 lisbon and marseille, 1940 | 61

Martha had written home that she thought the spirit in the town, whose populace was descended from Protestant Huguenots, was so exceptional that it could regenerate all of France.20 In Le Chambon she met Eduard Theis, the director of the town’s new Protestant school, which taught principles of nonviolence.21 Theis and his wife, who was an American, asked Martha whether she would take six of their daughters to live with relatives in the United States, and these girls also became part of Martha’s children’s emigration project.22 Remaining in Le Chambon, Pastor Theis would become one of the leaders of Le Chambon’s activities to hide and protect refugees. Over the next years, Theis instructed his pupils, some of whom were refugees, to act in quiet protest against Vichy policies and anti-Semitism. After the Germans occupied southern France in 1942, the inhabitants of Le Chambon put these ideas into action as Theis and Pastor Trocme and many villagers converted their homes and available buildings into hiding places for Jewish refugees. Knowing that most of his family was safe in the United States, Theis himself took a great many personal risks and was eventually on the run from the Gestapo. He spent the last year of the occupation in hiding near the Swiss border, where he worked with the French Protestant organization cimade, which was organizing many of the trips to guide Jewish refugees through the mountains into Switzerland.23 The paper requirements for Martha Sharp to bring the group of children to the United States appeared to be impossible at first because Spain and Portugal required that all the children’s dossiers be completed before they would issue the transit visas, but in practice, the dossiers for so many children could not be completed in time. Owing to her skill in negotiation, however, Martha managed to get some of the paper requirements waived. She was able to get the U.S. consul in Marseille, Hugh Fullerton, to intervene, as well as the U.S. ambassador to Spain, and she gained the cooperation of the French consul in Portugal and other influential people in Portugal. The financial affidavits had been much easier than the visas. Instead of seeking individual affidavits for each child, Martha Sharp was able to use financial assurances from Marshall Field III from the Chicago department store family, after he agreed to write a blanket document of support for all the children.24 62 | lisbon and marseille, 1940

In completing the paperwork for the children’s emigration, Martha Sharp and Helen Lowrie had broken new ground. They had satisfied the visa and other paper requirements of four different countries. They hoped that many other traveling groups would soon follow, and Martha and Helen wrote up a clear description of all of the procedures needed to organize the emigration party and gave it their main ally at the U.S. consulate — Hiram Bingham.25 Martha’s commitment to the children’s party meant a stay of several months in Europe without Waitstill, to date the longest period of separation in their marriage. Her letters home describe how much she missed him, “I am already so lonesome for you and the children that it isn’t very satisfying.”26 But her letters also describe how much she was enjoying herself among some of the interesting Americans still in France, the odd Herald Tribune journalist and wealthy expatriate. While she had to endure an inadequate diet, Martha availed herself of European literary offerings — especially the banned Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which she delighted in telling Waitstill.27 She undoubtedly missed her family and felt desperate for news of their children, but she could not leave. During the autumn, their daughter, Martha Content, came down with streptococcus and Martha tried to come back immediately on her own, but the Portuguese consulate said that if she, as the leader of the party, was not present, the group would not receive their transit visas, so she stayed.28 Martha’s letters were affectionate, but they were clearly the writings of someone who is wholly absorbed in the work at hand, and for these projects Martha’s new colleagues assumed a great importance. As had been the case in Prague, Martha founded a number of strong alliances. In her work in France her main partners were the Lowries, not her husband. On the trip home, she wrote a deeply felt letter to Helen Lowrie telling her every detail of how the children’s party had finished their journey and how she hoped they would be working together before long. Martha was now a woman pushed to the limits of her endurance, but a part of herself very much thrived on her selfdiscoveries, among them that she could use her growing reputation to carry out her ideas on her own, no longer needing to be introduced as the minister’s wife. lisbon and marseille, 1940 | 63

It took two months for Martha Sharp and Helen Lowrie to finish the paperwork, but in early December, exhausted from the flu, Martha left Marseille for Lisbon with the twenty-seven children and five adults. It was difficult for some of the children to leave their parents, but they wore the tan berets she handed out and followed her through the half-dozen rail lines and transit points to Lisbon. She humorously wrote to Helen about how at one custom station, she was waved on because the Spanish official was impressed that Martha had borne so many children at a relatively young age, although he could see there were triplets and twins in the group.29 When the group arrived in Lisbon on November 29, Martha learned that the ship line had decided not to hold their tickets because they had arrived some hours behind schedule, but the delay gave her a chance to meet with Charles Joy, who seemed to be proving himself useful despite her initial apprehensions. In October, Martha Sharp had been surprised with the news that Charles Joy, whom she had never met, was coming to Europe. “Also please tell me who is in charge of the work now. I never received any official word about his [Joy] coming . . . and [he] sends the most expensive telegrams with all the articles and punctuation in them,” she complained to Waitstill.30 But by December they had developed a rapport and the children were delighted with him. One of the children, Anna Vakar, recalled in later life that her first English words were “Mr. Joy,” and “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” one of the songs that Charles Joy taught them during their bus excursions in Portugal. Although Joy had thrown himself into a fatherly role with the children in Lisbon, privately he was against the idea of funding any more children’s emigration projects. He reminded headquarters that their mission was to help adult intellectuals start a new life abroad and he suggested that other organizations should focus on child emigration. In actuality, the children’s party that Martha Sharp organized did provide the United States with adult intellectuals years later, because members of that small group grew up and went on to become distinguished faculty at Columbia University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Wheaton College, Montclair State College, and numerous elementary schools.31 But Charles Joy, Varian Fry, and Robert Dexter 64 | lisbon and marseille, 1940

did not know that at the time and had on their minds the thousands of well-educated adult refugees desperate to go to the United States. Charles Joy wired back to Boston that he had been in favor of the children’s party, but now he regretted it, because the money could have been better spent helping adult intellectuals to emigrate. With Fry helping writers and artists and concentrating on emigration to the United States, Charles Joy started looking at other niche areas, and his first idea was to look to help groups of scientists. They had succeeded with Otto Meyerhof, who had contacts with a number of scientists in Europe who needed to emigrate. With the many obstacles to getting a U.S. visa, Joy also looked into emigration to Latin America. One of his first projects was to work with Friderike Zweig, the former wife of the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. Madame Zweig had the idea to organize a cultural settlement in Mexico that would offer a theatre and musical festival similar to that of her native Salzburg. Stefan Zweig, being Jewish, had fled to Britain, but Friderike was trapped in southern France for a time, before finding her way to Lisbon in the autumn. Stefan helped her to obtain an American visa but while she was waiting, Friderike arranged for the emigration project.32 She met with Joy and he added a number of names to one of her lists. These were people who had hoped to emigrate to the United States but who had given up on the idea and now said they would be willing to emigrate to Mexico. Within a few months, most of the people on Zweig’s list had departed for Mexico, and Charles Joy put together another list of thirty-nine refugees, including journalists, artists, engineers, and economists, who had been denied a U.S. visa.33 Although Friderike Zweig was able to pioneer the Mexico route for many of her fellow refugees and start a new life in the United States, her former husband never reconciled himself to life in Latin America. During the next year, Stefan and Elisabeth Zweig moved to the elegant community of Petrópolis, Brazil, where the novelist was revered in the local community. There, Stefan Zweig wrote a brooding novel, Schachnovelle (“The Royal Game”), about human conflict as played out in a long chess game between two passengers on a cruise ship. From his position in Brazil, Zweig read about what he interpreted as Hitler’s impending domination of most lisbon and marseille, 1940 | 65

of the world. He became severely depressed over the course of events, and early in 1942 he and Elisabeth took their own lives.34 In early October 1941 the difficult position of refugees in France became much worse with the passing of the Statut des Juif. This first law described exactly who was a Jew, and another law passed in that month authorized all French departments to round up Jewish refugees and place them in internment camps.35 These and earlier prohibitions against Jews working in most professions in France meant that thousand of France’s native Jews now were kept from earning a living. These laws were not forced on France by Germany but were written in advance and in anticipation by the Vichy government, which tried to appeal to a form of French nationalism and traditionalism, of which anti-Semitism was a part. In 1940 foreign refugees who could not afford a hotel or those who were rounded up under some pretext often found themselves in an internment camp cruelly situated on a windy plateau, a strip of sand, or some other inhospitable plot of land. The camp buildings were often crudely constructed and unheated, and with winter approaching, the situation was becoming desperate. In late autumn, Donald Lowrie organized a meeting of most of the organizations working on relief and rescue in southern France. And as its official name was the “Coordination Committee for Relief Work in Internment Camps,” the network, which included different religious groups, became known as the “Nimes Committee” after the town where they held their monthly meetings. They had their first meeting on November 5, 1940, and Donald Lowrie, who now had a budget as representative of the World ymca, was chosen as chair.36 When Donald Lowrie became head of the Nimes Committee, he assumed a role of tremendous importance within the world of relief and emigration. He now was in a position to negotiate with the French government about any aspect of life in the internment camps. He was a logical choice because of his long history in relief in Europe and his deep experience with French government agencies. Lowrie was already in his fifties, and his pleasant features were marked by deep furrows in his forehead that gave an impression of a man who has worried a great deal in his life. Waitstill Sharp described Donald Lowrie’s abilities 66 | lisbon and marseille, 1940

as equivalent to a doctorate in the patience and particular diplomacy needed to talk to Vichy officialdom. “I think he ought to get some kind of honorary degree for knowing how to sneak up on French prefects, harassed to the last atom of his prefecture conscience with problems of subsistence of his beleaguered people.”37 The Nimes Committee network included about twenty-five organizations including three Red Cross organizations, seven Jewish organizations, the Unitarian Service Committee, the International Migration Service, and the American Friends Service Committee, among others.38 The great range of the groups meant that they could share and receive information that would ordinarily be impossible. For instance, one of the attendees was a Madame Chevalley, who represented the International Migration Service, working on the other side of the demarcation line in occupied France.39 The other organizations could rely on her knowledge of conditions because they did not have access to northern France and normally saw censored news. Within the network were also various individuals who were not part of a relief organization but who had their own bases of influence. Among these was a Catholic cardinal of Jewish ancestry, Cardinal Gerlier, who pursued his own activities to hide Jewish children. The Nimes Committee network spent part of their all-day meetings, which took place once a month in the gracious Hotel Imperator in Nimes, discussing emigration cases and the rest of the day discussing relief activities, which was the main focus of the network. Although the beautiful hotel where they met was rated with four stars after the war, during their meetings they were served what Donald Lowrie described as “the bizarre concoctions” of wartime cuisine. The most important organization within the network, both for relief and for emigration, was the Jewish organization hicem. hicem was an acronym for three organizations located in New York, London, and Lisbon that were concerned with the welfare of Jewish children and adults in Europe. hicem had full-time workers in residence at a number of the internment camps and were often the first to know about movement of people into and between the camps.40 In Marseille they maintained a staff of about eighty people. hicem’s funds came primarily from American Jews, who gave generously through the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. lisbon and marseille, 1940 | 67

Charles Joy himself was on friendly terms with hicem and handled many of his emigration cases jointly with them. For reasons he did not spell out, Varian Fry kept his distance from hicem, which he said was too sectarian to be a major collaborator with his own organization. However, hicem appeared to be equally wary of Fry. Joy tried to explain the relationship to his home office: “The hicem in Marseilles does not want to have anything to do with Fry, and the hicem here is proposing that we do the wiring to Marseilles for them when it pertains to Fry business, because they are afraid of the association. With all of which I have little sympathy. Working with refugees is not a parlor pastime.”41 Charles Joy may have been rather uncharitable about an organization whose existence was even less secure than the Christian and secular organizations in France. Vichy racial laws were gradually dismantling all the legal and economic rights of both French and foreign Jews. hicem and the other Jewish organizations believed they did not have the standing with the Vichy government that the other groups had. Donald Lowrie regarded the Nimes Committee meetings as the high point in the life of relief workers in southern France, and other accounts confirm a cooperative, harmonious atmosphere to the meetings and to the work itself. Most of the voluntary organizations had some of their own problems with conflict within the organization — the Unitarians were not an exception — but tended to get along very well within the much larger structure of the Nimes Committee. One organization and individual who was conspicuously absent from the meetings was the Emergency Rescue Committee and Varian Fry. Public meetings between Donald Lowrie and Varian Fry came to an abrupt end in mid-September, as soon as word spread of the cable about Fry from the U.S. secretary of state’s office. Most of the other voluntary organizations also decided to shun Fry. Martha Sharp was still in southern France working on her children’s emigration party, but she decided that, like Lowrie, she would have nothing further to do with Fry. At that time, she was relying on Hugh Fullerton and other members of the U.S. consular staff to help with the children’s emigration project and she did not want to risk an association. 68 | lisbon and marseille, 1940

Fortunately for Fry, all of his staff stood by him during this period. Varian Fry’s organization was a draw for talented young refugees with a sense of adventure and the motivation to help other refugees while they were waiting for their own visas. His first hire had been a young man named Otto Hirschmann, whom he called “Beamish” for his slow but reliable smile. Beamish was extremely bright, and although he was still in his midtwenties he had already acquired a PhD in economics and a range of war experiences . One of Hirschmann’s first achievements was to find new sources of passports. Too many refugees were using the Czech passports Fry had received through Donald Lowrie’s ties with Vladimir Vochoc, and it could jeopardize the people who had legitimate Czech papers.42 Donald Lowrie had heard a warning from the U.S. consulate that he should stop using these passports, and the warning came at the same time as Frank Bohn’s expulsion from the country.43 Beamish found an alternative to the Czech passports when he discovered that he could buy passports from the Polish consul in Marseille and from the Lithuanian consul in Aix-en-Provence.44 They eventually were able to buy false Danish and Belgian passports as well.45 One of the most sought-after documents was an official French identity card, which assured that the bearer had the rights of a French citizen. Early on in his stay in France, Fry had met a Viennese cartoonist named Bill Freier who knew how to fill in and stamp a French carte d’identité. He used a brush and the heel of his shoe, but the finished document looked like it was printed, genuine, and well traveled.46 Fry also was able to attract to his staff four young Americans, among the few U.S. expatriates still in the country. In addition to Dick Ball and Charlie Fawcett, Miriam Davenport, a Smith College graduate in art history, joined the staff as an interviewer. She introduced Fry to her friend Mary Jayne Gold, a person of considerable means who had left her estate in Michigan — the Marygold Lodge — to live in Paris. Mary Jayne and Varian Fry shared a love of small dogs; hers was called Dagobert and Fry’s was called Mr. Clovis, but during his time in France, Fry was not prepared to talk to Mary Jayne about much else aside from their pets. Despite her cool reception from Fry, Mary Jayne Gold stayed with the group and contributed in different ways lisbon and marseille, 1940 | 69

as she describes in her memoir, Crossroads Marseilles. With Miriam Davenport, she found and rented a run-down but beautiful villa near Marseille. The large house and gardens, called “Air-Bel,” was roomy enough to house Varian Fry’s staff and some of their more famous clients. The extensive grounds allowed the group to add more potatoes and vegetables to their meager diet. With its faded deuxieme empire furnishings and towering plane trees, the villa was a wonderful Provençal oasis for the American expatriates. For some of the writers and surrealists — André Breton, Victor Serge, and Max Ernst — among them, the place allowed them some serenity for work and entertainment while they waited for their visas. Varian Fry’s most important addition during the fall of 1940 was a young man named Danny Bénédite. Bénédite had previously worked for the French police in Paris on refugee matters, but he was an Alsatian and harbored a great deal of sympathy for refugees. He was also trained in classical philosophy and his academic talents and serious demeanor were endearing to Fry, who soon made him his right-hand man. It was the nature of Fry’s organization that the staff had certain responsibilities but did not ask very many questions of each other. Charlie Fawcett’s main duty was to act as security guard. Wearing his American Ambulance Corps uniform he stood calmly in the hallway outside the Centre Americain de Secours throughout the day as the long line of refugees filled the hallway and staircase. It also happened, presumably without Fry’s knowledge, that Fawcett invited a number of women in internment camps to register themselves as married to the American Charlie Fawcett. While one woman received the comment from a camp official that “Charles Fawcett” must be a common American name, this ploy worked and helped a number of women to gain a release. Another new hire, Jean Gemahling, had ties to French resistance groups, and as time went on was involved with low-level sabotage of German operations.47 To Fry’s staff, Charles Joy and the Unitarians appeared to be all too law-abiding. While Joy was now Fry’s most important private collaborator outside the circle of his own staff, he was a generation older than Fry and most of Fry’s staff, and they saw him as the “straight man.” In their memoirs, Varian Fry and Mary Jayne Gold both recall 70 | lisbon and marseille, 1940

an incident in October 1940 when Charles Joy visited the Emergency Rescue Committee offices and said before Fry’s assembled staff that they must stop their illegal activities at once, especially their illegal border crossings. The staff apparently looked at each other with surprise because some were not aware of these activities, and others were surprised that Joy would mention them. They did not realize that Charles Joy was crafty in his own way and was staging an image of legality and conservatism that he was ready to shed in some circumstances. despite his words, charles joy continued to welcome in Lisbon refugees without exit visas who used the Pyrenees’ paths to enter Spain. One of the refugees who found her way to the Unitarian Service Committee was a Czech woman of about thirty years of age named Gerda Subak. She was traveling with her two young sons and her sister, Margit. Gerda had been on a skiing vacation with her sons in 1939, but with the turn of events their vacation had become an indefinite stay in France. Her twenty-seven-year-old sister, Margit, had been living in the Sudetenland near Karlsbad. In the previous year, soon after Germany annexed that region, Margit had gotten into a car, left for Prague, and found herself a small apartment in the Czech capital. Then, when the German troops entered Prague in mid-March of 1939, she vowed to herself that she would not get caught a second time. In an interview years later, she said, “Hitler occupied Prague on the 15th. I was in Paris on the 19th. I’ll tell you one thing, if you have to leave someplace, leave while there is complete chaos, before there are any rules or regulations.” She explained that she “just paid my way out. Any way I could. I couldn’t take anything with me anyway.” Like her cousin Hans, she left her parents behind. “I cannot tell you the hatred I had for Hitler at that moment,” she recalled. “Feeling so sorry for my mother, remaining there alone. I never saw her again.”48 By fleeing to France, Margit had joined the thousands of other Czechs who were seeking safety in neighboring countries. Margit’s days in Paris were very pleasant — she was fluent in the language and had found work modeling clothing — but this new life came to an abrupt end with the German invasion of the city. She made her way to Agde, France, a small town near the Mediterranean where lisbon and marseille, 1940 | 71

members of the Czech army had amassed and were waiting for boats to take them to Britain. Margit had all the right papers, including a visa to Britain and a French carte d’identite, which she had bought through a contact with a member of parliament. To her surprise she was not allowed onto the boat, although her brother-in-law and her ex-husband were among the Czech soldiers being evacuated. She went to see the general in charge, who happened to be a man she recognized as having enjoyed her family’s hospitality in southern Czechoslovakia. “But you know who I am!” she exclaimed. “You know I won’t take advantage or something.” “Yes,” he said, “You are the Jewess from Trebic.” She was shocked but replied, “Thank you very much! The Gestapo could not be any nicer!” and turned and left.49 At Agde she had a surprise meeting with Gerda, whose husband was in the Czech army. The Sharps were in Agde during the summer of 1940, working with Donald Lowrie to help Czech soldiers and their families to leave the country. At Agde, it is likely that Gerda met Martha Sharp or at least heard about the Unitarian program, because she thought to look them up later in her journey. The two sisters made their way next to Marseille. Margit had heard of Varian Fry but decided that she would not approach him. She knew that he was trying to help the famous and distinguished and that he did not have very much money to work with. She had money at least — a number of one-thousand-dollar U.S. bills — and would try to cross the border on her own. In the meantime they checked into a room in Marseille’s red-light district — exactly the quarters that Fry recommended to his high-risk refugees. Gerda’s children, Frank and John, were curious why the room lights were red, but were satisfied with the answer that the hotel was using leftover lights from the Christmas holiday. One clear day in mid-September, they set out for the border on an international bus from Switzerland. The international buses would be less likely to be checked, Margit reasoned. They arrived at the border town of Cerbere at lunchtime, and Margit and Gerda left their luggage on the bus and took the boys out for a picnic. So far, they had successfully maintained the artifice with the children that the entire trip was for fun. In fact, Margit had in her hand a map that she had bought from a smuggler in Marseille indicating the path to 72 | lisbon and marseille, 1940

the Spanish customhouse that Dick Ball used. The crude lines of the map directed them to walk first in the opposite direction from the French-Spanish border, then to curve inland to a small cemetery, over the foothills, and then back toward the coast and the border station. On the French side they managed to cross the border without any trouble from the French police who were still at lunch. On the Spanish side they were not so lucky. One of the children had left his teddy bear in the grass where they had picnicked, and Margit retrieved it to quiet the boy down. When she returned, teddy bear in hand, the small group was talking to the Spanish police. With her fluent French Margit quickly explained that they were just two women and nothing would be lost if they let them go. The patrol agreed, and they were able to get their papers stamped and make their way to Port Bou. Margit’s group had been gone for two to three hours, but the driver did not like to rush his lunch and by the time they returned, the bus and their luggage were still there. In Lisbon, Gerda visited the Unitarian Service Committee to seek their help on her U.S. visa application.50 She was unusually fortunate — her and her children’s visas came through within weeks of their arrival in Portugal. Margit had more difficulties but found on her own an American guarantor who would write an affidavit. One morning, Margit received the dreaded news in a cable from Washington dc: “Visa denied.” But later in the day she received a call from the American consulate in Lisbon that was even more shocking — her American visa was waiting for her there. She could not believe it but went to the office, and sure enough, they had a visa for her. She said of it later that the other refugees regarded it as a miracle and saw her as the one who got the visa. Earlier in the autumn, one of the U.S. consuls had taken her aside and told her the three things she should say to convince her tribunal. “Your sister is going to America, you are divorced, your mother is in a concentration camp,” he coached. “You have no choice, you must go to America!” These details were all true but not very relevant in light of the fact that there were thousands of refugees in Europe with similarly valid reasons for leaving who had been denied an American visa. Margit was still in her twenties and had the natural advantages of the young, attractive, and well heeled — and her English was very good. lisbon and marseille, 1940 | 73

This played into the consuls’ fantasy that these were still normal times and they could concern themselves with reuniting the families of those people they happened to like. After Dick Ball disappeared, Varian Fry needed a new guide for the border to help his many clients who, like Margit Subak, lacked a French exit visa. He also needed a new route, because the path from Cerbere along the cemetery wall that the Werfels, Manns, Feuchtwangers, Margit Subak, and many others had used was now closely watched and had become too dangerous. The new scrutiny might have resulted from Lion Feuchtwanger’s lack of discretion when he returned to New York and described his escape in detail to the press. More likely, the Spanish government already knew about the escape route but had decided to heighten their efforts to control traffic across their border. The government sent out notice that people wishing to pass through Spain now needed to forward their names to Madrid for approval. This turned out to be a temporary measure, but was another cause for worry. Refugees needed to be reminded to stop at the border station to get their entrada stamp in their passports. Charles Joy and Ninon Tallon had already been pulling out their hair on behalf of a number of refugees who had not stopped at the Spanish customhouse to get their papers stamped. With Frank Bohn’s help before he left, they were able to gain the release of nine refugees who had been arrested at the border and put in the Spanish prisons of Figuera and Camp Miranda.51 Many of these people had not stopped at the Spanish customhouse to get their papers stamped.52 Through Beamish, Fry learned about a refugee couple living in the coastal town of Banyuls who had guided a few people successfully over the border. Hans and Lisa Fittko were in their early thirties and had been active in socialist politics in Germany for about a decade but by now had lived for several years in France. In Banyuls, the Fittkos had met the mayor of the village, Vincent Azema, who happened to also be a socialist, and like the Fittkos, a brave individual. Azema showed them a route from the vineyards of Banyuls to the hilltops of the Spanish border. The route often departed from a path, but at the top, beyond the plateau with seven pine trees, walkers had a stunning view of the French and Spanish coast before descending. The route had been used 74 | lisbon and marseille, 1940

by fighters during the Spanish Civil War; it was more strenuous than the Cerbere route but safer because the portion near the border road was hidden from view by an overhanging cliff.53 The mayor gave the Fittkos detailed instructions on what time of day to start the climb, what to wear (espadrilles) and what not to carry (rucksacks, because they were too Germanic). He even gave them an apartment in the village, ration cards, lodgings for a small group of refugees, and arranged to transport refugees’ luggage to Port Bou in Spain with the help of another sympathetic French mayor in Cerbere.54 Lisa Fittko’s first and most tragic journey along the route was with the philosopher Walter Benjamin. Benjamin was only forty-eight years old but in poor shape physically. Despite the rigor of the mountain route, Benjamin insisted on carrying with him a black case with an unpublished manuscript. The group made it to the Spanish border, but the police told them they would not be able to stay because they were now refusing people without the French exit visa. Although Lisa had warned them that they might be sent back but could try again, that evening Benjamin was found dead. He apparently took a fatal dose of morphine, presumably in the belief that at least his manuscript was now safe.55 The manuscript was never found. Although the Fittkos initially regarded Fry as naïve, and were skeptical that he could get them the U.S. visa he promised, they agreed to help the refugees he sent. The guiding that began with Walter Benjamin’s trip in October 1940 continued. Marcel Verzeano, a young medical doctor from Romania working for Fry, became the go-between and visited the Fittkos every few weeks to find out how the route was going and to schedule new crossings. Typically, Lisa or Hans would set off with their charges early in the morning carrying pruning hooks in order to blend in with the arborists working in the mountain fields.56 Of the pair, Lisa did much of the guiding, not because she was more physically fit but because it was easier for a woman to convince Spanish or French border officials, if necessary, that she was not passing Allied soldiers across the border. Soon the route, which had been called the “Lister route” during the Spanish Civil War for the general of the Republican army, became known as the “F-route” for the Fittkos. Charles Joy called it the “Green Frontier,” and although he publicly lisbon and marseille, 1940 | 75

disapproved of using it, in practice he quietly waited for some of his clients to make it to Lisbon after passing through with the Fittkos. One group being helped by the Unitarians, Herbert Hirschfeld and his wife and several children, treated the trek as a Sunday outing and seemed to have a good time of it.57 An older couple on the Gestapo list, Georg Bernhard and his wife, did not seem up to the steep hills, so the Fittkos had them wait until a special guide could take them across the border in a vehicle. Some days later, however, Fry learned that “Denson,” Bernhard’s alias, was in prison in Madrid. Fry was afraid to send a wire about him to the Unitarians, so he wrote a message and placed it in a toothpaste tube and gave it to a refugee traveling to Lisbon. In it, he told the Unitarians who the Bernhards were and urged them to do everything possible to get them out of Spain.58 The Unitarians were able to free the Bernhards and help them on to Lisbon. In Banyuls, Lisa and Hans Fittko befriended Walter Meyerhof who was stranded in the village after his parents had left for the United States in early October. The Fittkos had met the Meyerhofs already in September when they were hoping to emigrate to the United States themselves and had offered to take the Meyerhof family over the mountain paths with them. But the Fittkos’ U.S. visa prospects fell through and they found themselves back in Banyuls. Otto Meyerhof and his wife then traveled over the mountains to Port Bou escorted by Mayor Azema, but they left Walter behind because he did not have a U.S. visa. When Otto Meyerhof and his wife arrived in Philadelphia, they got back in touch with the Unitarians. They were spending the Christmas holidays in rural Pennsylvania with their daughter, but they were distressed that Walter was still in France. They sent a friendly letter to the Sharps, describing their worries. “The news of our son are unfortunately not encouraging,” Otto Meyerhof wrote. “He stays, in liberty, in Banyuls, and has some elderly people protecting him, this is good, but he must get his visa.”59 In early January, Otto Meyerhof wrote to Robert Dexter asking whether he could help obtain a Spanish transit visa for Walter.60 Otto Meyerhof had everyone pulling strings for his son, treatment that a Nobel prize–winning scientist might expect from a powerful nation that regarded his family as one of its special responsibilities. 76 | lisbon and marseille, 1940

9. Walter Meyerhof at Banyuls, France, 1941. Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

His colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania wrote affidavits for Walter, the Rockefeller Foundation sent money for his boat passage, the American ambassador to France asked the Vichy government for an exit visa for Walter, and this plea was one of the few examples where an exit visa was granted. The American ambassador to Spain pressed Madrid for a transit visa. Varian Fry kept an eye on Walter. From Boston, Robert lisbon and marseille, 1940 | 77

Dexter kept track of the status of the various applications for Walter’s visas and stayed in touch with Charles Joy. Walter’s anguished father stayed with his case week in and week out, involving the Quakers as well, who transferred money from New York to an American Friends Service Committee office in France so that Walter could bypass the currency exchange restrictions.61 Despite all these interventions, Walter lacked a Spanish transit visa and was not ready to travel to Portugal. The Meyerhofs had left Walter in a small pension in Banyuls inhabited by two elderly women who delighted in introducing the young physics student, whom they called Boris Gudenov, to European literature. He stayed in Banyuls for several months and helped Hans and Lisa Fittko with errands, but he was increasingly anxious and Banyuls was not as safe as it had been in the early autumn. In November, Mayor Azema, who had helped the Fittkos to set up their surreptitious path, was removed from office by Vichy officials, despite his local popularity.62 In February, Walter moved to Marseille and volunteered himself as Charles Joy’s assistant in the small office that Joy was using during his visits to Marseille. He soon found larger quarters that the frugal Joy accepted.63 By March, Walter’s father was becoming frantic. A safe escape had still not presented itself. But in that month, Walter did finally receive a Spanish transit visa and set out for the border near an interior town rarely used by refugees for transit. This route also did not work, however, because the customs officials said that his “affidavit in lieu of passport” was not adequate. Walter was devastated and cabled Joy about the latest blow. Joy cabled back that in two days he was returning to Lisbon and would take Walter with him as his official secretary. At the appointed hour, Walter met Charles Joy on the train toward Cerbere at the border. En route, Joy asked Walter to give him all the U.S. dollars that he had in his possession. In Port Bou, Joy pressed forty U.S. dollars into the hands of a border agent and asked him to see to it that “his secretary” would not have any difficulty with the Spanish border police.64 Walter Meyerhof and Charles Joy traveled the rest of the way to Lisbon without any problems. In this way, Joy was able to accomplish with American dollars in the right hands what 78 | lisbon and marseille, 1940

months of ambassadorial-level discussions and applications had failed to complete. Joy was very proud of this moment but kept quiet about the bribes, as he had already lectured Fry’s staff that illegal border crossing were unacceptable.65 in december 1940 the emergency rescue committee sent a journalist named Jay Allen to Marseille to replace Varian Fry. Allen was considered a witty personality within his New York social scene, but in France during the winter of 1940-41, his efforts were grossly inept. In a few short weeks he alienated every member of Fry’s staff and all the Unitarians in Lisbon as well. He regarded managing the Marseille rescue activities as secondary and spent his time traveling in hopes of filing the definitive news analysis. Joy cabled to Robert Dexter about the situation, showing his loyalty to Fry and his ability to drop the articles in his cables: all i know or hear of allen forces me to same conclusions ask madame tallon believe fry’s leaving disaster first magnitude do not believe further cooperation unitarian emerescue possible under allen his plan operation fantastic strongly urge you back fry. 66 While Joy supported Varian Fry directly, he was holding on the back burner a far more ambitious plan, which involved taking over Fry’s activities in France in the event that he was expelled. As time went on, however, Joy realized the impossibility of doing this in the near term. The first problem was that they found the New York office of the Emergency Rescue Committee entirely unreliable on their funding commitments and the Unitarians did not have the financial resources to take on the entire operation. Even the current level of collaboration with Fry was straining the Unitarians’ budget. Fry’s success in sending people to Lisbon was a mounting administrative problem as the Unitarians sought to maintain an increasing number of refugees in Portugal. The Emergency Rescue Committee in New York had promised to cover expenses, but the money was slow in arriving and the refugees usually needed to spend months waiting for a ship. In early October, Charles Joy reported lisbon and marseille, 1940 | 79

that the refugees were angry at the Emergency Rescue Committee for leaving them stranded in Lisbon without financial help. “You remember the complaint against Moses ‘Why did you bring us out into the wilderness to die?’ ” Joy wrote to Boston. “I can’t blame them much. They are desperate. Portugal floats on a sea of rumors, all of them alarming. The refugees have a hunted look in their eyes.”67 With Fry’s replacement, Jay Allen, failing to assume any authority in Marseille, it appeared that Varian Fry would be able to continue on as director as he had in the past. Since he had arrived in France, Fry had sent Eleanor Roosevelt some updates of the situation in the region and his recommendations on what to do about it. She took a low-key but serious interest in his letters and had the State Department respond in detail to her about Fry’s proposals for granting refugees U.S. diplomatic protection. These exchanges would not have reached Fry in France, but he could comfort himself with the knowledge that he had received no further expulsion orders from the secretary of state.68 Fry now had a loyal and effective staff of around twenty. Jay Allen took himself out of the picture entirely in March 1941 when he was imprisoned for crossing the demarcation line into the French occupied zone without permission. While the Emergency Rescue Committee’s choice of a replacement for Varian Fry was to everyone’s mind an error in judgment, the organization’s other problems with communication in Europe seemed to be intractable. Although the New York office had a talented and dedicated staff, incomplete refugee files seemed to pile up and correspondence went unanswered. Part of the problem seemed to be related to the unreliable mail between France and New York. The British censors in Bermuda read much of Varian Fry’s correspondence, and he suspected that some of his mail never left the island. Other problems with the New York office were a lack of continuity among the support staff and a greater interest in applying available talents to fundraising and publicity — in which they excelled — than to refugee paperwork. By contrast, Charles Joy and his successors had a trusted partner for their casework in their home office. In the late autumn of 1940 the staff at the Unitarian Service Committee in Boston started to build up a case committee that could handle the paperwork for processing 80 | lisbon and marseille, 1940

affidavits and U.S. visa applications. To manage the process, Robert Dexter hired an old friend of Martha Sharp named Marion Niles. Niles belonged to the Sharps’ Wellesley Hills congregation and had a strong interest in international news, which she had until then followed by listening to radio broadcasts. When the Sharps were in Europe during 1940, Marion Niles had brought their daughter Martha Content to her vacation home on Martha’s Vineyard and stayed in touch with the Sharps about their children’s lives. Until that year, Marion had lived a rather quiet life caring for relatives and working as an officer in the state and national organization of Girls Clubs.69 Although she was sixty years old in 1940, hearing firsthand from the Sharps about the plight of refugees in Europe changed the course of her life. She spent all the rest of the war working for the Unitarian Service Committee on their refugee cases. Despite the dedicated staff, Charles Joy by January was also becoming increasingly bothered about what he saw as the Boston office’s lack of communication. Joy was a prolific letter-writer, but a good many of his letters never seemed to arrive in Boston and he felt undermined by his home office.70 From Boston, cables were passing between Robert Dexter and the Lowries in Marseille, but they seemed to be missing Joy entirely in Lisbon. So he was distressed to learn that Helen Lowrie had been appointed Unitarian Service Committee representative in Marseille to work on a second children’s emigration group, an idea that had come from Martha Sharp. Robert Dexter had made an effort to make amends with Martha after their differences over the milk project. When she had arrived in New York finally in December with some of the refugee children, Robert Dexter had traveled down to New York to meet her at the dock. Martha was now treated with outright reverence in Boston, and Joy was worried that headquarters was forgetting about him. He wrote back that Helen Lowrie might be all right with children but that she “is quite unfitted” for the refugee job that Joy thought they might take over if Fry quit.71 Joy was just as perturbed upon hearing that Robert Dexter had authorized hiring a person to work in the Agde internment camp where many of the Czech soldiers were being held. Joy had not pursued the project because he did not know if they had the funds, and now Donald lisbon and marseille, 1940 | 81

Lowrie seemed to have gone over his head. Joy wrote Robert Dexter an angry letter softened with the excuse that he might be overreacting and suffering from nervous tension and lack of sleep but said that all final decisions regarding staff in Europe and expenditures should be made in Lisbon.72 Although the result probably disappointed Martha Sharp, Joy held his position and won a great deal of authority for himself. By December 1940 Charles Joy moved the office out of the Hotel Metropole into a suite of rooms large enough for his staff, which had grown to eight people. The new offices on Rua Fuego were also quieter, but Joy economized by using one of the rooms as his bedroom. He tended to worry a great deal about funding, and even among the group of Unitarians, he stood out in his frugality. In his earlier days with the American Unitarian Association, he had visited the Unitaria temple in Prague and concluded in a report that it was an albatross and should never have been supported. Upon first meeting Varian Fry, Joy kept a close watch on Fry’s spending and was annoyed about having to pay for Fry’s hotel bill and to see that Fry “was spending like a drunken sailor.” The truth was that Fry enjoyed good meals and tended to seek out the better restaurants wherever he found himself. Charles Joy seemed to have no interest in culinary matters and negotiated with his hotel to allow him to dine a la carte, the way most of the refugees needed to take their meals. He had set their daily living allowance at 60 cents per day, which he calculated allowed for one good meal plus bread for breakfast and supper.73 Early in 1941 Joy proposed a symbol for the Unitarian Service Committee. He had asked an Austrian Jewish refugee artist, Hans Deutsch, to work on a design for the organization, and the design Deutsch handed him pleased Joy very much. “It is simple, chaste and distinctive. The holy oil burning in it is a symbol of helpfulness and sacrifice,” wrote Joy. “The fact, however, that it remotely suggests a cross was not in his [Hans Deutsch’s] mind, but to me this also has its merit. . . . Indeed at the present moment, our work is nine-tenths for the Jews, yet we do stem from the Christian tradition, and the cross does symbolize Christianity and its central theme of sacrificial love.”74 The flaming chalice became a symbol of the Unitarian Service Committee and later a symbol for the entire denomination of Unitarian Universalism. 82 | lisbon and marseille, 1940

10. Refugees arriving at Lisbon train station, 1941. Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Despite the disappearing letters and Varian Fry’s difficult position, the underground railway between the Emergency Rescue Committee’s office in Marseille and Lisbon was now running routinely. The Manns, Werfels, Feuchtwangers, and Meyerhofs had been among the first to use it, but now hundreds were coming through. The “reception service,” as Charles Joy called it, meant that refugees were received upon their arrival at the Lisbon train station and directed to the Unitarian offices where their lodging and boarding were arranged for as well as a small cash outlay. The Unitarian Service Committee doled out funds from several sources — their own, the Emergency Rescue Committee, and an Evangelical Churches of America Fund, although even these three funds were not enough to help in most cases if boat passage was needed. The refugees could at least receive help with their dealings with government authorities and other difficulties.75 By the early spring of 1941, the average number of refugees coming into the Unitarian office in Lisbon for financial or other help numbered thirty to forty people each day.

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4

Marseille, 1941

charles joy remained alone in lisbon and france through the 1940 holiday season. He spent some of his time visiting the French internment camps where thousands of refugees suffered through their first winter there without adequate clothing or nourishment. For instance, the barracks at the largest camp, Gurs, were never designed for long-term habitation, and most of the buildings were unheated. In a short time, Joy managed to make a substantial improvement in the living conditions in the camp. He arranged to have vitric windows put in all of the 260 barracks at Gurs where previously vents in the ceiling had let in the cold and the rain.1 The new windows dramatically reduced the death rate at the camp, and Joy was convinced that the Unitarian Service Committee should spend its resources on relief in the camps, especially medical aid, even if it was at the expense of their emigration program.2 “My own conviction [is] that it is better to keep 6000 children alive in France than to take a hundred or so to America,” Joy explained in a letter to Marion Niles.3 Headquarters in Boston agreed to allow Charles Joy to expand work in the camps and to hire his own director for France instead of hiring Helen Lowrie, as Martha Sharp had wished. In mid-March, Charles Joy found the man he wanted to run the new relief program. Noel Field, an American Quaker in his midthirties, had come highly recommended by Donald Lowrie. Although Field’s profession had been international relations, started during an early career at the U.S. State Department, he was deeply idealistic and had recently worked on a refugee program for the League of Nations. With the League, he had traveled to Spain at the end of the civil war and helped to repatriate foreigners who were stranded after fighting in the Spanish Republican Army. Field himself

11. Herta Field, Charles Joy, and Noel Field, 1941. Unitarian Universalist Service Committee Collection, bms 16076, Box 11, Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University.

had strong left-leaning sympathies and little confidence in the workings of western European governments or that of his own. After the war had brought an end to his job at the League of Nations, he had been hoping to help refugees in some way and knew more about their plight than most from his brother, Hermann. In 1939 Hermann had headed the small office of the British Czech Refugee Committee in Krakow, Poland, and had looked out especially for refugees who had support from British communist groups. After the war began, Hermann resumed his career as an architect, but his experience in Krakow was an important influence on Noel, who shared his politics.4 Unlike the other Americans working for the service committee, who had reasonable French language skills and a smattering of German, Noel Field and his wife, Herta, were trilingual. Noel was a smoker and had a disheveled glamour despite his earnestness. Charles Joy sent Field’s résumé along to Boston headquarters. “He has also written marseille, 1941 | 85

speeches for Roosevelt, but don’t let that prejudice you,” went Joy’s glowing introduction.5 The Fields were given a position that included some pay and responsibility for Noel’s wife, Herta. Herta had been Noel’s loyal and solicitous companion from the time she was nine years old, and they had been neighbors in an affluent neighborhood of Zurich. The Field family had even brought the teenage Herta with them to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the Fields relocated after the death of Noel’s father.6 She was the practical side of the pair and would have preferred a more settled life, but she supported Noel in all his career ambitions regardless of the sacrifice that entailed. Having moved to Geneva in late 1936 to work for the League of Nations, the Fields now packed up their things and moved into modest rooms in a boarding house in Marseille.7 Throughout the winter, Donald Lowrie and other members of the Nimes Committee of relief organizations had met to work out how to make life in the internment camps more bearable. The Quakers and the Jewish organization hicem were working to provide more food in the camps,8 and the ymca was setting up programs such as libraries and music groups aimed at reviving refugees’ spirits. Charles Joy had joined some of these discussions and had decided that medical aid should become the Unitarians’ special area. It was an ambitious idea because, although many capable doctors were interned in these camps, they had few supplies to work with and infectious diseases and malnutrition were rampant. And then there were the thousands of refugees in Marseille or in hiding who were afraid to visit French clinics or doctors for fear that they would be turned away or even interned. Joy was hoping to help both refugees in the camps and those still at large. The plan further gained momentum when Noel and Herta Field met an experienced relief worker at a reception in Marseille. The man, Joseph Weill, was the director of the Jewish Children’s Aid Society (known as ose), and he decided to bring the Fields into his organization’s large and often sensitive operations.9 A collaboration that would go so far as to house the two organizations — the Unitarian Service Committee and the Jewish Children’s Aid Society — in the same quarters took shape. Joseph Weill introduced Noel Field to an old friend, a physician named 86 | marseille, 1941

12. René Zimmer with patient. Unitarian Universalist Service Committee Collection, bms 16076, Box 2, Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University.

René Zimmer, who would become the Unitarians’ most important ally in France. René Zimmer was not Jewish but Alsatian and harbored a deep hatred of Nazism. He had been living in Strasbourg when France surrendered to Germany, and had narrowly escaped arrest soon after the armistice by hiding in his attic and fleeing to Marseille with his wife and young daughter. They had left most of their possessions in Alsace, but Zimmer set up a medical practice in Marseille and his waiting room was soon filled with refugees seeking his help. When Field met this man who worked all hours for the refugees with little interest in compensation, he believed that he had found the director for the medical program. One of their first hires was a young blonde woman with a sunny disposition named Zina Minor. She had recently finished her medical degree at Montpellier at the top of her class, but as a Jew from Russia marseille, 1941 | 87

she was not allowed to practice medicine in France. Noel Field met her at a party and she soon came on board at the Marseille clinic. She remained very popular with Field, and her patients adored her.10 The coordinating committee that Donald Lowrie headed — the Nimes Committee — was continuing to hold regular meetings, and Noel Field soon became an important contributor. To the medical program was soon added a program to organize kindergartens in the internment camps. While the Jewish Children’s Aid Society may have been the natural choice to lead this program, the Jewish groups often worked with other organizations rather than take a conspicuous leadership role in relief. There were certain advantages to having the Unitarian Service Committee head this program, and although the Fields did not have experience in early childhood education, Noel and Herta soon had a large kindergarten program up and running at Rivesaltes, the camp that held the most refugee children. The Fields recruited more than a dozen women — headed by a Madame Lang — who were pleased to find something to do to help ease the minds of the children’s parents. “At Rivesaltes, thousands of children are being educated and occupied, physically and mentally, and the spirits of thousands of parents (almost all of these fighters for a better world) are being raised at the sight of it,” Noel Field wrote to the directors.11 Added to the kindergarten program was also a new food package service. Despite the blockade the Lisbon office started sending out packages containing canned goods and other permitted items to internees in the camps. These went out at the rate of about one hundred a week and were paid for by friends of the recipients and Protestant groups in Switzerland. While beginning the medical program, the Fields also started interviewing refugees in their office for the Unitarian emigration program. With their language skills, Noel and Herta were able to talk to most of the refugees themselves. By far the longest lines were still outside Varian Fry’s office, but the Fields began to build up their own clients, which within a few months numbered about one hundred families.12 It was Joseph Weill’s impression that Noel Field was most interested in Spanish refugees, but a glance through the Fields’ client list shows that the vast majority were from central Europe and many had Jewish surnames. 88 | marseille, 1941

For Varian Fry, the Fields’ presence in Marseille was very welcome given his cold treatment from the other organizations. The Nimes Committee at that time was trying to get some support from the American Red Cross and was taking pains to show their U.S. government contacts that Fry was not a part of their group.13 With his nearby office, Noel Field was able to meet regularly with Fry to talk about their joint cases and the changing circumstances for refugees. They also enjoyed each other socially and had Harvard College in common although they had had very different experiences there. Varian Fry, a classics major, had been known by his peers for founding a literary magazine and for hosting stylish drinking parties.14 Noel Field, on the other hand, had graduated from Harvard with distinction as a political science major in only two years owing to his very disciplined work habits and to the fact that he lived with his family in Cambridge and took part in no extracurricular activities.15 varian fry had spent the entire 1940-41 winter in france, not daring to venture back to Lisbon for fear that he would be denied reentry into France. He had lost about twenty pounds since arriving in Europe, and although he was surrounded by close colleagues, he found himself battling anxiety and depression throughout the winter. A bright spot occurred in early March when emergency visas for Marc and Bella Chagall came through from Washington. These visas were two of the new “temporary visitor visas” that were started in late 1940 under pressure from Eleanor Roosevelt and Thomas Mann. The program had been discontinued already in January 1941, but Chagall was one of the twelve hundred or so persons of “superior intellectual attainment and indomitable spirit,” who already had such a visa in their name.16 Hiram Bingham came by in the large red Chevrolet that had been used to retrieve Lion Feuchtwanger, and on March 8 Varian Fry and Hiram Bingham drove up to Gordes to see the Chagalls. The spring weather and the prospect of meeting the painter put Fry in an especially lyrical frame of mind. “The almond trees are in bloom. A delicate pink against the soft gray-green and sage-green and dark cypress-green of the Provençal landscape,” Fry wrote in his journal.17 But when they found Chagall in his studio, he was not yet convinced that he should marseille, 1941 | 89

leave the beautiful French landscape. He had been granted French citizenship, and although now, as a Jew, these rights were gone under the recent Statut de Juifs, he had moved all his artwork to Gordes and was hoping to live out the war there. Fry and Bingham spent some time telling Chagall about the charms of the New England landscape, and he reluctantly agreed to leave. It took the Chagalls several weeks to pack up their possessions and art, but they arrived in Marseille on April 9. Marc Chagall was arrested that day in his hotel and imprisoned in town. When he found out what had happened, Varian Fry picked up the telephone and outlined to a junior police officer all of the embarrassing consequences for his country and for himself if it became known he had arrested “one of the world’s greatest living artists.”18 Chagall was released immediately, and whatever doubts he had harbored about leaving for the United States were gone. “Chagall came into the office this afternoon to thank me for getting him out of the clink,” Fry wrote in his journal. “Now he is rarin’ to go.”19 When Fry had arrived the summer before, he saw his mission as helping the notable artists and political leaders who the Germans could arrest on French soil under Article 19, or the “surrender on demand” law. When he and his colleagues selected clients and strategies for getting them away, they tried to figure out their endangerment based on interviews and their own impressions. In mid-March Fry was finally able to see a copy of the Gestapo’s list of most wanted. He had a refugee bribe an official at the prefecture to copy, bit by bit, the hundreds of names on the list. Among them was a member of Fry’s own staff — Heinrich Müller — who then left immediately for the Spanish border.20 When Müller arrived in Banyuls, he was offered a place in a boat about to take British soldiers around the point but instead he went on foot on the F-route and made it through Spain safely. In Lisbon, Charles Joy was impressed with him and gave him the position of head interviewer, and his wife, Reine Dorian, joined the staff as well. Although Charles Joy had been back and forth with Varian Fry about taking on the Emergency Rescue Committee’s work in Marseille, it had not come to pass. Fry had asked Joy to take his place, but Joy had a list of conditions and requirements that Fry could not meet or 90 | marseille, 1941

perhaps did not want to meet. It was also the case that, although his prolonged stay in France was wearing on his relationship with his wife who lived in New York City, Fry did not want to go home. Aside from his personal attachment to his work and his colleagues, he believed, probably rightly, that there was no other American who would go after the work with the aggressiveness and knowledge that he was bringing to the job. Beyond that, he had a highly talented staff, and they did not want to work for anyone else. The “friend” sent to replace Fry in the winter, Jay Allen, was still in jail, and Fry dismissed out of hand the new idea that New York City’s star fundraiser, Harold Oram, who was Jewish, should come out to Marseille. “We are already in bad odor because we help so many Jews and have a number of Jewish employees. . . . I insist upon having them to cope with the clients — they are the only people who can stand the strain.”21 In the meantime, Fry continued to build up his office, and by mid-spring he had a staff of about twenty people.22 More refugees than ever were finding their way to the Centre Americain de Secours, and during the first two weeks of May alone, Fry’s staff counted one thousand visitors.23 By this time, Varian Fry was no longer sending most of his clients to Lisbon. A new route out of Marseille, “the Martinique route,” was an unexpected salvation. Since the Caribbean island of Martinique was a French colony, refugees could depart Marseille without a French exit visa, and from Martinique they could board another boat to the United States. Regular sailings from Marseille to Martinique began in February 1941, and some of the artists and writers who had been haunting the Villa Air Bel with Varian Fry — including Andre Breton, Max Ernst, and Victor Serge — were able to leave for the United States via the Caribbean. The opening of the Martinique route, however, scarcely put a dent in the pressure to find passage on boats out of Lisbon, which were still scarce. The only hope for passage now was by way of the Portuguese lines which had one sailing a month. Instead of routing more ships to Portugal, the American Export Lines was withdrawing their boats. In early 1941 the ss Siboney, the American export boat that Margit Subak and Antoine de Saint Exupéry boarded in December to New York City, marseille, 1941 | 91

was taken off the Lisbon run. The Unitarian Service Committee was acutely aware of the situation, as they were responsible for helping refugees in both France and Portugal to arrange for steamship tickets. Back in Boston, the Unitarians tried to influence the State Department on the matter. In March, Robert Dexter and Martha Sharp made a visit to Washington dc to press for permission for additional companies to send ships to Lisbon or to allow organizations to charter special boats. They tried to see undersecretary of state Sumner Welles but were routed to Breckinridge Long instead, who Welles knew would be unsympathetic.24 Long’s evasive reply was, “The matter is hardly within the competence of the Department of State as it is an operating question and comes properly before the Maritime Commission.”25 Martha Sharp and Robert Dexter also visited an official at the Maritime Commission, who had a more elaborate response but did not give them the answer they were hoping for.26 In April, Joy reported that the shipping situation had gotten worse: “As the available space on American boats is reserved, by order of the American government, exclusively for American citizens and refugee bookings on these boats dating previously of this governmental order, are rather rare, all refugees coming here must be crammed into the boats of the Portuguese companies, into the few Spanish boats that pass, and into the occasional cargo boats leaving here.”27 The shortage of boats meant that many refugees no longer held valid U.S. visas. The U.S. consulate in Lisbon had been enforcing a fourmonth time limit to visas — after which they expired — a technicality inherited from the Immigration Law of 1924. For many refugees, it was impossible to leave a French internment camp and board a ship out of Lisbon within four months.28 Already in October 1940, Robert Dexter had visited the U.S. State Department in Washington to urge them to renew expired visas “when through force majeure the holder has been unable to get out of France. There is a bit of government red tape that works needless cruelty.”29 From their position in Lisbon, the Unitarians were often meeting refugees whose U.S. visas expired before their sailing date from Lisbon. They even met refugees who had sailed from North Africa but who were not allowed to disembark in Lisbon because their U.S. visas had just expired. 92 | marseille, 1941

In May, Lisa and Hans Fittko told Varian Fry that they thought the F-route was finished, and that it was too risky to send anyone that way anymore because the Spanish were now arresting everyone without a French exit visa.30 The alternative, known as the “Garcia route,” however, was not working very well either. This was an expensive option that involved groups of people working for a man named Garcia who brought refugees through Spain using private vehicles. The route had the effect of delivering many of the refugees to the Spanish prison in Miranda.31 To make matters worse, the Martinique route, which allowed refugees lacking French exit visas to board boats in France for the Caribbean island, was closed down and Vichy impounded the remaining boats.32 Desperate for a way out of France, the Jewish organization hias (Hebrew Immigration Aid Society) won permission to direct some of the refugees to French Morocco.33 Another setback for the refugees in France was the departure of Hiram Bingham. He was called away from Marseille for a temporary posting in Lisbon. His departure was a blow to the relief workers and the refugees still coming in who had been able to count on his help. For those many refugees who did not carry a passport from any country, Hiram Bingham was often happy to issue a “Nansen passport” or an affidavit in lieu of passport. Bingham had been the person who sheltered the Manns and Lion Feuchtwanger in his villa and showed his sympathy in many ways that attracted the notice of all the refugee relief workers. Donald Lowrie had taken him on a visit to some of the camps and, at his own time and expense, Bingham had written a compassionate report that he sent to Washington to be used in support of the Nimes Committee’s request for help from the American Red Cross. Martha Sharp had noticed Hiram Bingham’s helpfulness as well, and after her experiences with U.S. Foreign Service staff in Prague, Lisbon, and Marseille, his attitude struck her as unique. In November 1940 she had written to Hiram Bingham her appreciation for all that he had done to help bring the children to the United States. “I am proud that our Government is represented in its Foreign Services by a man of your quality,” she wrote. “I feel so deeply about this that I shall take the earliest opportunity to transmit it through the Unitarian Service Committee to the United States State Department, for I believe that such marseille, 1941 | 93

humane and cooperative handling of individuals is what we need most coupled with intelligence and good breeding in our consular officials.”34 At Martha Sharp’s suggestion, Robert Dexter then sent a letter to the U.S. secretary of state Cordell Hull, praising Bingham. A brief reply came back from assistant secretary of state Breckinridge Long, who promised to forward the compliments to Bingham.35 When Bingham saw the letter, he wrote Martha Sharp his thanks and what a pleasure it had been to work with her. As it turned out, his diplomatic career was probably ruined and Robert Dexter’s letter was just another piece of evidence for Breckenridge Long that Bingham was being all too helpful to refugees. In the spring of 1941 Bingham was transferred to Lisbon and then to Argentina where he was continually passed up for promotion.36 although martha sharp and robert dexter were working together on efforts such as trying to change opinions in Washington, since the Sharps’ return from France in late 1940, Robert Dexter was finding himself somewhat in the background, much to his annoyance. Audiences all over the East Coast wanted to hear the Sharps talk about their experiences in Europe, and prominent Unitarians like Frederick Eliot were proud to introduce them. Someone even had the idea to make a vinyl record of Waitstill talking, so the committee sent out handsome postcards offering to loan a twenty-minute phonographic record in which Reverend Sharp describes his work among “European refugees, fleeing for their lives.”37 Martha was also very much in demand, and Robert Dexter was sometimes in the unwelcome position of serving as her appointment secretary. Since her return in December 1940, Martha had been giving public talks and appearances at the rate of three lectures each week. Because she did not have a staff position or an office, many of the inquiries were finding their way to the executive director’s office. By late winter, Robert Dexter’s patience was wearing somewhat thin, and he returned the latest request with a letter explaining, “I do not maintain Martha Sharp’s appointment book. I suggest that you contact Mrs. Sharp directly.” He closed with the hint that the writer could consider inviting some one else from the Committee, “and if she is not available, a substitute could be found, although I am sure that it would not be as satisfactory.” 94 | marseille, 1941

Although Robert Dexter’s work did not seem to be exciting enough to draw the interest of the university and church groups that Martha visited, he was succeeding in developing the Unitarian Service Committee. He was putting much of his time into raising funds and trying to raise the image of the European refugee in the eyes of the American public. By late winter, he and Elisabeth had signed five affidavits themselves and had sent out letters to business owners in different parts of the country asking for their help.38 Some of the recipients seemed to take the view that refugees would take jobs away from Americans or conversely burden their American sponsors. Robert was spending a good deal of time trying to dispel these views. “The fact that we have not been able to get work for all of our own people is, it seems to me, beside the point,” he wrote. “The present tendency, however, is for increased work in America. . . . The experience has been that most European refugees who have come have created employment for others than themselves because they are such preeminent people in their field.39 By May, these and other efforts brought the Unitarian Service Committee’s total income for the twelvemonth period to about seventy-five thousand dollars, about triple the traditional budget of the American Unitarian Association.40 One appeal addressed to Unitarian readers of the Christian Register was called “The Hard Way to Help Britain.” In this essay, Robert Dexter tried to motivate an American readership worried about Great Britain to help their ally by writing affidavits for refugees and making a monetary contribution. He hoped that his Unitarian readers would be moved by a message that Americans can help relieve Britain of “a burden,” but understand at the same time that “if these refugees could only get to this country, they could secure work and most of them would be self-supporting.”41 Robert Dexter’s emphasis on helping Britain reflected the view of a long-standing Anglophile. He had been born in Shelburne, Nova Scotia, a coastal town founded by British loyalists fleeing New York at the end of the American War of Independence.42 Although the Shelburne loyalists had made their stand more than a century earlier, Robert Dexter had much of the British patriot in his outlook. During his frequent travels to Europe during the 1920s and 1930s, he had often given voice to an unabashed admiration for many aspects of British culture, which marseille, 1941 | 95

in his opinion included a higher educational standard and a greater engagement in political affairs.43 These ideas were reported by admiring students in the newspaper of the Skidmore College campus where he and Elisabeth taught during the mid-1920s. During the 1930s, when he became the director of social relations at the American Unitarian Association, this perspective found its way into his regular column, “European Notes,” in the Unitarian journal, the Christian Register. Much of Robert and Elisabeth Dexter’s politics and early work with the Unitarian Association related to the idea of strengthening liberal churches and democracies in Europe. Robert’s job with the American Unitarian Association during the 1930s involved trying to foster a sense of unity among American congregations and among Unitarian churches abroad. Elisabeth shared his interest. Her own father, Alfred Anthony, had helped to found the National Council of Churches, which became the World Council of Churches. Now that Robert Dexter was director of the Unitarian Service Committee, the Dexters still saw their most important work as strengthening democracies, and as individuals, both Dexters believed that the United States should enter the European war. This position, which distinguished the Unitarians’ policy from that of the American Friends Service Committee, was inscribed as an official policy of the Unitarian Service Committee. Quoting Robert Dexter, “Let me say that I consider our policy as a service organization differs radically from the Quaker policy, in that we are not trying to help both friend and foe alike without distinction.”44 Elisabeth elaborated on these ideas in a letter to staff at Boston headquarters in 1941: As early as September 1939, Dr. Dexter declared his conviction that this country ought to stand beside England in fighting Hitler. I did not hide the fact that I agreed with him. After our return from Europe in 1940, we both repeatedly stated that Christian people could not rest content with trying to help refugees; we ought to do our best to stop the power that was responsible for refugees. . . . When I am asked — as I often am — what the difference between the Quaker and the Unitarian committee is, I say that we are not neutral; we take sides in this war, and since our resources are limited we deliberately 96 | marseille, 1941

concentrate on helping those who are most valuable to the democratic cause, who will be most useful in rebuilding the future; that we are willing to run risks if necessary in helping those who have suffered most; and that we will not knowingly do anything to embarrass the British, on whom falls the heaviest burden of resistance to tyranny.45 The views that the Dexters expressed had a different emphasis than those of Charles Joy and the Sharps, although they also shared a liberal internationalist perspective. Martha Sharp’s concern for refugees seemed to be practical and spontaneous — she tried to help those she thought she could help successfully and did not concern herself a great deal with the ideological or professional background of the refugees. Charles Joy may not have disagreed with the Dexters’ general perspective, but he had less interest in these topics. His motivation came from religious humanitarianism, perhaps in the spirit of the medical mission of Albert Schweitzer, whose work had a life-long fascination for Joy. Given the Dexters’ perspective, the Sharps’ and Charles Joy’s tendency to broaden the work of the Unitarian Service Committee toward relief — food or medical — was a constant source of tension. Now Charles Joy had taken the Unitarian Service Committee in a new direction, but Robert Dexter was not sure if the committee should go there. He was opposed to most forms of relief, which he thought could potentially help Germany. Since the internment camps were in France, he reasoned that providing medical aid might free up resources that might be used by Germany. The committee’s main purpose should remain “the travel business,” he kept reminding his staff and board of directors.46 These differences were a factor in Robert Dexter’s decision to bring Charles Joy back to Boston. Although Joy wanted to stay in Europe indefinitely, Robert Dexter asked the chairman of the board to insist that Joy return to the United States to make a report and to get some rest. Joy reluctantly agreed to go home but was promised that he could return to Europe after six months. Robert Dexter decided that he himself — despite family considerations — would replace Joy for the next half-year, and Elisabeth agreed to join him in Lisbon. marseille, 1941 | 97

The Dexters’ decision to work in Lisbon may have lessened some of the tensions that had formed in their relations with Martha Sharp. At least the distance of the Atlantic Ocean between them meant that Robert Dexter was not in a position to include or exclude Martha from meetings at headquarters. That spring, Martha had written Elisabeth about her dissatisfaction with Robert’s attitude. Since my return I have given seventy speeches and have raised several thousand dollars for the Service Committee. There can hardly be any doubt about my interest in its work. I have devoted two full years to the cause, without receiving one cent of remuneration for this effort. The least I would naturally expect would be encouragement and co-operation from the Director and the Committee. From the moment of my return I have been excluded from discussions which dealt intimately with my work abroad. . . . My suggestions to the Committee, based upon work abroad and the field at home, have only met with this attitude from Robert: that I could not possibly know anything that would be of advantage. . . . My requests for information — vitally needed by one speaking five or six times a week — have been flatly refused. . . . These statements should obviously prove to even the most stupid person that she is not wanted.47 Elisabeth made some efforts to repair the rift with Martha Sharp,48 but Robert Dexter was hoping that after working in Europe that year, he and Elisabeth would be able to take over many of Martha Sharp’s speaking engagements when they returned. “I don’t think you want to schedule Elisabeth for social Alliances meetings [Unitarian women’s organization] or anything of that sort. . . . But I want to make it clear that if she is called on for assistance she must have some sort of official position and that our judgment over here is not going to be over-ridden by people who were here a year or two ago and know nothing about the present situation whatever.”49 Robert’s attitude came more from the feeling of missing the limelight than from any negative view of Martha Sharp and her abilities. Privately he admired Martha a great deal and was hoping that his daughter, Harriet, would develop some of the same skills and experience. He advised his daughter to accept a job in Providence as a social worker rather than 98 | marseille, 1941

stay in Chicago. One of the attractions of Providence, Robert said, was that the Sharps would be able to introduce her to a circle of interesting people. “I think I understand why you would like to stay around Chicago, but unless there is a really good job there, I think you would do better both professionally and personally if you took the Providence opening. . . . I wish you were going with me [to Portugal] as I think we would have a rather interesting time. I shall miss you very much.”50 Aside from their aspirations for their daughter, some things about Martha’s opportunities may have been a source of wistfulness for Elisabeth, if not resentment. Martha Sharp had sailed into Pembroke College, the sister college to Brown University, with a high school record that included the prestigious Anthony Award for public speaking, endowed by Elisabeth Anthony Dexter’s relatives. To make matters worse, Brown University was traditionally the training ground for the young men of the Anthony family, and Elisabeth always resented the fact that her brothers and cousins attended Brown while she was sent to the less prestigious Bates College. Although eventually she earned a doctorate in history from Clark University and her academic training was unusually advanced for early-twentieth-century America, let alone for an American woman during that era, she never felt that her scholarly talents were appreciated in the academically oriented Anthony family.51 Although she had had a strong start in academia, first teaching at Storer College as a young woman and then at Skidmore College with Robert, followed by a year as a tutor at Radcliffe College, Elisabeth’s professional life had languished during the 1930s. She had found a prestigious publisher for her PhD dissertation, a social history of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century American women, called Colonial Women of Affairs, but the book had not sold well. She had felt slighted at Radcliffe where, as a female member of the faculty, she was not allowed the Harvard library privileges available to male students and staff. During the depression years, it was not considered appropriate for married women to hold salaried positions that could be given to a male breadwinner, and she had settled for volunteer positions with organizations such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.52 Now, as wife of the executive director of the Unitarian Service Committee, Elisabeth was looking forward to work that she expected marseille, 1941 | 99

would be the most challenging and interesting in her life. This was a greater priority for her than staying home with the pretense of guiding her adult children’s lives. In any case, to the disappointment of Robert, Harriet stayed in Chicago where she was seeing a young man who was studying to become a Unitarian minister. “My daughter has just become engaged and mother ought be somewhat nearer than 3,000 miles away,” Elisabeth wrote in her journal. “But as anyone who has worked with refugees knows, the work can become quite addicting.”53 She made plans to follow Robert to Portugal on a passenger ship. robert dexter arrived in lisbon on the clipper on april 24, 1941, and at the end of the month, Joy returned to Boston. Although Dexter had already been hearing from his staff about the lack of cooperation from the U.S. consulates, he was rather shocked to encounter it directly in Lisbon. In the first week of May, Dexter complained to headquarters: I have had during the last week at least a dozen cases of prominent anti-Nazis, who of necessity had to escape from Germany, or Poland or Italy or wherever under false passports, going to the American consul, even with a formal request from the State Department at Washington that the visa be granted, being told that they must go to the German or Italian legation and get a genuine passport. The consulate, knowing all the facts, sometimes throws these men right back in the lion’s mouth. It has seemed to me that our consulate here, particularly the minor officials, are opposed to doing anything, and if they have to grant any visas prefer to give them to unknown persons, frequently wealthy ones, than to give them to people who have suffered because they have been prominent in opposition to the Nazis. We could produce, if asked, many such cases; one is on the way over with Dr. Joy who only got his visa because John Whitaker, the well-known newspaper correspondent intervened with Sumner Welles personally. I do not know if anything can be done, but it seems as though our own state department officials are in some ways the greatest enemies to the friends of democracy.54 100 | marseille, 1941

In the spring of 1941, obtaining a U.S. visa had become even more difficult because consular officials were instructed under the new “relatives clause” to reject visas from all applicants with relatives in countries under enemy control such as Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. The pretense of the new restriction was that relatives of the refugee applicant would be prone to torture if other family members emigrated to America. Of course, refugees and relief workers in France saw the absurdity of this new rule. The actual processing of applications also became much more complicated that spring because visa applications now had to go through a central committee in Washington dc before being forwarded to country consulates, which still had the right to reject applications.55 These measures were related to the supposed threat of “fifth column” spies into the country, a rumor that the State Department spread enthusiastically during this period.56 U.S. undersecretary of state Breckinridge Long and his colleagues argued that consular staff in Europe did not have enough facts at hand to determine whether a refugee applicant was truthful or if they would be a threat to the security of the United States. The logic of moving application review to Washington, where less information was available, was not successfully challenged, and the U.S. State Department was able to add this new obstacle. In the previous summer, Breckinridge Long had sent out a memo to his staff telling them to slow immigration as much as possible by creating bureaucratic delays: “We can delay and effectively stop for a temporary period of indefinite length the number of immigrants into the United States. We could do this by simply advising our consuls to put every obstacle in the way and to require additional evidence and to resort to various administrative devices which would postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of the visas.”57 The Unitarians would see many of their visa applications refused months after filing and appeals, and at some points saw the obstructions from the State Department as insurmountable. An appealing couple who became the Unitarians’ clients hit up against one after another of the new State Department rules, although their efforts began with unexpected good luck. Herbert and Dorothea Meyer had made it to Lisbon after Dorothea succeeded in getting her Viennese husband marseille, 1941 | 101

out of an Italian concentration camp after presenting a Siamese visa. In Lisbon they had the idea of searching through a New York City telephone book to find someone who might help them to get a U.S. visa. They found a listing for a person with a similar name — a Herbert Myers, Esquire — and wrote to the man, explaining their situation. To their relief, Mr. Herbert Myers wrote them back a friendly letter expressing interest and asking for more information. Robert Dexter was happy to provide it because he himself had a favorable impression of the Meyers. The Meyers’ new friend in New York soon sent an affidavit, and they were able to send an application to the American consul in May. To their delight, the consulate promised that they would receive their visas within three days. However, just at this time, the new “relatives” rule went into effect. Herbert Meyer’s mother was still living in Berlin, and because the new rule stated that no visas should be granted to people who had relatives in the occupied countries, the Meyers lost their opportunity. When they told Mr. Myers in New York about the setback, he immediately started a fresh application and pointed out that it was impossible for Herbert Meyer to return to Germany, as he had already been in prison twice and had given ample proof of the strength of his democratic sympathies. Again, the visa was about to be granted when the second change came into effect, that all visa applications now had to go through Washington dc. Undaunted, Mr. Myers in New York complied with the new regulations and filled out additional forms, but by now months had passed and the case had not been resolved by the time the Dexters returned to Boston.58 Although Robert Dexter did not have much patience in some areas, he had a great deal of patience when it came to talking to U.S. consulate staff about their refugee cases. And in early May 1941, the visa approval process had not yet ground to a halt. Soon after arriving in Lisbon, Robert visited the U.S. consulate and wrote home to Elisabeth that almost every case where the visa had been refused had now come through.59 Robert did not say how he had won these lifesaving decisions, but it was said that he was excellent at maintaining a rapport with consulate officials. Some time later in the year, Varian Fry had the idea that Robert Dexter should replace him in Marseille and described him this way. “He is, I should say, about 60 years old, 102 | marseille, 1941

rather stout and very jolly, very American and very respectable. He would soon efface all the bad impressions made by me. He would be especially good with the Embassy and Consulate people.”60 soon after robert dexter arrived in lisbon, a younger american recruit from New York joined them there. The man, Howard Brooks, was a Unitarian minister from Staten Island. He was preparing to spend the next few months in southern France, ostensibly helping out Noel Field and René Zimmer at the Marseille office. Dexter and his Boston colleagues asked Brooks to report on whether their medical relief program in France could be helping the enemy in any respect, and Brooks promised to make a first-hand report.61 In fact, Howard Brooks’s main mission in France was quite different, but it came to influence the direction of the Unitarian Service Committee over the next few years. Brooks’s trip had come about rather spontaneously that spring when he had met a French exiled leader laid up in a hospital in New York. The man, Louis Dolivet, was a socialist and a supporter of Charles de Gaulle, and had started an organization in New York called the Free World Association (fwa). The fwa tried to draw support from the minority of Americans who were not isolationists and to raise money for resistance cells in France. Before Dolivet’s departure from France some months before, he had met Charles Joy who promised to introduce him to Robert Dexter. Joy’s letter to Dexter is rather vague but stresses that Joy knows “of no man better informed upon the whole complicated business here in Europe than he.” He wrote that Dolivet has organized a committee composed of people from various countries to organize group, rather than individual, emigration.62 He closed by writing that he knew of nothing more important for Robert Dexter to do than to talk to Dolivet. Dexter did talk to him soon, looking him up in New York on his next visit.63 Soon after that, Dolivet was taken ill and spent some time recovering at a hospital on Staten Island. Dexter contacted the Unitarian church of Staten Island and asked the young Unitarian minister Howard Brooks if he would be willing to visit this “friend of the Unitarians.” Brooks soon met Dolivet and was inspired enough to accept a boat ticket to Lisbon and five months’ travel expenses paid for by the Free World Association. marseille, 1941 | 103

When he arrived in Marseille, Howard Brooks paid a courtesy visit to the U.S. consulate and met with Hugh Fullerton, who did his best to make him feel unwelcome. After their meeting, Hugh Fullerton wrote back to Washington: A Mr. Brooks has recently arrived in Marseille to assume charge of the office here of the Unitarian Service Committee. Mr. Brooks called on me and when I bluntly asked him just what his activities in this area would really comprise . . . [he said that] his real mission was to pass on “important messages” to Leon Jouhaux, formerly president of the Confederation Nationale du Travail, now in hiding somewhere in this region, and other former political figures now in disgrace or seclusion. . . . I told Mr. Brooks that I thought his position was an extremely dangerous one, that he would undoubtedly be watched by the police and that if Franco-American relations deteriorated, he and his friends might find themselves in the unenviable position of being arrested and imprisoned. Mr. Brooks was visibly affected. He left for Geneva, I believe, last night, and I suspect that while there he may endeavor to communicate with his principals in the United States.64 In fact, Hugh Fullerton did succeed in frightening Brooks, and in his book Prisoners of Hope, Brooks describes the panic and anxiety he experienced on his trip to Geneva. As to his actual mission, he approached it rather indirectly in his book, which he wrote quickly and published in 1942 in the hope that it would help convince the American public that France would regain its fighting spirit if the United States would enter the war. His work is mainly a call to arms to help the French resistance movements, which he came to understand through his collection of underground newspapers and his personal contacts. Prisoners of Hope is written in the style of a travel memoir and describes the day-to-day hardships of the French living in the unoccupied zone. Brooks’s own day began “with 50 grams of bread, a cup of bitter black brew (Café National) that tasted like anything but coffee, a tablet of saccharine, a tablespoonful of a horrible mess of comfiture, which is a couple of cherries in a thick syrup made of grape sugar.” He also wrote about the headaches he endured and “the demoralizing, 104 | marseille, 1941

weakening effect from hunger.”65 His day sometimes ended with entertainment supplied by the occupiers. One evening he went to the cinema and saw a German rendition of Lion Feuchtwanger’s book Jüd Süss (Power in the English edition). However, the Jewish protagonist in the new German cinematic version is a hideous murderer and Brooks is more depressed than amused by the film. When Brooks returned to the United States in September 1941, he visited William Donovan at his new intelligence office. He also made stops at the U.S. State Department. Breckinridge Long later reported that Howard Brooks’s comments were highly critical of the relief effort in unoccupied France. Long used this visit from Brooks to justify the policy of maintaining tight restrictions on licenses for Americans who wanted to bring funds into France for relief work.66 Long’s comments were clearly a distortion because as Brooks stated directly in Prisoners of Hope, he thought very highly of the relief workers in France and the importance of their work in keeping refugees alive in the internment camps. Brooks portrays the American relief workers — Varian Fry, Noel Field, René and Madame Zimmer, and Donald Lowrie — as courageous and effective. And as to Robert Dexter’s question about whether the work could be helping the enemy, he concluded, “We are helping only foreigners who are stranded in France. None of our aid is given to the French people and there can be no question that we are indirectly aiding Germans.”67 With Howard Brooks in France, Robert Dexter was the only American in the Lisbon office at first. Elisabeth Dexter had not been able to get a ticket on the seaplane with Robert but arrived in Lisbon more than a month later on June 7. She had harbored some fears of making the journey and she felt all the worse when a long-time acquaintance handed her a letter soon before she left the United States, outlining in detail why she was a fool to be going. Soon after arriving, Elisabeth took up the job of correspondent to the Boston office and described in detail the daily office routine. Now we have five rooms in Lisbon for an office. Pippa Harris knows French and German and some Portuguese. Aurora Ramos, Portuguese-American secretary. Next the Goldstajns, of whom you have marseille, 1941 | 105

heard — Jugoslov with British wife, both music hall artists — came in, to report on a letter from the U.S. They are an amazing couple. She is chic and winsome, and extraordinarily unsophisticated, and the Blitzkrieg business she has been through has made her cling to her husband so that she can hardly let him out of her sight. He for his part treats her with the utmost tenderness and consideration. Of course most of these poor souls, whether at the moment in funds or destitute, are terrified lest they overstay their permission here, or their visa expires. . . . One of my first cares was to inspect the stove in the kitchenette; it is not ideal, but in case of emergency we can have a bonfire in it [for case files]. . . . The bulk of the interviewing is done by the staff (Müller and Hoffman). Rob or I intend however to have at least one interview with any client for whom an important decision is taken. On the other hand, we can get further in matters of seeing the consulates and usually with other organizations. . . . We hold a staff meeting every day to discuss new cases, report on developments in old ones (¾ of hour).68 One of the Dexters’ worries was the emigration of their own staff. They did not want to lose their capable workers, but they did not feel justified in keeping them in Lisbon for long because refugees were being taken away by the police. In July, Elisabeth wrote, “The Portuguese police are becoming very much more exacting. Four of our clients have been arrested within the last day or two and we are afraid some others may have been.”69 Robert appealed to the Unitarian Service Committee headquarters for help in finding work in America for their staff. “We have on our staff here two anti-Nazi German refugees (Heinrich Müller and Max Hoffman), both of whom have tasted the pleasures of a concentration camp, and my own secretary, an English girl (Pippa Harris) about whom I wrote the other day, has had the privilege of an interview with members of the Gestapo while in Paris. . . . They are staying here not for the pleasure of the Lisbon scenery and the delights of the climate but because they want to be of service to people who are even more unfortunate than they.”70 In the next year, not only did the Unitarian Service Committee bring Heinrich Müller to the United States, but it sponsored him 106 | marseille, 1941

to set up a small office in New York City for the committee. Pippa Harris moved to Boston where she became editor of Standing By, a monthly publication about the activities of the Unitarian Service Committee. The Dexters and Howard Brooks took pains to say that the Lisbon office made sure to ferret out any potential spies among the refugees. The Dexters said that among their staff, “Several of them have had experience which made them particularly competent to recognize potential ‘fifth-columnists.’ ”71 Whether they took the espionage rumors at all seriously, let alone discovered any “fifth columnists” in their office, is another matter. In the United States, propaganda about the threat of foreign spies in the country was continuing to circulate. In mid-June 1941 the U.S. government ordered the closing of all German consulates in the United States on the presumption that they provided a cover for Nazi espionage. In retaliation, the Nazis demanded the withdrawal of American consular staff from Germany and German-occupied territories.72 Now, a person in German-controlled regions still hoping to emigrate no longer even had a U.S. consulate to visit. In the spring of 1941, Adolf Hitler had informed his inner circle of his intention to kill all the Jews of Europe. During the summer, the plan began to be administered through the Einsatzgruppen, mobile troops that followed German forces as they attacked territory in the Soviet Union. On July 31, 1941, Hermann Goering instructed Reinhard Heydrich to organize “a complete solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe.”73 On July 15, 1941, the United States had closed its consulates in much of Europe and occupied France. Vichy interpreted these closures and changes in U.S. visa application procedures as a sign that the United States would no longer be granting visas to refugees in France. They threatened to close the “emigration” camps near Marseille and remove the internees from Les Milles to more strictly guarded camps. The Jewish organization hias succeeded in persuading Vichy officials that the United States would continue to grant visas to refugees in unoccupied France and that refugees should be allowed to remain in the low-security compounds.74 marseille, 1941 | 107

the boston office began to hear a great deal from elisabeth about the difficulties they were facing. “The extraordinary days which were said to come perhaps three times in a summer come three times a week; and one’s energy is cut down 50%. In addition the noise, and a hectic and unreal quality in the life here, give a nervous strain,” she wrote. As the summer wore on, Elisabeth Dexter was becoming increasingly bothered by what she saw as a breakdown in communication with the Boston office. “Case matters are answered promptly and usually intelligently. I suppose Miss Niles and Miss Campbell deserve the credit for this and we hand it to them. But general questions are completely ignored.” She offered a listing of all of the items she had not heard about. “I am not joking when I say we are losing our reputation. We are beginning to get bitter letters and cables from clients — why don’t we do anything for them? Maybe it can’t be helped but it is maddening.”75 The Dexters received letters back from a board member and personal friend admonishing them for their harsh tone, but the flow of letters and cash they were awaiting seemed to improve. Elisabeth appeared to have become increasingly confident about her new responsibilities but found an excuse to justify her presence further in a letter to a board member where she hinted at an office affair that had ended with the dismissal of a secretary: “Perhaps it is a good idea to have a ‘respectable married woman’ like me here for a while to disinfect! We have heard stories Charles did not know.”76 Whatever the stories were, Elisabeth probably wanted to plant the idea that one of Charles Joy’s trips to France earlier in the year had allowed conditions in the office to deteriorate. Toward the end of July, Robert Dexter left for a trip to Britain and wrote a tender letter to Elisabeth, who remained alone in the Lisbon office. “You were a brick to come — and you have done a marvelous job here. And what’s more. Despite difficulties and hard knocks, it has been in many ways the happiest time in what has now been quite a long and not unhappy life together. . . . I hope I’ll be back soon — and don’t worry about things. I’ll try not to myself. Oh my dear — I do love you so. — Rob”77 Aside from his fond feelings, Robert’s words may have hinted at a fear that he or Elisabeth might not survive the summer. 108 | marseille, 1941

A boat journey to Britain was considered dangerous at that time, and Elisabeth had a heart condition that had long been a source of worry for them both.78 Robert Dexter had intended to visit France that summer, but the visa had not come through and so he had contented himself with reports from Howard Brooks and letters from Noel Field.79 Noel Field had been taking pains to tell Robert Dexter that he agreed with him on the importance of emigration and used Dexter’s own words to say so: “A few men and women of ability and prominence saved are more worthwhile than a hundred to whom we simply give a bit of food and whose agony we help to prolong.”80 Robert Dexter was very pleased by this and the emigration casework they had developed. The Unitarian medical team, led by René Zimmer, had spent much of the spring visiting the internment camps. Zimmer would start his visit with a courtesy call to the head of the internment camp and listen to the man explain that everything was fine and that they did not need any help with medical supplies or treatment.81 He would then visit the barracks, where malnutrition was common, and try to do something about the deplorable conditions. They also made the rounds of the compounds for refugees in and near Marseille. One of them, the Hotel Bompard in Marseille, had been a villa owned by a Syrian family and was now used for women and children. Like the Les Milles camp, this compound was set up to house people who might be able to complete their travel arrangements with the U.S. consulate in Marseille. The Unitarian Service Committee had an office at Hotel Bompard, and a member of the committee’s staff, Margot Stein, looked after the refugees’ needs. In July, the Unitarian team opened up a sophisticated medical and dental clinic in Marseille, with a medical staff that included specialists in pediatrics, surgery, radiology, dermatology, dental surgery, and laboratory work.82 The staff, headed by René Zimmer, numbered ten specialists in all, mostly refugees themselves, and they had nine support staff of nurses and dental assistants.83 Zimmer and his team actually had an extensive supply of vitamins, nutritional supplements, and medicines that was remarkable for wartime France.84 These supplies were organized in a stock room called the dispensary. marseille, 1941 | 109

13. Dispensary, Unitarian Service Committee, Marseille. Unitarian Universalist Service Committee Collection, bms 16181, Box 2, Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University.

Noel Field was especially proud of the dental clinic. “It has the lure of the macabre and the thought that in Switzerland the Joint Committee of the International Red Cross is starting a campaign to collect 100,000 used teeth for our atelier (since artificial teeth are virtually no longer to be had in France), gives the spectator something close to ‘the creeps.’ ”85 The Unitarians shared the clinic with the Jewish Children’s Aid Society, which ran the social work program at the site. The clinic and the doctors could help give refugees hoping to go to the United States the clean bill of health needed to emigrate. Otherwise, refugees with all their papers completed could still be denied 110 | marseille, 1941

14. Fanny Zimmer and Margot Stein at Hotel Bompard, Marseille. Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

a visa if they had a listed illness or were suspected of carrying germs for a serious disease, a suspicion that was impossible to avoid for those in the internment camps. The refugees could also be denied visas if they appeared too weak and exhausted to make a good impression on a consular official.86 Indeed, sometimes refugees with all the necessary visas were barred from setting out for the United States because of a suspected contagion, but Zimmer and Field were able to unblock the travel plans of some of these refugees who the U.S. consulate made an effort to quarantine. One beneficiary of the medical program was a young Jewish journalist from Prague named Lotta Hitschmanova. Since the Munich Pact in the fall of 1938, her travels had taken her from Prague to Paris to Brussels, marseille, 1941 | 111

and then to southern France. Lotta had tried to board one of the boats for England organized for the Czech army, but she was not allowed on board.87 She tried to cross the Pyrenees on foot at a small village, but the French border police found her and would not let her through. Instead, they helped her to get safely across the demarcation line to Pau. Lotta soon made her way to Marseille, but when she was nearly arrested and interned, she made her way to a little village in the Provence countryside where she was able to work for a year as a librarian. In August 1941 she was back in Marseille trying to persuade the American consul to provide her a U.S. visa, and the consul himself refused, citing the new “relatives clause.” But with her excellent language skills — she knew French, German, Czech, English, and Spanish — she got a job as an interpreter for the International Migration Service, and Varian Fry took her on as a client. She moved into a small hotel with friends and tried to get by on her rations of beetroot and carrots. One day, she fainted from hunger while waiting in line at the market. When she awoke, she made her way over to the Unitarian Service Committee medical clinic, and there a doctor bandaged her up and gave her a tetanus injection.88 Lotta was so moved by the help she received and the dedication of the Unitarian staff that she vowed that when she made it to North America, she would do all that was in her power to help the Unitarian Service Committee. She eventually spent the rest of her life running relief programs as the director of Canada’s Unitarian Service Committee.89 as the summer wore on, charles joy was becoming increasingly nervous that his U.S. passport would not be renewed and he would not be able to return to Europe in the autumn. His fears were well founded because Hugh Fullerton at the U.S. consulate in Marseille had made a point of relaying his disapproval of Joy back to the U.S. secretary of state’s office in Washington. “I learned while in Lisbon a few weeks ago that Dr. Joy was suspected by our officers there of doing work for the British and I had already been apprised months ago in Marseille that his activities in behalf of Czech elements in Morocco, presumably working for General de Gaulle, had aroused the distrust of the French authorities. It was probably upon the recommendation from me that Dr. Joy left Marseille at the time he did.”90 112 | marseille, 1941

Instead of blaming the attitude at the U.S. State Department to his “dabbling” in espionage, as he put it, Joy assumed that it was due to Howard Brooks’s visit to France. “It may be a bit embarrassing to those of us who have been assuring the State Department, in connection with my own passport, that our work was wholly regular and legal, to have this [Howard Brooks’s] report reach Mr. Berle, for instance.” Joy asked the Unitarian Service Committee to pass a resolution disapproving of Brooks’s hidden mission.91 The executive committee — absent Robert Dexter — readily obliged and signed the following “voted: that the Executive Committee of the Unitarian Service Committee has learned with dismay and regret of a special mission to France carried out without its knowledge by one of its representatives. . . . It further states that Dr. Charles R. Joy and Mr. and Mrs. Noel Field were in no way responsible for, and had no participation in, this mission.”92 Whether owing to these efforts, or due to a lack of influence on the part of Hugh Fullerton, Charles Joy’s passport was renewed and he made plans to return to Lisbon. Meanwhile, in Marseille Varian Fry had not succeeded in extricating himself from his difficulties and was still in hot water with the U.S. consulate. Hugh Fullerton had written more complaining letters about him back to Washington,93 and Fry was spending much of the summer traveling, hoping to avoid or at least delay expulsion from France. His wife, Eileen, had made a last-ditch appeal to Eleanor Roosevelt through the journalist Dorothy Thompson, but Mrs. Roosevelt’s reply was, “Miss Thompson gave me your message and I am sorry to say that there is nothing I can do for your husband. . . . I think he will have to come home because he has done things which the government does not feel it can stand behind.”94 Earlier in the year, Eleanor Roosevelt had passed Eileen Fry’s request to Breckinridge Long at the State Department, and Long’s cagey reply stated that he would cable Vichy and “ask if there was any reason why a passport should not be issued to Mr. Fry,” although Long had enough knowledge about the situation to anticipate Vichy’s likely response.95 In June 1941 Hugh Fullerton at the U.S. consulate told Fry point blank that his U.S. passport would not be renewed and that he must leave France. This was followed in the next month with a visit with the marseille, 1941 | 113

Marseille chief of police, Maurice du Porzic, who repeated Fullerton’s words with the warning that if Fry did not leave, he would arrest him. When Fry asked him why he wanted him to go, du Porzic said, “Because you have protected Jews and anti-Nazis too much.”96 Fry negotiated for some more time — until mid-August — offering an excuse that he had used for nearly a year — he was awaiting his successor. Fry knew that a successor was not on the horizon, but he still felt that “if the Committee is left without an American at its head, it will be closed down immediately.”97 For the time being, he installed Howard Brooks in his office and then took an extended tour of southern France.98 He visited Henri Matisse, Andre Gide, and Consuela de Saint Exupéry as well as ancient churches, which had fascinated him since his youth.99 He tried to continue to manage his office from afar, but this was proving difficult, and he suffered intense emotional turmoil at the prospect of leaving the work and country that he loved. Fry counted his remaining refugee clients at 472 individuals at this point and used this time away from the office to visit possible safe houses for hiding them in the countryside.100 He returned to Marseille at the end of August knowing that his arrest was imminent. It came days after his return to the city. Nine of Fry’s staff took the train journey with him to the border and spent days with him in Cerbere while the U.S. consulate hurried his papers through. He crossed the border into Spain on September 6, and was pleased that his status was refoule — turned back, not expelled.101 He went alone to Lisbon where he was welcomed warmly by the Dexters and by Charles Joy, who had just returned to Portugal. Fry spent nearly six weeks in Lisbon waiting for a place on the Clipper. He was in a reflective mood and looking for ideas that would help his colleagues back in Marseille. He was also still holding out hope that Robert Dexter or Charles Joy would take his place at the Centre Americain de Secours, and wrote Danny Bénédite about his continuing hope that one of the Unitarians would be his replacement. I think Charles would get on famously with the ymca people and all the other members of that sorry bunch with which I got on so badly (they thought me a snob, I guess; anyway they couldn’t understand me. I feel somehow that they would understand Charles much 114 | marseille, 1941

better on account of his work with the urchins of P’town). And he could contrive somehow to stomach that frightful prig [at the U.S. consulate] Donaldson and drunken playboy Wiley, something I was never able to do (Donaldson refuses visas for life to anyone who misunderstands a question and answers wrongly).102 In his private musings to Danny Bénédite and to his wife on the skills of the Unitarian staff he begins to lean towards Charles Joy. “He [Dexter] is a first-rate man when for outside relations, very social and sociable, and well liked by everybody. But he has no talent at all for office work, and no liking for it either. . . . Dr. Joy is a bird of a different feather, and is now engaged in pulling things together. He prefers ‘desk work’ to ‘leg and armchair work’.”103 It is telling of Varian Fry’s attitude that he does not mention Elisabeth Dexter, although she was known for her disciplined work habits. Before leaving Lisbon, Fry leaves Elisabeth with the task of arranging for the transport to New York of his small dog, Mr. Clovis. In Lisbon, Fry’s dog was reunited with his small canine friend Dagobert, because its owner, Mary Jayne Gold, was now in Lisbon helping out the Dexters. Observing how Mary Jayne has made herself “very welcome” with the Dexters, he wrote his regrets to Danny that he had not managed to bring her more closely into his Marseille operations. Mary Jayne Gold had offered her services at the office while she awaited her boat passage to New York. Because she was asked to, she agreed to help with typing although her stenography skills were even more basic than the Dexters’ own typing. She made a donation, the “Gold Fund,” to be used to help the Emergency Rescue Committee cases to leave Europe.104 Mary Jayne Gold and Varian Fry’s colleague Marcel Verzeano also showed up at the Unitarian offices at this time. During the previous year, he had taken responsibility for keeping track of routes over the Pyrenees and had been Varian Fry’s liaison with Hans and Lisa Fittko. The Fittkos’ Cuban visas had finally come through and they left France in October. In the spring, the hardening of the Spanish attitude toward the refugees led them to decide to retire their guiding activities. Refugees were still trying various routes across the border, marseille, 1941 | 115

inland from the coast. The “black train” route, which involved taking people through Spain using guides, safe houses, and false transit visas while avoiding the Spanish border posts, seemed to be working, as some of their clients were succeeding in getting to Lisbon this way.105 For the most part, however, few refugees were leaving France anymore, and even fewer were arriving in Lisbon. While Mary Jayne Gold’s thoughts were turning toward “Fry methods,” Fry was having more regrets about the sour turn in his relationship with the U.S. consulates. “I think we ought to have helped Americans in need, even though that was not the purpose for which we founded the Committee,” he wrote Danny Bénédite. “The Unitarians do it here with most extraordinary results in those quarters.”106 One could speculate about whether Varian Fry’s self-reproach had much merit. Charles Joy and his colleagues had organized a recreation room for U.S. navy men and had helped some stranded Americans with their emigration plans. Joy and the Dexters had lunched frequently with staff at the U.S. consulate. These actions all probably helped with some of their successes on behalf of the refugees and helped them to maintain an office in Marseille and Lisbon. However, documents that Varian Fry never saw suggest that the American government’s betrayal of Fry was related more to policy than to personality and failed diplomacy. It is probably true that his fate did not hinge on the opinion of the relatively junior officials he met in Marseille, but was decided by the U.S. secretary of state in Washington. During Varian Fry’s thirteen months in France, he had helped at least two thousand civilians to escape and several hundred British soldiers to leave France. His alphabetical listing of clients begins with no. 1, Frederick Abel, and ends with no. 2,142, Jose Sabat-Muntane, and is scattered with the names of some of the most prominent writers and artists of his day.107 The list is most probably an undercount because about three-quarters of the names are male, and dependents are not listed in many cases. Fry recalled that he and his staff had considered the cases of more than fifteen thousand people who had written to him or visited their office.108 Fry and his colleagues’ list of refugees helped is very similar in length to the Jewish organization hicem’s tally of their own emigration successes. hicem reported that between the beginning 116 | marseille, 1941

of August 1940 and the end of September 1941, they had helped 2,167 Jewish refugees to leave southern France, from their client list of about fourteen thousand.109 From the Lisbon “bottleneck” that the Unitarian Service Committee oversaw, the year 1941 was the committee’s busiest and most successful for refugee cases. Unitarian staff reckoned that they had helped 534 people to sail from Lisbon during the year 1941. About one-fifth of these refugees left for destinations in Latin America with most of the rest leaving for the United States.110 For many of these people, the Unitarian Service Committee was their main source of help, and two-thirds of these people were not clients of the Emergency Rescue Committee. With Varian Fry gone from Marseille, and the future of his work highly uncertain, the Unitarians shared Fry’s worries but promised to continue working with Danny Bénédite and Jean Gemahling, whom Varian Fry had put in charge of the Marseille organization. By now, with its useful location in Lisbon, the Unitarian Service Committee had become a representative of many organizations that had an interest in refugees. By November, the Unitarian Service Committee represented and spent money on behalf of the International Relief Association; the Central Bureau for Relief of the Evangelical Churches in Europe; the International Migration Service; the American Association of University Women; and the World Alliance for Friendship through the Churches, in addition to the Emergency Rescue Committee.111 Charles Joy had managed to return to Lisbon despite the disapproval of the U.S. consulate in Marseille. He had stuck his neck out to work with Fry and he himself had broken Vichy laws at times. Varian Fry’s critics at the U.S. consulate still regarded Charles Joy as a nuisance, and he was now conspicuous in both Lisbon and Marseille with other parties. In October, he was featured in an article called “The Joy Case: A Shady Story from Lisbon” by the Lisbon correspondent of the Voelkischer Beobachter, Hitler’s own newspaper.112 Joy has had for a long time a taste for politics. He takes care of poor humanity, but it must be those who have a black record. Political criminals fare best with him. Those who plot assassinations are his marseille, 1941 | 117

dear children. He shelters them and nurses them and covers them with his spiritual mantle. He hides them in the country in lonely farmhouses. He cares for their journey and even finds the money for it, heaven knows where. And here Joy’s pot begins to boil. Who is interested in saving capital offenders, assassins, and political conspirators and in getting them to America? The Unitarian Service Committee, for whom Charles R. Joy acts as the European Director. In uncovering the activity of Charles R. Joy in Lisbon we are not merely unmasking the activity of an agent, but also the secret plans of a state. Joy’s case proves that the State Department at Washington is working systematically to bring anarchy and disorder to the Spanish American republics. Today the eternal Jew is being sent to South America that he may continue there the work he has had to drop in Europe. The State Department at Washington, through its agent Joy in Lisbon, smoothes the way for him. Joy, delighted about the article, sent a copy to Varian Fry and to the Unitarian Service Committee staff with the thought that it would make for a good theme for the Christian Register: “It seems to me that it would be of special interest to our constituency, both amusing and instructive to them, to know how German propaganda works. . . . I should add that the article is highly colloquial and in spots too vulgar for literal translation.”113 The committee talked over the idea but in the end decided to stay clear of the story. Though most of the readers of the Christian Register would have been impressed that Charles Joy’s work stood out enough to catch the notice of a Nazi journalist, some of the language was not that different from the warnings about refugees coming from the U.S. State Department. The Unitarian Service Committee was trying to appeal to a worldly readership but did not forget that even their members had hidden fears that could be aroused by an airing, however clumsy and untruthful.

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Marseille, 1942

an american reader of the unitarian’s publicity during the first half of 1942 might have noticed that a great deal was being written about the Unitarian Service Committee’s medical program, but far less was being said about the committee’s kindergartens. The kindergartens had been set up at the Rivesaltes internment camp, which had by far the most children of any of the camps. While Noel and Herta Field had organized the kindergarten program in the previous spring, by early 1942 many of the kindergartens at Rivesaltes had in fact disappeared. The list of kindergarten staff — mainly young Jewish women interned at Rivesaltes — was still long, but the children had all but vanished. The disappearance was mainly the work of the Jewish Children’s Aid Society (ose), which shared its Marseille offices with the Unitarian Service Committee’s medical clinic. The Jewish organization’s social welfare program had evolved into an operation to liberate children — either openly or under cover. By fronting the kindergarten programs, the Unitarian Service Committee was able to help with these activities. Liberating children from internment camps had been the singleminded goal of ose director Joseph Weill since the autumn of 1940.1 Freeing children from the trauma of camp life would often mean separating children from their parents, and while breaking up families in this way was not initially an attractive idea to many relief workers, members of the Nimes Committee eventually came to agree and to cooperate. Many of the children freed from the camps were taken to one of the many ose children’s homes in France because emigration to the United States seemed impossible except for a lucky few. About three hundred had been taken to the United States in 1941, as an expansion of the children’s party that Martha Sharp had started with

15. Preschool class organized by the Unitarian Service Committee, Rivesaltes Internment Camp, 1942. Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

the American Committee to Save European Children. Much larger trips had been envisioned, but an initiative to bring several thousand children to the United States had died in the U.S. Congress. The Unitarian Service Committee and the Jewish Children’s Aid Society sought to recruit staff who could work on the inside to help bring the children out. In the summer of 1941, Herta Field had met a young French Jewish woman named Vivette Hermann who was looking for a social work position. When Herta told her that young children were interned in these camps, Vivette’s reaction was one of shock, but when she was asked whether she would agree to voluntarily intern herself at Rivesaltes to help the children there, she readily agreed. Vivette moved into the camp in November 1941, and by the time she left in May of 1942 she had helped several hundred children to leave. She recalled that only five young Jewish children remained at Rivesaltes, children whose parents could not bear being separated from them.2 In most cases, ose was able to release young children openly with the consent of camp authorities.3 For more difficult cases and for adolescents, the young people were often smuggled out or taken out on 120 | marseille, 1942

16. Children outside Rivesaltes Internment Camp, 1942. Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

false pretenses. The Unitarian Service Committee medical clinic in Marseille was a handy excuse, and some children were summoned to the clinic on “doctor’s orders” and never returned. Others were taken on children’s excursions from Rivesaltes and were later reported to have “run away” from the group.4 A delivery truck to the camp was modified to hide children under the passenger seat. One of the Unitarian Service Committee staff at Rivesaltes was a young French Jewish woman named Jacqueline Levy who sometimes wore a large cloak that she used for hiding young children she was removing from the camp.5 While the kindergartens were successfully shrinking, the Unitariansponsored medical program was continuing to expand into a major program. The Marseille clinic offered thousands of consultations each month and now also included services in X rays, a laboratory, orthopedics, dental plates, dermatology, and laryngology.6 In addition to the Marseille clinic, the committee opened a small hospital in Toulouse for severe medical cases. French government funds and other organizations paid for some of its operations, and the Unitarian Service Committee supported the hospital surgery, a dispensary, and other services. Noel Field had seized the opportunity for opening the hospital when he marseille, 1942 | 121

17. Nurses, Unitarian Service Committee clinic in Toulouse. Unitarian Universalist Service Committee Collection, bms 16181, Box 2, Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University.

found out that the resident French surgeon of the facility was about to retire. The surgery included not only a well-equipped operating theatre but a staff of trained nurses who agreed to work for the Unitarian Service Committee. The grounds themselves were serene, situated in a former school built around a quiet courtyard. Photographs of the Toulouse clinic depict a group of nurses wearing pristine white uniforms; another photo shows men sitting up in their beds wearing expressions conspicuously happy for a hospital environment. Most of the patients were severe cases from one of the French internment camps, but the facilities were such an improvement over camp life that the Unitarian Service Committee’s publicity was convincing: “They seemed glad they were ill. . . . Here they are again living under something like normal conditions, in a properly built house, in a clean bed and in an atmosphere of compassion and comprehension. And illness seems a small price to pay for all this.”7 The medical program was enormous in comparison with its small budget, but the original funds were gone by the end of 1941 and 122 | marseille, 1942

18. Patients and staff, Unitarian Service Committee clinic in Toulouse. Unitarian Universalist Service Committee Collection, bms 16181, Box 2, Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University.

19. Margot Stein of the Unitarian Service Committee serving rice to refugees at Hotel Bompard, Marseille, ca. 1941. Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Robert Dexter made a trip to New York City to appeal to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee to support it. The Joint was hesitant about funding a program outside the numerous organizations for which they were responsible, but their representative in Lisbon, Joseph Schwartz, was adamant that the Unitarians’ medical program was vital, and the New York office agreed to do it.8 An irony of the medical program was that they were often offering sophisticated treatment to people who were trying to survive on a crude diet and who were severely undernourished. Visitor reports on life in the camps in 1941 and 1942 were consistent on the primacy of pumpkins to the camp diet: “The camp dweller receives about four slices a day of bread, and mornings and evenings a soup made of 124 | marseille, 1942

pumpkins or cabbages, also a sixth of an ounce of fat and a very small portion of tomatoes or jam or dates, and occasionally, four ounces of potatoes.”9 Some of the other relief agencies — especially the Quakers — distributed additional food, but the overall level was only about one thousand calories per day. In early 1942 the Unitarians’ medical staff started a project to try to keep the internees from dying of starvation. René Zimmer and the others examined about nine thousand inmates at Gurs and other camps and divided them into several groups for special treatment. The groups included a small proportion who were found to be “starving,” and a larger group of the “near starving.” These two groups were moved to special huts and received additional food provided by the Quakers, the Secours Suisse, and ose. Almost half of the internees were found to be “threatened” with starvation and given some supplemental food. This effort to help the most malnourished saved hundreds from immediate starvation.10 Another objective of the project was to embark on a broader study of malnutrition, which the physicians hoped would contribute to a better scientific understanding of the course of starvation and its reversal. During this period, Noel Field was making regular trips to Switzerland and obtaining enormous quantities of dietary supplements. One trip in early 1942 yielded about 10 tonnes of calcium and yeast, 145,000 units of insulin and glucose, and 20,000 packages of iron supplements. These were donated by private companies in Basel, individual donors, and from the Joint Committee of the International Red Cross. Field estimated the value of the supplies to be about sixty thousand Swiss francs, but some of the items were almost unobtainable.11 For many of the refugees in the region, the dietary supplements made the difference between starvation and survival. The medical program seemed to be at least acceptable to Vichy authorities and was probably more than welcome. The regime did not want to spend its own limited resources on treating refugees, but it also wanted to do what any government that considered itself civilized wanted — to not allow sick people to just die out of neglect. Vichy’s approval of the medical program was most likely a factor behind Noel Field’s popularity with the U.S. consulate in France. While marseille, 1942 | 125

Varian Fry and Martha Sharp had met stonewalling and indifference during their visits to the new French capital, Field’s experience was entirely different, as he described in a letter to Boston. “The most valuable part of my Vichy trip was my visit to the American Embassy, where I was received with open arms and royally treated,” wrote Field. “I had a long and most cordial interview with the Ambassador [Leahy], who was very interested to learn of our work and who was upset to hear of our difficulties in obtaining medical supplies from America and in continuing the package service from Lisbon.”12 In Marseille, Hugh Fullerton at the American consulate also took a personal interest in Noel Field and wrote to Washington that Field was working too hard and seemed on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Fullerton went as far as to tell Charles Joy to call Noel Field to Lisbon for some rest and consultation. That Charles Joy had instead traveled to Marseille in the new year of 1942 infuriated Fullerton, who took steps in February toward asking Washington to not renew Joy’s passport. It is of course incomprehensible to me that Dr. Joy, with whom I had a long and friendly talk in the Consulate General at Lisbon on the morning of September 17, 1941, should have categorically denied the assurances which he then gave me (and which I immediately repeated in a letter sent to Consul Hurley by pouch) that he would not return to Marseille but would do his best to have Noel Field come to Lisbon for rest and conference purposes. . . . Irrespective of the devotion and activity of an agent of this sort, his usefulness in unoccupied France under present conditions is at an end when he becomes the object of suspicion upon the part of the French authorities or of the Germans who virtually control them. Mr. Varian Fry, representative of the Emergency Rescue Committee, was in very much the same situation during a very long period and, although he undoubtedly accomplished much good, very much more could have been done had Mr. Fry been withdrawn immediately that he became suspect and replaced by a new agent. . . . When I left Marseille there were said to be over 600 Gestapo Agents in that area and several of these gentlemen are probably now on Dr. Joy’s trail.13 126 | marseille, 1942

20. Herta and Noel Field (right), Rivesaltes Internment Camp, ca. 1941. Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Charles Joy was well aware of Hugh Fullerton’s attitude. It seemed to be a source of worry for him, but it did not seem to affect his view of the risks the committee should take. In contrast, Noel Field’s acceptability to Hugh Fullerton and the U.S. embassy in France was most likely due to the different emphasis of the Marseille and Lisbon offices. Although the Fields had embarked on an emigration program in early 1941, as the year wore on, most of their energies were directed at medical and relief work. By 1942 much of their emigration work was covert, helping people to hide and to escape to Switzerland, which diverted traffic away from the United States, at least for the time being. Charles Joy’s work, on the other hand, was still devoted in theory to emigration to the United States. In Lisbon, Charles Joy was becoming increasingly frustrated with an emigration program that month after month was waiting for refugees who were not arriving from France. The staff was spending most of their time tending to the refugees already in Portugal waiting for a boat or a visa. The refugee population there had stabilized at several thousand individuals, many of whom were concentrated in residence force in the small town of Caldas da Rainha, about an hour north of Lisbon. As an ancient town in the scenic foothills near the coast, it had its attractions, but for its inhabitants, who were not allowed to work, the wait was a challenge. The Unitarians set up a recreation room in the town and moved two of the staff there. As part of the refugee organizations’ guarantee to the Portuguese government, the Unitarian Service Committee was supporting financially some of the refugees while they waited. Given their own work ethic and rather puritan outlook, Charles Joy and the Dexters had to struggle to remind themselves that the refugees’ idleness was not of their own choosing. The town seemed safe, the food was plentiful, and some of the refugees became reluctant to leave. In some cases, Charles Joy had to use forcible tactics to make sure that families boarded their ships. In January 1942 sixty of the clients of the Unitarian Service Committee and the Emergency Rescue Committee boarded the ss Nyassa for the Caribbean and the United States. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee had obtained the Portuguese vessel after long months of negotiation.14 The ship picked up most of its passengers in 128 | marseille, 1942

Casablanca before stopping in Lisbon for the remainder.15 The Unitarians usually had someone at the dock for every boat departure to help with any last-minute hitches. On this journey, an American Unitarian described the ship’s boarding: “ ‘Four weeks,’ words often pronounced, sounded like four years. But no four weeks on the sea could ever be like four weeks in a concentration camp, and almost all these people had known the camps of France too well.”16 In April, the ss Guine, a cargo boat chartered by the Joint, departed from Lisbon with a long list of refugee passengers, including Lotta Hitschmanova, the young woman who had come to the Marseille clinic malnourished and left inspired about a future in public service. Earlier in the year, Lotta had accepted a job with Czech Aid where she was caring for Czech children liberated from the internment camps. Part of her responsibilities was to take the children to the Unitarians’ Marseille clinic for treatment for malnutrition.17 A visa to Canada came through for Lotta in April, and Noel Field asked her to take the completed “starvation study” with her to North America. In Lisbon, Lotta spent two weeks in the office with Charles Joy applying for export licenses to send food to the French camps. She had a very good impression of Joy whom she described as a “revelation,” and she renewed her personal pledge: “For my part, I have decided to put myself entirely at Dr. Dexter’s disposition.”18 Lotta’s boat journey, however, turned out to be among the most dangerous days of her life, because a few miles from the U.S. shore, it was discovered that the pro-Nazi ship captain of the ss Guine was hiding a German submarine beneath the ship. U.S. fighter planes were dispatched to torpedo the waters surrounding the boat, but the passengers were eventually allowed to disembark safely and Lotta hand-delivered the starvation study to Boston headquarters. In the following year, the ground-breaking study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine under the title “The Nutritional Situation in Camps of the Unoccupied Zone of France.” A few years later, Lotta Hitschmanova founded the Unitarian Service Committee of Canada, which she led for many years. Increasingly, Charles Joy was trying to help refugees stranded in North Africa. The Jewish organization hicem had been able to take marseille, 1942 | 129

hundreds of refugees out of Marseille and across to North Africa. A large proportion of the refugee population in Morocco had been recruited into Vichy work battalions and were enduring brutal conditions building the trans-Saharan railway. Joy was receiving hundreds of desperate letters from people stranded in North Africa and felt certain that the next phase of the committee’s work should be to send someone there, and he was keen to go himself. back in the united states, robert dexter was getting disappointing results with his fund-raising efforts. It seemed to him that most Americans saw no difference between helping the enemy in Europe and helping their victims. He was also worrying about whether the refugee work that Varian Fry had started in Marseille could continue without American staff. He did not seem to completely close the door on the idea that Varian Fry would join the Unitarian Service Committee, and Fry pursued every promising suggestion that Dexter sent his way. Within a few months of his return to New York in 1941, Varian Fry had been terminated by his organization, the Emergency Rescue Committee. Frank Kingdon, the director, told him that the U.S. State Department staff had said that they would grant no more visas to the organization’s protégés as long as Fry was associated with the committee. Fry was disappointed but accepted the idea that he may have become a liability to the committee. He even wrote to some of his clients still in Europe and recommended that they distance themselves from his name. Varian Fry’s departure from the Emergency Rescue Committee did not put an end to his surreptitious correspondence with Danny Bénédite, which was detailed and far-ranging. Bénédite continued to treat Fry as boss in absentia and was angry about his dismissal. Writing to Charles Joy in April 1942, Bénédite explained his disillusionment with the Emergency Rescue Committee, which merged with another organization in the spring of 1942 to become the International Rescue and Relief Committee: “I must say that I counted a great deal on Fry’s arrival in New York to have a better cooperation, but he is considered as the most ingrata person by the new committee who seem to believe that we are working in perfectly normal conditions. . . . I think we 130 | marseille, 1942

have done here under very difficult conditions during the last seven months [since Fry’s departure] work which is not at all negligible, embarking in particular 74 people for the New World in this month alone, but all this appears normal and natural to our bosses and they seem to have expected twice as much.”19 Now that Varian Fry was gone, his staff back in Marseille hoped that the Centre Americain de Secours could join the other organizations working as the Nimes Committee. Noel Field pleaded the center’s case with Donald Lowrie but he was unrelenting, and so Bénédite and the others had to continue on without the camaraderie of the Nimes Committee organizations. Although the U.S. State Department had forced Varian Fry to leave France, he was still managing to be a thorn in their side. Fry’s explanation to Bénédite for his dismissal was that “the Department is sore as a boil at me because I refused to return to the United States a year ago last September, when they brought pressure on me to come back.”20 Since his return, however, Fry had been using his public engagements to speak out against U.S. visa and refugee policy, and some of these comments were coming back to the State Department. For instance, after Fry spoke at Dartmouth College, someone in the audience sent a letter to the State Department asking whether they could disavow the “truth of charges and allegations advanced some weeks ago by Mr. Varian Mackey Fry.”21 The secretary of state’s office forwarded the letter to the fbi, hoping that Varian Fry and anyone who was persuaded by his appeals would be proven to be a communist of some kind. Varian Fry’s conversations with Robert Dexter continued for some months, painfully. Robert Dexter told Fry that he could direct the Unitarians’ Lisbon office if he could get a passport and Fry confided his frustration to Daniel Bénédite. “He [Dexter] also suggested that, now that I am free of all ties, I might go to Lisbon to direct their office there if I could get a passport. Of course, I should like nothing better than to go to Lisbon, but I am afraid that I could never get the passport.”22 Charles Joy joined in the discussion by writing that Fry’s ties to the French resistance had compromised his position, although these ties seemed to have been no more than the fact that Fry had retained a member of the resistance on his staff. Varian Fry, well marseille, 1942 | 131

aware of Howard Brooks’s mission in France, hinted at the hypocrisy of their accusation in a letter to Robert Dexter: “Unlike some other Americans, whom I could name but shall not, I never had anything to do with De Gaullism. . . . They [the police] sent young informers and agents into the office to offer me the plans of French air fields and other such inviting things. Needless to say, I always refused them.”23 As the year went on, Dexter offered Varian Fry nothing more than a role as a volunteer anonymous fundraiser for some of his individual cases still in Europe. With the collapse of his work with refugees, Varian Fry was succeeding in establishing himself as a pundit specializing in the scene in France. Beginning in the spring of 1942, he published articles in liberal, anti-isolationist venues including the New Republic, the Nation, and the New Leader. Fry’s articles are vivid and candid in their attack on the U.S. State Department’s refugee policy and accommodation of the Vichy regime. In May 1942 Fry published in the Nation a scathing but seemingly lighthearted portrait of the incompetence and anti-Semitism of the U.S. consulate staff in France and in Lisbon, in a piece entitled, “Our Consuls at Work.”24 The magazine published only one responding letter, whose author seemed to have entirely missed the point of Fry’s piece. In an article in the New Republic, on the State Department’s lack of support of de Gaulle and the Free French, Fry closes his article with “But our State Department has not even yet learned how to deal with Hitler and his puppets. Whether still overawed by the respectability of the Vichy gang, or still living in the polite diplomatic world of thirty years ago, it has been busily sawing off the branch on which it sits.”25 In another article in the New Republic on the background related to anti-Semitic policies in Algeria, Fry concludes, “What is surprising is that the State Department should be seeking to excuse and justify such odious, undemocratic and anti-Jewish procedures.”26 The Unitarian collaboration with the Centre Americain de Secours in Marseille fell into the background as few clients were making it to Lisbon.27 The Unitarians were still supporting some of the center’s clients in Lisbon but were not receiving the reimbursement they were expecting from the Emergency Rescue Committee in New York. Charles Joy had not had a reply to his letters from the Emergency 132 | marseille, 1942

Rescue Committee for seven months, and in April he sent them a cable, “completely fed up with your bloody committee we stop our activity here and drop your cases.”28 Joy wrote a softer letter to Danny Bénédite, explaining that although he felt that they had reached a perfect synchrony between the Marseille and Lisbon offices, he could not continue with the collaboration with the New York office for financial reasons.29 In June 1942 Vichy closed down the Centre Americain de Secours. Despite the departure of Varian Fry the previous autumn and their continued exclusion from the Nimes Committee, Danny Bénédite and his colleagues had had some remarkable success. They had sent out nearly three hundred people from France between the time Fry left in the autumn of 1941 and the office’s closure in June 1942.30 Among this late group were a number of notable politicians, writers, and artists, including Marcel Duchamp.31 as the year went on, charles joy argued that with so few people coming through Lisbon, the committee should consider closing the Lisbon office and concentrating on the relief work in southern France: “The only point to be considered is the work itself and it is only because the work seems to be petering out that I have advised the Committee to consider a transfer to a more important field. . . . There is still, of course, at the moment some useful work to be done [in Lisbon] as you know but it is very little and the end of most of this is in sight,” wrote Joy.”32 “Because I defend the French work does not mean that I do not value the other, though knowing both and so intimately, I have no hesitancy in saying that the French work seems to me more important.”33 Charles Joy’s letter about closing the Lisbon office infuriated the Dexters, and Charles Joy’s relative autonomy in Europe was still a sore point. As executive director of the organization, on the other side of the Atlantic, Robert Dexter had limited control over what was happening in Lisbon and Marseille. Charles Joy seemed to make an effort to be responsive but the delayed and lost mail meant that he was largely on his own. Dexter was uncomfortable with Joy’s independence and it was a situation that he was not used to. Throughout his life he had marseille, 1942 | 133

been the director of the various programs that he had served, both in title and in practice, although most of the organizations had few staff.34 During World War I he had become head of a small organization called the Charity Organization Society of Montreal, and later, the director of the sociology department at Skidmore College. The Dexters and Charles Joy seemed to clash over their basic views on the fate of the refugees. The Dexters believed that the people in the internment camps were doomed. Both Robert and Elisabeth Dexter had already spoken with Nazi propagandists in Berlin in 1933 and had visited German territory again in 1937 and 1938.35 They had visited Vienna in 1938, and during their visits with Hans Subak’s parents and the Quakers working there would have learned of examples of Nazi brutality. They seemed to view the Nazi regime as utterly without mercy and intent on completing a genocidal mission. Charles Joy was a more religious man and had not had firsthand experience with the violence of the Nazi regime. He seemed to believe that the Jews in the French internment camps would survive the war if they had medical care and enough to eat. In May of 1942 Joy seemed more worried for the future of the Spanish Republicans, for he feared that Vichy would send them back to Spain, where they awaited a life in prison. This attitude is indicated in a letter he sent to the Joint AntiFascist Refugee Committee: “For most of the other refugees [nonSpanish Republicans] the danger they would face if Hitler occupied the whole of France is nothing more or less than the danger they face now — the danger of disease and hunger. We are succeeding in getting many of them out of that danger.”36 It is possible that Joy’s letter was slanted toward appealing for funds for the Spanish internees in France and did not reflect his frank outlook on the dangers facing the Jewish refugees. However, his planning for long-term improvement in the camp facilities and medical care seemed to be the work of a man who believed that the refugees could survive the war, regardless of the victor, so long as they had enough resources. When Charles Joy’s half year in Europe came to a close, this time he did not fight to remain in Portugal. Robert Dexter still had to find someone to replace Charles Joy when he returned to Boston. He had received a letter from Martha Sharp during a West Coast speaking 134 | marseille, 1942

tour, hinting that she and Waitstill were available to go to Europe. This letter may have come as a surprise as Martha Sharp had been very busy on the home front. Among other projects, she had been involved in helping to organize Unitarian Service Squads comprised of women who volunteered their time at hospitals and various social agencies. By late 1942 these activities had grown into a program that became the Home Service Committee of the Unitarian Service Committee. It took on a new director and staff and extensive projects that recruited young people to work on farms and other projects related to the wartime labor shortage and improved race relations.37 Martha Sharp’s trip to the West Coast, however, seemed to have reawakened a strong desire to return to the European scene. Waitstill had not accompanied her but had helped her organize the trip. He had written in advance to Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger, who now lived in southern California, to see if they might be able to attend her speaking event.38 Helping Martha Sharp with a speaking engagement might be complicated, Lion Feuchtwanger explained, because his movements were restricted: “I am considered an enemy alien for the sole reason that my birth took place in Germany, and consequently, out here on the West Coast I am subject to most strict restrictions. I am not allowed to leave my home after 8 p.m. nor to move further than a radius of five miles. As Los Angeles is an uncommonly long, stretched city, this put me practically in the same position as I was in at the time in Marseille, meaning into that of a prisoner. We therefore have to content ourselves with seeing Mrs. Sharp at our house which is a very pleasant and comfortable prison.”39 Lion Feuchtwanger had been making efforts to show his appreciation for the help he had received from the Unitarians. He had written an article for the Christian Register and had publicized the work of the committee in more informal ways. When it was ready, Lion sent Martha and Waitstill Sharp the English version of his book about his ordeal in French internment camps, The Devil in France. This was the beginning of a lifelong correspondence between the Sharps and the Feuchtwangers that encompassed literature, their work, and their family lives. Martha recalled that each year on his birthday, Lion wrote them to say that he could enjoy the day only because Waitstill had saved his life.40 marseille, 1942 | 135

Earlier in the year, Martha Sharp had recommended that the Unitarian Service Committee sponsor an American in Marseille to work on emigration.41 From California, she revisited the idea in a letter to Robert Dexter — with the suggestion that Waitstill be appointed for an interim position at the Lisbon office. Martha also mentioned that she could go as well, and that in fact some of her expenses were already provided for. A supporter had pledged fifteen hundred dollars toward her costs for joining Waitstill in Lisbon.42 Robert Dexter wrote back that the committee did not need the Sharps to go to Marseille because when Charles Joy returned, none other than William Emerson, the chairman of the board, would be going to Lisbon. William Emerson may not have actually known that his name was mentioned, and it seems unlikely that he was seriously thinking of going. It only came up later when rumors began to circulate at the office. Robert Dexter wrote an apology to William Emerson saying that he had forgotten that he had brought up the subject with Martha in the first place.43 Robert Dexter volunteered that he and Elisabeth would be going to Lisbon that summer, not Martha Sharp or anyone else. Once again, Martha lost patience over her treatment, and this time wrote to the chair of the American Unitarian Association, Frederick May Eliot. Known for his sermonizing, Eliot sent Martha this reply: “I can see no way out unless you are willing to let me put the whole problem to you on the basis of a job that is so big and so important that even wholly justifiable feelings of having been unfairly and discourteously and unreasonably dealt with are beside the point. That takes, as I know, a lot of the real thing: but I am convinced you have it, and I want very, very much to see it put to work for this cause.”44 Martha probably did not find his letter very inspiring, but she was as keen about her work with refugees as ever and was willing to put up with a great deal. On her West Coast trip she had visited San Diego and Vancouver and dozens of communities in between and had given forty-eight addresses in only five weeks.45 In Boston, she was attending the case committee meetings regularly, and the program was still directed by her old friend Marion Niles. During her trip to the West Coast Martha learned of new refugee cases — friends and relatives of 136 | marseille, 1942

the people she met on her trip — and from her base in Boston, she worked to bring them to the United States.46 Robert and Elisabeth’s impending departure for Lisbon could once again mean an improvement in her working conditions in Boston. in june 1942, before setting out for lisbon, the dexters took a trip to New York City for an appointment in the International Building at Rockefeller Center. They had been summoned to the thirty-seventh floor of the gleaming art deco edifice for a confidential meeting with Allen Dulles, the second in command of America’s new intelligence program — the Office of Strategic Services (oss). The purpose of the New York office was to provide American support for oss in Bern, Switzerland, where Allen Dulles was expecting to be dispatched shortly. Allen Dulles wanted to follow up with the Dexters on what the oss had learned from Howard Brooks. They had read his detailed confidential report about his trip to France in the summer of 1941, which provided more specifics about resistance groups than had his book. Brooks had followed up with a visit to William Donovan, the director of the oss, who was known by the code number 109. After Brooks’s visit, Donovan and his staff wanted to sustain the flow of information from Howard Brooks’s sources. They ruled out asking Brooks to return to France, however, because they thought that the publication of his book made him too conspicuous.47 Before their meeting, Robert Dexter had sent Allen Dulles (code number 110) a letter about what was most on his mind, the closing of Varian Fry’s program, the Centre Americain de Secours, in Marseille. He made an appeal to Allen Dulles as he had the day before to secretary of state Cordell Hull on the same subject.48 I am enclosing herewith for your information a copy of the letter I have just sent to Secretary Hull. This concerns the closing of the Centre Americain de Secours in Marseille, about which I assume you know a great deal. I think it is only fair to say that Varian Fry and those associated with him in the Centre occasionally made blunders — as who does not? — but nevertheless that they have done probably the most outstanding job of any group in Europe — not marseille, 1942 | 137

even excepting our own — in the field of saving political refugees. We have acted for them in Portugal and this action of the Laval Government is a first-class calamity. . . . It may be that the whole thing will have to be re-organized, but in the meantime I hope at least that the employees who have been arrested may be released, since they are the employees of an American organization, and that in some way the work can continue.49 Robert Dexter’s hope that Dulles and Secretary Hull would take a serious interest in the fate of Varian Fry’s colleagues and the refugees they were trying to help seemed to be misplaced. However, the Dexters made a good impression on Dulles, and he told oss director William Donovan that “I am convinced that Dexter is thoroughly reliable and that he has a combination of resourcefulness and commonsense to be entrusted with the names of our people in the various localities mentioned above.”50 John Hughes, a friend of Dulles from their Princeton days who headed the New York oss office, shared Allen Dulles’s enthusiasm for Robert Dexter. “I am convinced that he would be the ideal person to get in touch with several people whose names were given us by Howard Brooks, particularly those who are high up in a couple of the underground movements. These people talked so frankly to Brooks when he was in Lyons last year that I am sure Dexter, on account of his close connection with Brooks, would be able to get the most information and make the best arrangements.”51 At their July meeting with Allen Dulles, the Dexters accepted a mission and the code names “Corn” for Robert and “Cornette” for Elisabeth. Robert Dexter agreed to try to deliver ten thousand dollars to Leon Jouhaux, a major leader of the trade union movement who was in hiding in southern France. The choice of Jouhaux had been the outcome of a discussion between Varian Fry and the oss staff in New York. Upon his return from Europe, Fry had impressed on the oss Jouhaux’s importance and offered to relay funds to him through the important network leader based in Switzerland, René Bertholet. With the Dexters headed for France, Fry’s original plan to send money through Bertholet was canceled. In addition to the Jouhaux mission, Robert Dexter was asked to deliver five thousand dollars to other contacts in unoccupied France 138 | marseille, 1942

after further instruction.52 Ray Bragg, the treasurer of the Unitarian Service Committee, agreed to be the go-between in sending additional funds. Elisabeth had some of her own duties and agreed to turn over information to a contact at the U.S. consulate in Lisbon. Dulles asked the Dexters to bring an oss man onto their staff in the Marseille office named Justin Greene. Greene was a French-trained American doctor whom the oss had been trying for months to place in France. They had approached the Rockefeller Foundation, but they had refused, saying that the man’s “mediocre qualifications” would raise suspicions. The oss offered to cover Greene’s salary and travel expenses and the Unitarians agreed to take him, but the arrangement never came to pass because by the time the oss found a placement with the Unitarians, Greene had joined the U.S. Army. An intriguing aspect of the Dexters’ mission was that it ran counter to the spirit of the British and American intelligence agreement of June 1942, which gave Britain the leading role in Allied relations with European resistance movements. Military and financial support for French resistance groups was to be at London’s discretion, not Washington’s. Instances where American intelligence provided financial support to resistance groups, however modest in funding, tended to infuriate Charles de Gaulle and his British hosts.53 It is interesting that Allen Dulles would risk relations with his British counterparts while engaging the Dexters in this work. Robert Dexter’s meetings in Washington seemed to have changed his perspective on the U.S. attitude toward refugees, and he began to see the U.S. State Department as becoming more sympathetic. With his new role with the oss, he may have felt an added motivation not to annoy members of his own government, and he went so far as to urge the Boston office to discourage Charles Joy from any plans for aggressive lobbying in Washington about visa decisions or rules regarding relief in France. “It has no doubt been impossible for Dr. Joy to realise the rapid changes and the present status of the [U.S.] governmental attitude, but I fear that he will come back here with the feeling that we ought to try to raise the devil with the various governmental authorities and if we can’t get results one way, try another.”54 Charles Joy, who tended to keep his own counsel, probably was not persuaded by any such instructions. marseille, 1942 | 139

The Dexters arrived in Lisbon in mid-August 1942. A practical advantage for Lisbon of their new oss ties was that Elisabeth did not have to travel to Portugal on the slow route but could take a priority seat on the Clipper.55 They spent their first weeks in Lisbon visiting the residence force at Caldas and awaiting a visa to France for Robert. Elisabeth wrote up her view of Caldas: “The people we knew [at Caldas da Rainha] last year who are there now seem in better health but a number of them have visibly deteriorated mentally and morally. They have been thrown together in a small town without even the mild distractions of Lisbon, and it is very bad for those who have only moderate resources within themselves.”56 In Lisbon, Elisabeth Dexter threw herself into the role of intelligence informant but was not following all the details of the oss instructions. She had been given a code that she was supposed to use when sending messages: “Begin with the 5th word in the 5th line in the first paragraph and then every fifth word thereafter.” She was also briefed that she should pretend not to recognize her oss contacts when she ran into them in public places. She ignored the instructions because she figured that this would only raise suspicions given that they were some of the few Americans staying at the same hotel.57 She forgot the secret code as well. However, she did win the confidence of the oss staff to whom she reported. Her son, Lewis, recalled that on oss matters his mother was discovered to be “more reticent and discreet and also more accurate on what was essential to them, matters of detail, than my father.”58 This discretion carried through to her later years because in her unpublished memoirs she gives no substantial details about her oss work aside from owing that when she was asked to help them during that summer of 1942, she agreed without hesitation. Given that in Lisbon the U.S. consulate had staff who were interviewing refugees throughout the day and could become acquainted with individuals involved in resistance activities, the oss had other options than involving human rights workers such as the Dexters in their work. The oss could use the U.S. consulates as a base, since they were required to accept the presence of oss staff on their premises. In the neutral countries, however, where the Unitarians worked during the war, including Portugal, Spain, and Switzerland, the assignment of 140 | marseille, 1942

oss staff to the American embassies under diplomatic cover met with strong resistance from the professional diplomats.59 Serious rivalries were rife in the relationship between staff at the oss and the State Department. For the oss, keeping a network of informants like Elisabeth Dexter meant that they would not need to rely as much on information coming from the consulates. The oss may also have assumed that refugees would speak more frankly to staff at an organization like the Unitarian Service Committee. Robert Dexter’s mission to transfer money that would strengthen the French resistance met with unexpected complications. The Singer Company had agreed to provide French francs in exchange for the American currency, but the Vichy government blocked the money. The Vichy authorities said that they were awaiting a decision on the transfer by “the occupying authorities.”60 The Unitarians tried to unblock the money for more than a year. There is some evidence that they were able to borrow replacement funds from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, ostensibly for Noel Field’s program.61 The intended recipient of the bulk of the funds — Leon Jouhaux — was imprisoned by the Germans but survived the war and went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize.62 the dexters arrived in portugal shortly before the deportations began in France at the end of August. From southern France, the fact of the deportations and their brutality sent a shock wave through the refugee community. Donald Lowrie went to Switzerland and sent press releases and cables back to the United States. The Riegner cable informing the West of Hitler’s plan to kill all remaining Jews in Europe had been sent from Switzerland in July 1942. The source for the information behind the cable was a German industrialist named Eduard Schulte who had learned about Auschwitz during a recent visit to Poland.63 Charles Joy had been trying one thing after another to save their own clients and staff but had run up against a wall of refusals: “Roughly since July, there is a regular epidemic of refusals of U.S. visas. (e.g. Himmelstern, Aba Scerbac, Dr. Baer [member of Unitarian medical staff in Marseille], Mr. and Mrs. Zoltan Kemeny, Meyer, etc.). While the law forbids the disclosure by the State Department of the grounds for marseille, 1942 | 141

21. Donald Lowrie and Helga Holbeck outside ymca foyer, Rivesaltes Internment Camp, spring 1942. Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

refusal, our guess is that these visas were refused on account of the ‘close relatives in German dominated territories’ clause. One cannot even file a new application for a visa before a period of six months since refusal has passed. . . . Cuban and Mexican visas are practically unobtainable; South American visas are obtained only in absolutely exceptional cases.”64 In September, Joy wrote, “Since that time [the United States entered the war] hardly a dozen of our refugee clients have come through Lisbon from France, and hardly a dozen of our clients in Portugal have received visas enabling them to emigrate. A larger number have passed through Casablanca, but to-day even that port is almost closed.”65 Soon after news of the visa refusals, Joy learned of the impending deportations. “Our own cases deported or about to be: Hedwig Himmelstern; Richard Baer, Josef Morgenstern. Probably many others, but about these we had cabled word.”66 The physician Richard Baer actually made it to Switzerland but before he left he wrote, “I waited for the help that was promised. Now it is too late. We know that nobody returns from the East. Thanks for what all of you have done — alas in vain.”67 The Nimes Committee had made a last desperate plea on August 6 when Donald Lowrie met with Marshal Petain and his general secretary, Jean Jardel.68 Lowrie sent back to ymca headquarters a transcript of his meeting, and Charles Joy also circulated the account. donald lowrie: We come to you in the name of all philanthropic organizations in France working in large part for the French population, but also for foreign refugees. Many of our organizations are giving major aid to the French. Here Jardelle interrupted to name the Quakers and the ymca. petain: I know both of these and we are very grateful for their help. donald lowrie: For two years these organizations have been collaborating with the French Government, often at the Government’s request, to help preserve and prepare those refugees for emigration. About 10,000 have already emigrated, thanks to our combined efforts. We are willing to continue this service, but we are now greatly concerned about the present measures being taken against certain foreign refugees, particularly Spanish and Jews. marseille, 1942 | 143

jardelle, interrupting: You know, Monsieur le Maréchal, that the Germans asked us to have 10,000 French Jews and that to save them, we have been obliged to give up an equal number of foreign Jews. They are to be transported to a sort of “Jewish State” the Germans have set up near Lublin. There, it appears, they will enjoy a certain liberty . . . petain: Oh, yes, I know, near Krakow. donald lowrie: We have been deeply moved and profoundly hurt by the present measures. We cannot believe, Monsieur le Maréchal, that this has been done with your knowledge (this I emphasized, but Petain did not react) or that it is inevitable. petain, with a gesture of helplessness: You know our situation with regard to the Germans. donald lowrie: We believe that there might at least be some exemptions. For example, those ready to emigrate. [Vichy prime minister Pierre] Laval has this list under study. Here both Petain and Jardelle brightened and Petain said he would speak to Laval about it. I went on: Then, children. We can naturally make no promises but believe, if we could have three or four weeks in which to launch an appeal, that United States doors might be open for the children involved. petain: I will speak of this to Laval too. Will you be in Vichy for a week or ten days to have the reply? donald lowrie: Monsieur le Maréchal, the first train is leaving today. petain: Well, then, I will speak to Laval this afternoon and you may telephone M. Jardelle tomorrow morning for my reply. lowrie: We cannot conceal from you, Monsieur le Maréchal, the unfortunate impression this action will have on public opinion abroad and the serious repercussions it may have on the work of our organization in France. Over the next days, chaotic raids took place on the streets of Marseille and in the offices of many of the committees, including that of the Unitarian Service Committee, where people waiting for consultations at the dispensary of the Unitarian Service Committee were 144 | marseille, 1942

arrested.69 Although few children were in the internment camps at the beginning of the summer, at the start of the deportations, suddenly one hundred children were at Rivesaltes who had been rounded up from other places. Relief workers started frantic measures to free these children, through open negotiations and planned escapes, and they had some success. A few weeks later, the relief agencies learned that many children, and some families that the workers knew well, were being held at Fort Vénissieux, a secure transit camp, before being deported to the east. Members of ose met to contemplate risky measures. One idea involved derailing the train that would carry the refugees toward Germany. They hoped to derail the train when it slowed down for a curve and then to bring the children to a convoy of waiting trucks. They decided that this plot was too risky, but they did manage to undertake a dangerous late-night mission into the holding camp to rescue the children there. Late at night, the group disabled the electricity for the wires surrounding the camp and spirited away eighty to one hundred children before the transport began at dawn. The children were taken to convents in Lyon, and all attempts by the police to force the convents to surrender the children failed. The region’s Cardinal Pierre-Marie Gerlier had informed Vichy that he could not be responsible for public order in Lyon should the police forcibly enter the convents.70 The operation to free the children at Fort Vénissieux was the start of large-scale activities to hide children with French families, an operation which became known as the “Garel network.” Georges Garel was an engineer who had been the armaments director for a resistance group but, after meeting Joseph Weill and helping to plan the Vénissieux escape, he switched to helping hide children.71 The Garel network had “Aryanized” identities and used funds from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Garel’s official identity was that of a porcelain salesman, and he hid the real tools of his trade — blank identity cards, ration cards, and cash — under his wares. The children were taken from many of the ose homes and were given new names and identity cards and placed with French families. A typical family would live in a rural area and be headed by a French woman marseille, 1942 | 145

whose husband was a prisoner in Germany and who had a number of children of her own. Children who had not learned enough French, or whose strongly “Semitic” features might give them away, were put in a group home or taken to Switzerland. The network was highly organized and effective and included a section for forging identity and ration cards, and a clothing committee to help make the children look as appealing as possible when they were taken to their foster families for the first time. A transportation committee concerned itself with moving children to different homes and families as circumstances changed throughout the war. Noel and Herta Field had been directing many of their refugees in the direction of Switzerland rather than to Lisbon. Records have not been found that report on the routes or means they used to help these people escape from southern France, but many probably left with the help of cimade, the French Protestant group that took it upon themselves to organize the guiding of refugees across the Swiss border. The organization was able to get assurances from the Swiss government in Bern that the people under cimade’s care would not be turned away at the border.72 An important member of cimade was a young woman named Genevieve Pittet, who herself helped organize the Swiss route. In September 1942 she recruited young men who worked with the Maquis (armed French resistance) and young mountain guides from the region near the skiing resort of Chamonix to take refugees across the French-Swiss border. When snow on the passes blocked the route in October, she developed two new routes that passed people through gaps in barbed wire along the coast of Lake Leman and near the city of Geneva. The guides often used a cemetery near the town of Annemasse on the frontier between France and Switzerland. The “mourners” would arrive wearing their veils of crepe, and an altar boy, trembling with fear rather than grief, would kneel close to a tomb. If the way was clear, he would pull up the ladder used for grave-digging and place it where the “mourners” could use it to ascend the cemetery wall.73 In August, Charles Joy returned to Boston from Europe and spread the word about the deportations. Although some of the board members 146 | marseille, 1942

were on vacation, he made an effort to see that everyone was immediately informed.74 The news of the deportations did not alter Robert Dexter’s plans to travel into France. His travel visa to France came through, and in September he set off for Marseille, where he was planning to spend several weeks before traveling on to Switzerland. His trip report is more related to the situation of the refugees than on any specific activities on his part. “Since Saturday, however, the German pressure has become so great that they [the refugees] are now being returned. The Swiss are hiding them, if they can, again particularly the church people, especially the Protestants. . . . Urgent appeals have come to me to see if America will not take some of these émigrés and thus make it possible for Switzerland to take more, but so far I can see no other way than the lengthy one of affidavits etc.”75 during his stay in marseille, robert dexter had a meeting with Danny Bénédite. The content of their discussions was not summarized in Dexter’s lengthy trip report, but appeared decades later in Bénédite’s memoir, La Filiere Marseillaise. Bénédite was continuing to run the Centre Americain de Secours since Varian Fry’s departure. The original office was no longer open — the French authorities had shut it down — but Bénédite and some of the former staff, including Anna Gruss and Paul Schmierer, were continuing to help refugees who still depended upon them. Dexter had summoned Bénédite to the Unitarian Service Committee office but then took him to a nearby park and asked him whether he would consider passing on information of interest to the oss. Dexter told him he was interested in information on how Germany was exploiting the French economy, the attitudes of the working classes, and the morale of the clandestine groups. Bénédite told him that he had his doubts but that he would talk it over with his friends. One of his friends was adamantly in favor — and so began a resistance cell linked to the oss that was able to gather considerable information. Bénédite used contacts at the postal service in Paris who had access to important mail and other contacts who knew about freight traffic and industrial production and could provide information on the transport of goods to Germany. marseille, 1942 | 147

During this trip, Dexter also met with René Zimmer, the physician in charge of the Unitarian medical program, and persuaded him to separate the Unitarian office from those of the Jewish Children’s Aid Society. At this time, Dexter also brought Zimmer into his confidence on the espionage work and encouraged him to work with Bénédite. Zimmer agreed with Dexter on all of these plans and thus started a program of covert aid to refugees in hiding, as well as resistance cells and a flow of information that continued for several years.76 From Marseille, Robert Dexter continued on to Switzerland, which the Fields happened to be visiting at that time. In Bern Dexter met with Allen Dulles and brought Noel Field in for a meeting with the oss director. Field and Dulles already knew each other from working at the State Department in the 1920s, but Dexter’s introduction solidified a new role for Field as an oss agent with Dulles’s operations. Noel Field did not join Dulles’s inner circle in Switzerland but became important enough within the oss network to receive a code number, which was 394.77 Clues as to the type of meetings Robert Dexter probably had with potential informants during his 1942 trip to Switzerland is shown in a list of questions that Flora Lewis uncovered from a meeting believed to have taken place during that Swiss visit between Dexter, an oss agent, and Leo Bauer, one of the “leading functionaries” of the German communist party. The written questions asked the identity of several Germans living in Switzerland, the output of factories in southern Germany, the location of arms factories in the Black Forest, damage from air raids over Germany, and the names of officers in German units stationed along the Swiss border.78 Robert Dexter’s meetings with Noel and Herta Field about their refugee work left Robert with a feeling of relief that the Fields’ efforts in support of refugee emigration had been wholehearted. In a letter to Boston headquarters, Robert Dexter wrote, I find, however, that the Fields have been doing much more in that direction [emigration] than I had given them credit for. Most of their immigration work has been directed toward Switzerland and hence we do not hear of it in Boston, but they have done 148 | marseille, 1942

a much better job than appears on the surface. . . . I found at first that they would say little or nothing about what they were doing for fear I would disapprove but when I began to question and they learnt my point of view they opened up. I am sure they will do much more now. I emphasized Seth Gano’s idea which has been from the beginning to save for civilization the brains and leadership of Europe, if not for our country, owing to our restrictions, for the world. Field has built up excellent contacts here and dozens, if not hundreds of capable people are temporarily safe here because of what he had done. . . . The Fields are both fine people; but I am worried about them both. They are overworking and undereating.79 From Switzerland, Robert Dexter telephoned his wife in Lisbon to tell her about what he knew of the situation in France. Elisabeth Dexter alluded to the situation in a letter she wrote that autumn to Hans Subak, but she did not mention what would have been devastating news about the deportation of Jews to Poland. She wrote only, “He [Robert] was much depressed by the situation in France and said that Geneva seems like Heaven after Marseilles.”80 On his way back to Lisbon in October, Robert stopped again in Marseille and met with Bénédite. The position of the refugee organization Centre Americain de Secours had been further jeopardized in September with the outcome of a trial that heard the case of various “revolutionary” colleagues and clients of Bénédite’s, some of whom fortunately were not even in the country. Bénédite and Paul Schmierer decided it was high time to leave Marseille, and they found separate safe houses in the countryside. Bénédite had achieved a great deal in the meantime on his new spying mission for the oss, and came back to Marseille for another meeting with Robert Dexter. Dexter was very pleased about what Bénédite’s network had accomplished already, and asked him how much money they needed for their work. Bénédite decided that they would need forty thousand francs per month to carry out their work, and Dexter agreed and told them that they would be able to collect these funds from a contact at the U.S. consulate.81 During his meeting at the U.S. consulate, one of the consular staff marseille, 1942 | 149

told Bénédite that he was very sorry about the way his government had treated his former boss, Varian Fry. As a pragmatist, Bénédite accepted the apology and threw himself into his new role. During this meeting, Dexter told him that they were interested in knowing about Vichy loyalists on their way to North Africa to join the French troops there. Over the coming weeks, Bénédite and his friends traveled to the port at Toulon to check on the French fleet and to various coastal positions to find out about troop movements to North Africa. The U.S. and Allied forces were amassing troops in North Africa in the hope of winning a decisive campaign to take control of the Mediterranean. Throughout the autumn, Donald Lowrie and other members of the Nimes Committee worked to organize the emigration of five thousand refugee children from France. Lowrie had seen his conversation with Petain as providing an opening for bringing children out. The relief groups had finally won tacit agreement from the State Department to expedite visas for children. But in the end, the Vichy government did not keep its promise. In a confidential letter, Lowrie described the outcome: “Pinkney Tuck had several discussions about this with Laval, whose chief concern about permitting these children’s departure was lest their arrival be the occasion for ‘a violent anti-Vichy speech by Major La Guardia.’ Subsequent conversation with other officials emphasized the same fear that the United States press and radio would take the opportunity for attacks against Laval and the Germans.”82 As of October 7, 1942, Lowrie wrote that eleven thousand people had been deported from the unoccupied zone. Back in New York, Varian Fry also sprang into action. He wrote up a report in September and sent it to Eleanor Roosevelt. It evidently had some effect on the First Lady, because she sent it along to Sumner Welles, the undersecretary of state, and asked, “Could we protest and may I mention in my column?”83 Fry wrote an essay for the New Republic — an essay rare for the American press for its graphic description. The piece was published in December and was followed by a special supplement in the magazine about actions that the United States should take to rescue Jews.84 Fry wrote: “There are some things so horrible that decent men and women find them 150 | marseille, 1942

impossible to believe, so monstrous that the civilized world recoils incredulous before them. The recent reports of the systematic extermination of the Jews in Nazi Europe are of this order. . . . This is the nature of the evidence. Letters, reports, cables all fit together. They add up to the most appalling picture of mass murder in all human history.”85 u.s. troops landed in north africa in early november 1942. Elisabeth Dexter recalled that she was one of the few people in Lisbon to be informed in advance on the exact time and location of the landings, and that she had worked hard to keep the news from everyone, including her husband. Lewis Dexter recalled that his mother never told his father about the North Africa plan, although she worried that Robert would not come back to Portugal in time to avoid the danger in France. She felt that she could not trust him to remain silent on the news.86 The Germans occupied the rest of France on November 11, but Noel and Herta Field made it out at the last minute on the evening before. A telephone call in the evening and a low-voiced warning that the Germans were moving in, impelled them to leave almost everything behind and jump in a horse-drawn buggy that took them to the train station. They were able to board the midnight train to Geneva, but when they arrived at Annemasse on the Swiss border it seemed that they were too late. The Nazis had already occupied all the border towns, and the Vichy police had instructions to prevent any Americans from leaving France. While the local authorities considered these instructions, the Fields sat for hours in the office of the chief of police in Annemasse waiting to hear their fate. In the end, the Annemasse police chief, who did not want to defer to Nazi orders, put the Fields in a Vichy police car and called the Collonge border station with instructions to pass the Fields without questioning or inspection. In the darkness, the passengers were aware that they were being followed, but the roads were narrow and the trailing car was not able to catch up. When they made the final dash to safety across the Swiss border, the Fields could see the passengers in Gestapo uniform pile out of the car and surround the French border marseille, 1942 | 151

official who had allowed them through.87 “So instead of a concentration camp, the Fields went to Geneva,” read the dramatic account in the Christian Register. The Lowries had also made a last-minute escape. The few Americans still left in France were interned in Baden-Baden or exchanged for German prisoners of war. Thousands of refugees and French Jews were in hiding in France — at least six thousand refugee children among them. At this phase of the war, rescue and relief activities fell chiefly on the shoulders of French Jews to help their brethren. The Fields and the Lowries and other members of the Nimes Committee would concentrate on extending lifelines to their contacts in France.

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6

Geneva, Lisbon, and Marseille, 1943

after their late-night escape from marseille, the fields were back in Geneva appreciating the view from their office balcony overlooking the Jet d’Eau on Lake Geneva, and enjoying their first good meals in years. Their new office on the Quai Wilson shared a building with other relief organizations, including the World ymca, and so the Fields did not have to go far to see Donald and Helen Lowrie, who had also fled Marseille at the start of the Debacle, as the French called the German occupation that began in November 1942. With the press of refugees in the region, housing was scarce. The Fields were staying in a girls’ pension with their foster daughter, Erika Glaser. Erika’s Jewish father had joined the Spanish Republican forces some years before. Erika’s parents had entrusted their only daughter into the Fields’ care when Erika had taken ill, and then they had fled to England. Erika was still a teenager when she met the Fields, but she shared Noel Field’s passionate commitment to socialism and his energy. She was pursuing her studies at the University of Geneva, which the Fields had sponsored, and after reuniting with her foster parents, she volunteered her time to work in the committee’s new office. Noel Field wrote to his mother about this seemingly contented period of his life. “Of course it’s not quite the thing, me male alone among a batch of females, from sweet 17 on up. But then, my hair is gray, my wife is with me, and Erica is our daughter, even if only foster. . . . And so, at long last and most unexpectedly, we’re again re-united with our beloved child — and all three of us are very happy over it.”1 After the Fields left Marseille in a hurry that night in November 1942, the physician René Zimmer was left alone to try to maintain the Unitarian Service Committee medical program. He was very anxious

about whether he could keep any of it going — the internment camp work, the Marseille clinic and dispensary. But many of the refugees he had been helping visited him during those first days of occupation and tried to persuade him to stay. The beginning of the German occupation had meant the quick exodus of the remaining American relief workers. The few Americans who had made their preparations too slowly were able to leave through a prisoner exchange or were taken for internment in Baden-Baden. The Quakers were now gone and much of the food supply that they had managed to import into France was now not available. Donald Lowrie was still in touch with the remnants of the Nimes Committee network, but indirectly through couriers from Geneva. Noel and Herta Field lost contact with France for many months.2 In the past, the Fields had taken on the administrative load of running the Unitarian Service Committee in Marseille, leaving the medical care to René Zimmer and his group of specialists. In these difficult times, Zimmer could continue as an individual physician administering care to refugees in camps and in hiding. This role would be important and a source of comfort even to those he could not help directly, but this scale of involvement did not seem to have occurred to this remarkable man who had other ideas on how he would find his way through German occupation. Soon after the Debacle, the prefet de police in Marseille summoned René Zimmer and told him that he would have to disappear if he did not want to get into serious trouble with the German authorities. The prefet, who was obviously sympathetic, further told Zimmer that they would deliberately forget that the Unitarian Service Committee had ever existed in Marseille.3 By early winter, Zimmer closed the medical clinic at rue Fortia. The committee’s less-visited medical dispensary at rue d’Italie was still open. It was now Zimmer’s only facility because the French authorities had requisitioned the small hospital in Toulouse some months before the German occupation.4 René Zimmer decided to visit the mayor of the city of Marseille with a plan of his own. He already knew something about this man, who had in the past expressed his admiration for the Unitarian medical program. With the German presence ominously hanging over the 154 | geneva, lisbon, and marseille, 1943

city, Zimmer outlined to the mayor a plan for the city to front a new, clandestine program. Zimmer offered to lease the dispensary to the city for a token amount for the care of French schoolchildren. The new clinic would actually help these youngsters but would also provide support to a much wider group of people, including adult refugees and other people who were part of Zimmer’s broadening sphere of work. The mayor agreed to the plan, and Zimmer soon recruited a French Christian physician to direct the new clinic, which was named Centre de depistage et de prophylaxis. Despite the new French physician who headed it, René Zimmer remained in charge.5 Zimmer’s original staff had left by this time, but by great fortune, most of the doctors with the Unitarian Service Committee had escaped deportation. The physicians and surgeons Wolff, Mendel, and Landmann had gone into hiding or joined the resistance. Dr. Karp had made it to Lisbon and Dr. Baer to Switzerland. Their first physician, Zina Minor, had gone into hiding earlier in the autumn.6 The director of the Unitarian Service Committee’s kindergarten program, Mlle. Lang, had managed to escape, as did her colleague, Mlle. Monteil. A terrible exception was the case of Mme. Haber, the medical secretary, who was deported along with her husband.7 After the German occupation, René Zimmer had been able to continue working for a time in the French internment camps. With the Unitarian Service Committee identity now retired, Zimmer was able to work simply as a member of the Nimes Committee, which was now almost entirely made up of French citizens. The members of the committee were divided as to whether he should continue to bring medical care and supplies to the camps, which had turned into way stations before deportation, and after several months, Zimmer ended his visits. The deportations had been continuing since the summer of 1942, and the networks to hide children and help adults in hiding were continuing underground. At Robert Dexter’s urging, Zimmer agreed to encourage the Jewish Children’s Organization (ose) to leave their shared premises at that time. Zimmer recalled urging staff at ose and at the umbrella Jewish organization, the Union of French Jews (ugif), not to believe the promises of the German authorities. At geneva, lisbon, and marseille, 1943 | 155

least in retrospect, Zimmer felt that the group homes made it easier for the Germans to find the refugees. “It was the same for the Jewish Homes of U.G.I.F. They were all deported, the Gestapo had only to gather them by hundreds,” Zimmer recalled. In actuality, the Garel network’s efforts to hide children, and Donald Lowrie and the World ymca’s efforts to keep children safe, were having some success. They were keeping track of several thousand Jewish children placed with French families or in relatively safe homes in the Italian zone.8 During this phase of the war, René Zimmer’s network took on entirely new and dangerous work. This work still used the premises of a medical aid program, but in function and legality it moved entirely underground. Robert Dexter had insisted that Zimmer move in this direction and assured him that plenty of money would follow. Dexter had already recruited Danny Bénédite for clandestine missions during the previous year, and now he asked Zimmer to work with Bénédite and what remained of Varian Fry’s original organization. Two others of Fry’s original staff — Anna Gruss and Paul Schmierer — were still helping refugees at the risk of their own lives. What followed was a network that supported both the resistance movement and refugee relief. The collaboration that had begun in the summer of 1940 between two clean-cut Harvard-educated Americans — Waitstill Sharp and Varian Fry — was now being carried out by two very brave Alsatians — René Zimmer and Danny Bénédite. The front of a medical program insured that Zimmer could still meet a large number of refugees, who were for the most part virulently anti-German and anti-Vichy. Foreign recruits who deserted from the German battalions knew that they could receive medical care from René Zimmer. More importantly, Zimmer’s network could help them obtain a new identity, fresh identity papers, ration cards, and different clothing. Zimmer and his network could help them further on their way with instructions for crossing the Spanish border, joining underground movements, or finding the Free French forces.9 Some of the defectors visiting the clinic were fellow Alsatians who naturally trusted Bénédite and Zimmer. Refugees with left-leaning convictions who had received support and encouragement from Noel Field were participating in Zimmer’s activities as well. Among them were German 156 | geneva, lisbon, and marseille, 1943

communist women who socialized with the occupation troops and persuaded them to subvert German army operations. These delicate missions were encouraged by German communist leaders in Switzerland who communicated through Noel Field.10 The men and women that René Zimmer and his doctors had served, and who now were motivated to help with resistance activities, harkened from all regions of Europe and now numbered in the hundreds. They were a motley but expanding group of people who had friends of their own who were in hiding, in internment camps, or forced into German work or military brigades. The members could read and distribute the two clandestine newspapers that Zimmer had helped to fund, which fell into the oss “psychological warfare” rubric. The papers offered news and information about the strengthening Allied forces and high German casualty rate, often penned by German social democrats who could use their inside knowledge to try to demoralize German troops in France. While Zimmer was helping to produce newspapers and information to hurt the morale of German recruits, he was receiving considerable information in return. Refugees and others who came through his clinic had information to pass on, and some of this information was military in nature. For instance, Zimmer and his friends were learning about the current state of morale within various German regiments and work battalions, and about such details as gun positions, the state of fortifications, and troop strength and movements. This information could then travel with trusted people passing over the borders into Switzerland, Spain, and Portugal or across the Mediterranean to North Africa. Among René Zimmer’s large number of clients were the Czechs at the farming community that Donald Lowrie had helped to set up at Vence years earlier. Some of the residents and workers were former Czech soldiers who had not managed to escape on the submarines and boats that the Lowries and Sharps helped organize in 1940. Most likely, this group of people was part of Zimmer’s information network and was tied in with Robert Dexter’s work in communicating with the Czech government-in-exile in London. Some aspects of René Zimmer’s double life had begun years previously, as was hinted at in Howard Brooks’s book, Prisoners of Hope. In 1941 the Zimmers were probably among the small number of people geneva, lisbon, and marseille, 1943 | 157

contributing to the resistance. It is hard to imagine that Brooks’s entrée into the French underground during his visit in 1941 could have been so rapid without the help of the Zimmers, although wisely, he did not note any association in his book. When Howard Brooks had visited France in 1941, he had stayed at the home of René and Fanny Zimmer, at their invitation, and Fanny Zimmer’s resourcefulness as a shopper and a cook saved the stocky, rather food-obsessed Brooks from languishing from hunger. By 1943, when the Zimmers were deeply engaged in underground work, the French resistance movements were gaining ground month by month and had become a broad, popular movement with many separate factions. The Unitarian Service Committee back in the United States may not have known a great deal about what René Zimmer was doing in France. Although the Lisbon office had a communication link with Zimmer, this contact was interrupted some time in 1943.11 Robert Dexter and some of the board certainly knew something about Zimmer’s activities, but if Charles Joy had been fully briefed, this does not show up in the committee’s official newsletter, Standing By, where Joy reported on Zimmer’s work for “indigent French children” and left it at that.12 It was the Unitarian Service Committee board’s position that no public mention should ever be made of the fact that the committee was trying to supply René Zimmer with money or anything else. Any supply line into France would be illegal now that southern France was enemy territory as far as the United States and its Allies were concerned. And of course, news of Zimmer’s network would have put many lives at risk. Undoubtedly, Unitarian readers of Standing By would have been intrigued that American Unitarians were supporting resistance and espionage activities in southern France, but they would have to wait until after the war to hear about it — and then, only obliquely. Raising money for a program that did not officially exist was challenging, and the Boston fund-raisers tried to seek out the kind of donor who would be willing to donate “on the basis of faith not information.”13 Despite the odds, the Unitarians were able to get some money to René Zimmer. He received two payments of fifty thousand French francs that moved from Boston to Noel Field in Geneva and then into France, first through the World ymca and later through the International 158 | geneva, lisbon, and marseille, 1943

Red Cross. Robert Dexter had persuaded the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee to fund Zimmer’s medical program in 1942, and the Unitarian Service Committee continued to receive regular support from the Joint for the medical work in the following year, but for some reason Zimmer did not receive these funds and was chronically short of money. In the autumn of 1942 two of the leaders of what remained of Varian Fry’s organization in Marseille had found themselves in difficult straits. Danny Bénédite and his Jewish colleague and old friend Paul Schmierer had been formally charged with treason in a Vichy-staged trial. They were charged based on a “revolutionary doctrine” found in the offices of the Centre Americain de Secours, and the prosecutor referred to a copy of a document sent in a toothpick inserted in a bar of soap. Bénédite and Schmierer wrote their final letter to the Emergency Rescue Committee in New York soon after, explaining the circumstances and the need to completely dissolve any public tie with the New York–based organization.14 They told the New York office that they would not desert the remaining refugees, although few were left. They hoped to be able to pass some of them to Switzerland and Portugal. With the Allied landings in North Africa in November 1942, and the growing sentiment that the Germans would lose the war, the energy to prosecute Bénédite and the others lost steam. Nonetheless, Bénédite decided to take on a new identity with an assumed name and to move his family into a remote house in the French countryside. He started an enterprise to make and sell charcoal at a site in the woods. This was a far cry from his original plan because he had hoped he could live out the remainder of the war at the Villa Air-Bel outside Marseille. He had made detailed plans for converting all of the flowerbeds to potatoes and vegetables and had dreamed of providing a safe haven for prosecuted Alsatians there. He had even sent a map of his vegetable planting scheme to Varian Fry for comment, and his well-fed friend in New York had studied it wistfully. Bénédite’s new quarters in Vagasse lacked the Belle Epoque grandeur of the Villa Air-Bel and the flamboyant nightlife offered by the Surrealist crowd, but a group of refugees joined the Bénédites in their woodland site and contributed their hard geneva, lisbon, and marseille, 1943 | 159

labor. This small community in the woods became extraordinarily productive. Several score of the Centre Americain de Secours clients and a number of Spanish refugees were able to make a livelihood while living in the barracks they built for themselves there.15 Bénédite was aware of the irony of his new situation. In the past, when he had been working openly in Marseille for refugees, money had been scarce. Now that he was operating “illegally,” money was easy and it was still coming from the home office in New York. His link with the New York office was the bold operative René Bertholet, oss code number 328.16 Bertholet had been an acquaintance of Varian Fry, and upon his return to New York, Fry had relayed to U.S. government contacts the idea that Bertholet could be a very useful source to them. Fry was soon able to tell Bertholet that large sums of money were on their way to him in Switzerland from “Ursula,” the code name for Great Britain, and from a “private” source, which was likely the oss.17 René Bertholet and his wife, Hannah, were socialists originally from Germany, and they concerned themselves with developing a large information network from their base in Bern with resistance and labor groups in France and elsewhere. In their large network, they had a particularly key friend in New York known as “Eva.” Eva was in touch with the oss and may have been on staff, but her or his identity was highly secret.18 She or he was a friend of Max Hoffman, a member of the Unitarian Service Committee staff in Lisbon who was also working for the oss.19 Allen Dulles considered René Bertholet’s information absolutely vital and was willing to use oss codes to send letters and cables back and forth between “René” and “Eva.” These messages included arrangements for funding Danny Bénédite and detailed military information of interest to both American and British intelligence. The information passing from Switzerland to New York was paraphrased to protect the oss codes, but some of it was considered too sensitive for Eva and never made it past the oss staff. With Varian Fry in the United States and Danny Bénédite in the remote countryside, Anna Gruss, who had worked for Varian Fry in 1941, carried much of the load of the original organization, with help from Paul Schmierer. Varian Fry described Anna as “a queer little gnome about four and a half feet tall, with a good heart, a sharp tongue, 160 | geneva, lisbon, and marseille, 1943

an immense capacity for work, and the virtue of genuine innocence of our undercover work.”20 The “innocence” that Fry alluded to had disappeared by the time of the German occupation. Anna Gruss and Paul Schmierer were now attending to people who had relied on the Emergency Rescue Committee and the Unitarians, but added to this group were the people who had been receiving help from the Quakers before the American Friends Service Committee had to leave in the autumn of 1942. Gruss and Schmierer couriered money, ration cards, and supplies to refugees in hiding and helped them to find guides over the borders.21 The group was able to cover some of the refugees’ expenses for guided trips across the border into Switzerland. Bénédite recalls that twentyseven of their clients were able to cross into Switzerland without any problem. For those refugees lying low in France, René Zimmer reported that they were able to help the refugees to develop successful crafts projects and that they were able to sell the goods through local stores. Like the refugees working in the woods with Danny Bénédite, at this point in the war, the main goal for most of those refugees still in southern France was to escape arrest and to find enough food to survive. after his return to the united states in 1942, charles joy was spending much of his time in New York City in an unlikely location in Greenwich Village. A popular Italian restaurant with an ornate façade in the East Village had gone out of business during the Great Depression, and Joy had worked out of offices on the premises of the small building. It so happened that the Free World Association, the organization headed by Louis Dolivet that had fascinated Howard Brooks in 1941, was based at the same location. Joy wrote very little of his family at this point, but it seems unlikely that his wife had followed him to Manhattan, as his youngest daughter was a teenager and would have been completing high school. For Charles Joy, the return to America had been difficult, and in his restlessness, he pursued various plans to get back to work in internment camps. He had the idea that he could better use his time helping refugees stranded in North Africa. A legacy of the Vichy regime was an extensive system of camps in North Africa with living conditions as geneva, lisbon, and marseille, 1943 | 161

bad as, if not worse than, the camps in France. Many of these internees were refugees who had volunteered for the French Foreign Legion or who had been drafted into Vichy work companies.22 As the war continued, the camp population swelled with refugees of all nationalities who had fled France. After the Allied landings in the autumn of 1942, the regions of the French internment camps in North Africa were accessible to American troops, and by the end of 1942 French forces in North Africa were on the Allies’ side.23 The camps in North Africa lacked the support that the Nimes Committee had delivered in southern France. Few relief workers were in place, and the Unitarian Service Committee wanted to send someone there, but in the meantime paid part of the expenses of a social worker based in Casablanca named Mlle. Marin-Chancerelle. American viewers of the film Casablanca, which was released at the end of 1942, were given a tense portrait of the atmosphere in that Vichycontrolled city during the early war years. Aside from “Rick’s Café Americain,” the film’s action took place at the airport, where lucky refugees could board a flight from Morocco to Lisbon and hope to meet up with volunteers like Robert Dexter who could help them leave Portugal if necessary. For refugees still scrambling for visas, some of the pressures were similar to the earlier years in Marseille, but lacking a Varian Fry to help with visas and a René Zimmer to treat their illnesses. The Lisbon office of the Unitarian Service Committee worked to help with the visa applications for some of those stranded in the desert regions of North Africa. In his letters to Boston, Robert Dexter described several of these people, including a Polish colonel who was a “leading democratic figure in Warsaw before the war, and who later organized Polish units in the French Army,” and a “young German naval officer who refuses to serve under the Nazis.” One of the many letters that came to the committee’s Lisbon office in the summer of 1941 described the conditions. “This place is 120 miles from Casablanca; the temperature rises to 122ºF and the average is 104º in the shade; there is a great shortage of water for washing and no drinking water is available, so that we have to buy our own drinking water every day.”24 In hopes of improving his chances of getting to North Africa, Charles Joy tried to pull strings at the oss. He gathered names of refugees 162 | geneva, lisbon, and marseille, 1943

in the North African camps who might have useful information or who had skills in medicine or engineering that might be useful to the American forces. Joy sent the names, along with his comments, to the oss. He applied to the State Department for clearance to work in North Africa and for a priority passport. John C. Hughes at the oss office in Rockefeller Center promised to try to do something.25 Hughes had met Charles Joy after he returned from Europe in 1942 and he had recommended to his oss colleagues that they use Joy in some way.26 Joy was willing to pass on information to the oss but did not seem to take the organization very seriously. When oss staff asked Joy to take the oss training course, he told them that his schedule did not permit it, and although they offered him a shortened version of the course, he told them that he did not have time even for that. While he waited to hear whether he could go to North Africa, Joy struggled with State Department rules that restricted what he said in his letters to Lisbon. The rules seemed intended to shut down any type of work on behalf of refugees in occupied regions. The new policy included the bizarre rule that private organizations, in their correspondence with one another, were not to discuss any refugee cases in enemy territory. In effect, this rule meant that Joy was barred from making any inquiries to Robert Dexter about their refugee cases still in France but also from mentioning refugees who were believed to have escaped to Spain or Switzerland, unless they had definite knowledge that these individuals were now in neutral territory.27 At first, Charles Joy took the restriction on discussing refugees as a tangible rule, but then he decided that the rule was folly to begin with. He could not see any use in refraining from mentioning refugee cases in neutral countries and wondered why Robert Dexter was attempting to conform.28 Joy suggested that with the restrictions on funding and on pursuing refugee emigration, the usefulness of the Lisbon office was greatly diminished, a point he had made before but which infuriated Robert Dexter. In January 1943 Charles Joy personally received a letter from Breckinridge Long at the U.S. State Department saying that he was “unable to make a favorable recommendation” for the Unitarian Service Committee representative in France to borrow money for repayment after geneva, lisbon, and marseille, 1943 | 163

the war.29 Joy was very disappointed by the refusal, which applied to a license for fifty thousand dollars, and by another refusal that pertained to money that the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the Congregationalists wanted to spend in France.30 Joy was correct in worrying that the restrictions were hurting the refugee cause, but at this juncture the Unitarians’ special relationship with the oss was starting to have its payoff. Behind the scenes, the oss saw to it that the Unitarians would get U.S. government approval for money licenses for the French program. Late in 1942 the oss wrote a secret memo explaining that the U.S. Treasury Department would reject the Unitarians’ application for a money license because granting it would look suspicious, but that at a later date the Treasury would grant the license for a substantial sum of money.31 The Unitarians used the licenses to send money to René Zimmer. However, since it was official U.S. policy that American organizations were barred from sending resources to France, they tried to be very quiet about it. The Unitarians were aware that the existence of the French program should only be discussed among an inner circle that knew about the oss work. This circle included Unitarian Service Committee board members Seth Gano, William Emerson, Ray Bragg, Frederick Eliot, and, of course, the Dexters, Joy, and Field. The work with the oss was offering another practical advantage for the Unitarians’ refugee mission. John Hughes of the oss office in New York City provided the Unitarians a direct mail route to Lisbon through the oss pouch, and this route was far superior to the normal mail service. Mail now took about six weeks to cross the Atlantic, so the oss pouch was a lifeline for maintaining communications, although what it offered in convenience, it lacked in privacy. John Hughes occupied himself with reading most of the mail that passed between the Boston and Lisbon offices, and then he took care to try to conceal any sign of his curiosity by resealing and replacing the envelopes that he opened. By early 1943 a colleague of Hughes named Lloyd Hyde had also taken it upon himself to study the Unitarians’ mail and took an interest in the private correspondence between the Unitarian staff and their families in the United States as well as the letters that passed between staff.32 164 | geneva, lisbon, and marseille, 1943

In the spring, the Unitarian Service Committee’s financial position took a dramatic change for the better when they began to receive money from the National War Fund. Due to this fund’s largesse, the committee suddenly had one-half million U.S. dollars to work with in that year, much more than their entire budget since the first days of the committee.33 About one-third of the money was supposed to be spent in North Africa with the rest for work in Portugal and Spain. A small proportion of this fund was used for a stipend and medical care for refugees stranded in Lisbon.34 The International Rescue and Relief Committee (irrc), the new name for the Emergency Rescue Committee after its merger in the spring of 1942, received a similar amount and spent much of it in Switzerland. It may have been more than a coincidence that the beneficiaries of the National War Fund included two of the American organizations most involved in espionage.35 With a much larger budget, the committee could now hire more staff, and they decided to send Howard Brooks back to Europe, this time to the Lisbon office, with the mission of helping Spanish Republicans to immigrate to Latin America. The Unitarians could now also afford to support a larger program in Switzerland, whereas before they had struggled to cover the Fields’ office and living expenses in the pricey city of Geneva. At this time, the committee even considered opening a new office in South America. Charles Joy was sorely disappointed when he opened his mail one day to learn that his long-standing request to work in North Africa had been denied. The U.S. mission in North Africa was a military one and the number of American civilians who had been allowed into the region was very few, although the Quakers had been permitted to send a representative. Joy consoled himself by leaving at the end of June for a trip to the Dominican Republic and Ecuador to scope out the idea of opening an outpost for the committee in the Ecuadorian capital. Ecuador had offered several hundred visas for European refugees who were willing to work in agriculture. A small settlement in Ecuador had been established for Republican refugees from Spain who could attest that they were not communists. Some of the refugees were Europeans who had first settled in the Dominican Republic and then traveled to Ecuador. geneva, lisbon, and marseille, 1943 | 165

By the time Joy reached Quito, however, he felt that a Unitarian office in Ecuador’s capital was no longer needed because he expected that North American and other visas would become available for the relatively few refugees who could still leave Europe. In Ecuador, Joy visited Arthur Fried, who had been representing Jewish organizations and the Unitarian interests in the country, and Joy decided to leave the program at its small scale in Fried’s capable hands. The trip itself was one of Charles Joy’s greatest adventures, and he enjoyed recounting all the conveyances he used in his journey including, planes, trains, steamers, buses, taxis, riverboats, steel cows, jeeps, horses, mules, and Indian dugouts. These travels presaged his later life, which was devoted to aid work in Africa and to writing travel books for children.36 meanwhile in lisbon, the dexters were continuing to concern themselves with a number of families waiting in residence force at Caldas da Rainha and Ericeira north of Lisbon. Caldas da Rainha, the “Queen’s Hot Waters,” had developed as a spa town, whereas Ericeira was a small fishing village that later became a popular surfing beach. During the war years, however, the refugees did not enjoy the resort aspects of the sites and were barred from any economic activities. Among the people waiting were some of Varian Fry’s clients who had been there for years. Others had recently arrived in Portugal after crossing Spain or disembarking from boats from North Africa. The Dexters had tried to help with the various problems of those waiting in the country and those still trying to arrive. At one point a ship from North Africa carrying a load of refugees had been refused permission to dock, and set anchor off shore from Lisbon. Elisabeth Dexter had gone out in a small vessel to meet the passengers and to try to arrange for supplies, but she had broken her ankle during the trip and spent many weeks afterward laid up in her hotel room. In early 1943 the Dexters heard from their daughter, Harriet, that she was pregnant. There was no need for Elisabeth to return on her account, Harriet assured her mother. Her husband, who was working as an army chaplain, would be able to take some leave to be with her. Robert met the news with impatience and sent off a letter asking why she could not have been more sensible in her timing and waited a bit. 166 | geneva, lisbon, and marseille, 1943

22. Ilse Subak, Karl Subak, and Harriet Dexter, Belmont, Massachusetts, winter 1942–43. Courtesy of the author.

Some of the correspondence passed through Charles Joy, who weighed in that Elisabeth was needed in Lisbon and that Harriet could cope without her, though as a postscript he wrote that the matter was none of his business and Elisabeth should do what she thought best.37 Elisabeth probably agreed that her daughter did not really need for her to go. She herself had given birth to her first child without geneva, lisbon, and marseille, 1943 | 167

a doctor, nurse, or anyone else on the scene. The Dexters had been living in Montreal at the time and a large snowstorm had blocked the roads the evening that their son, Lewis, was born. Elisabeth had let her husband sleep through the night and had presented him with their infant son in the morning.38 In this case, however, the upcoming birth of their first grandchild was an excellent excuse to return to the United States and talk to John Hughes and his friends in Rockefeller Center. Elisabeth arrived in New York in April and appeared as the featured speaker at a private luncheon at the Hotel Commodore. Varian Fry’s former organization, the irrc, was the sponsor for the event. Frank Kingdon, Varian Fry’s former boss, invited some of their contacts at the oss to attend quietly, and promised not to appeal for funds during the meeting. Kingdon introduced Elisabeth Dexter as the irrc’s representative in Europe: “During these months Mrs. Dexter was in daily contact with the stream of refugees of all nations who succeeded in making their way over the French frontier. She has seen and spoken to hundreds of men and women who have left France illegally since last November, and has better and more authoritative information on the present situation of the political refugees than any one else in this country.”39 By now, Elisabeth Dexter was a celebrated visitor at the oss and was ushered into the Rockefeller Center offices of one after another director. During the past year, she had been briefed on the most sensitive military information, and her discretion had been tested to the extent that she was believed to have succeeded in remaining reticent on oss matters even around her own husband. It was said that she was one of only two Americans in Portugal to have been told of the exact day and location of the American landings in North Africa in November 1942, information that had been withheld even from General Charles de Gaulle.40 On this trip, Elisabeth met Gerald Mayer (number 678), the head of the Office of War Information responsible for the U.S. propaganda program, who apparently “thoroughly enjoyed” meeting her.41 That spring, she also saw her original contact, John Hughes, the New York textile manufacturer who had been coordinating aspects of Allen Dulles’s fast-growing program.42 Elisabeth also met Toni Sender, an exiled Social Democratic Party leader from Germany and one of the 168 | geneva, lisbon, and marseille, 1943

highest-ranking women in the oss. Sender was ostensibly running a private organization that studied European labor, but the organization was actually funded by the oss, and Sender was reporting to Arthur Goldberg (number 309), chief of the oss labor division.43 This division was trying to develop a plan to sabotage German industry by encouraging slowdowns and more direct acts of resistance. Arthur Goldberg’s missions were ambitious and involved the Unitarians in several projects. Goldberg was a labor lawyer from Chicago originally, and would eventually become a U.S. Supreme Court justice. As was the case for most of the officers at the oss, Goldberg had few European contacts of his own in the early days of the war. He relied to a great extent on the ideas and contacts of an exiled European socialist named Paul Hagen (alias Karl Frank) who had helped start the Emergency Rescue Committee with Varian Fry in 1940. The Labor Section of the oss, under Arthur Goldberg, eventually established contacts with European trade unions and other foreign workers and infiltrated agents into Germany, in part by parachute. The program included channels to help underground labor groups communicate with governments-in-exile in London.44 Eventually, tens of thousands of workers in Europe were directly or indirectly spying for the oss.45 Elisabeth Dexter agreed to provide Toni Sender, the exiled labor leader from Germany, with the names and dates of arrival in the United States of potentially useful refugees. She also agreed to do some of her own research on the morale of labor groups under the Nazis.46 These years had evolved into the most exciting of her life, and the responsibilities that she faced were much greater than she could ever have imagined. When she had joined Robert in Lisbon several years earlier, she had written a self-deprecating letter to her friends promising that she would not try to take on roles that were more appropriate for a man, such as talking to government officials. By now, Elisabeth was doing just that, and her U.S. government contacts considered her to be their most important contact among the Unitarians. Although she was female, the Dexters were aware that the name Elisabeth Anthony Williams Dexter sat well with the Ivy League East Coast club of the oss. In early July, Elisabeth left the United States to rejoin Robert in Lisbon. Although Robert was not privy to many of the discussions his geneva, lisbon, and marseille, 1943 | 169

wife was engaged in, he had a growing portfolio of oss projects himself. One of his missions was to collect information for Arthur Goldberg on Franco’s relationship with Hitler. The United States was worried that with the large Allied troop commitment in North Africa, Germany might strike the Allied forces from the rear. They were concerned that it was possible that Franco would allow Germany to use Spanish territory as a staging area.47 From his base in New York, Arthur Goldberg recruited Spanish Republican exiles in America to return to Spain via Morocco and to investigate German activities once they arrived home.48 With their ties to Spanish Republicans and their knowledge of the Spanish refugees leaving Lisbon for New York, the Unitarians were well placed to tell Arthur Goldberg about various refugees of interest. A refugee that Varian Fry, and later the Unitarians, had hired earlier in the war, Max Hoffman, had a direct link to the oss from his base in Lisbon. He had spent several years in Portugal interviewing refugees and passing information to the Dexters and the oss.49 He was also a friend of Eva, the secret bridge between labor groups in Europe and the United States and the vital source for Allied intelligence.50 Another mission that fell into Robert Dexter’s lap, because of the Unitarians’ long association with Czechoslovakia, was a project to help scattered Czechs communicate with their government-in-exile in London. A contact of Robert’s who was helping the oss was a Lieutenant Katek, who was already familiar with René Zimmer and Donald Lowrie’s work and wished to bring Dexter more closely into the oss Czech program.51 Part of this program was to inject a trusted Czech exile into Spain to seek out Czech refugees loyal to the Czech government-in-exile. A Czech Protestant minister named Blahoslav Hruby had worked with the Unitarians and was recruited for the job. Hruby had been in southern France at the time that Martha and Waitstill Sharp were preparing to bring the Feuchtwangers out in the summer of 1940. He had been a quiet escort on the trip and had been able to emigrate to the United States not long afterward. Several years later he took the oss training program, and although he did not pass with flying colors, they trusted him enough to send him to Spain to help the Czechs.52 Robert Dexter was against this particular mission because he believed that a Protestant minister would be regarded with 170 | geneva, lisbon, and marseille, 1943

high suspicion in Catholic Spain and turned away at the border. Dexter made his views known during a visit to London in that year, and his comments were sent to Whitney Shepardson, code named “Jackpot,” who was the head of the secret intelligence service at the oss.53 The oss was willing to send Hruby despite Dexter’s objections, but Hruby was not able to complete his mission because the necessary visas did not arrive in time. During the year 1943, Robert and Elisabeth Dexter both expanded their work with American espionage. Although they were rumored to have been working in British espionage as well, records from the British Secret Service suggest that this relationship did not materialize. The British Secret Service had spent some time trailing Robert Dexter when he visited London in 1943 and they wondered whether they should worry about his alleged ties to communists. One report went, “Active anti-fascists used to be regarded by the American immigration people and by most of their foreign service as potential anarchists and assassins so I imagine dexter has had a pretty uphill task.”54 Their reports on the background of Robert Dexter and “Martha Sharpe” were highly inaccurate and seemed to reflect an indirect knowledge. However, the reports were increasingly sympathetic: “A person who has conversed with Dr. Dexter a good many times informs me that he is an extremely religious and kind-hearted man. It is possible, therefore, if ever he did actually give any assistance to Spanish Communists (as described in 55a), he did so for purely humanitarian reasons, and not that either he or his Unitarian organization have any sympathy with the Left-wing movements as such.”55 At the end of the war, Kim Philby, who was later exposed as a secret Soviet agent, directed his staff not to pass on to the U.S. authorities their reports on the Unitarian Service Committee.56 as far as varian fry’s former organization the irrc in new York was concerned, they were content to cultivate indirect contact with southern Europe through Elisabeth Dexter and the other Unitarians. The man who had started the whole fantastic enterprise for them was still in New York City, but the staff of the organization currently had no formal association, although they occasionally ran geneva, lisbon, and marseille, 1943 | 171

into Varian Fry in the halls of the Harvard Club in Manhattan. Fry had spent most of 1942 writing his book about his time in Marseille, entitled Surrender on Demand. But fearing that it would put colleagues and refugees in southern France at risk, he had resisted publishing it, despite pressure from his editor. He allowed his first publisher to cancel his contract when he insisted that the book must wait until France was completely liberated.57 Random House agreed to publish the book on a delayed time frame, and Fry tried to be responsive to the demands of editors who wanted a streamlined adventure story. In his final draft, he left out passages about the work of many of his colleagues, including Waitstill Sharp. Fry retained a few sentences about Charles Joy, but the Unitarian minister comes through as a rather fusty character who is fazed by the hardships of traveling through wartime France on dirty, packed trains, a caricature rather untrue to Joy’s hardy nature.58 Nonetheless, Fry’s account is charming and rich in the atmosphere of wartime Marseille and the Villa Air-Bel that he shared with the Bénédites and some of his most famous clients. During this time, Varian Fry was also publishing articles in the Nation and the New Leader and more frequently in the New Republic, which made him a contributing editor. What might have continued as a successful career as a political pundit, however, deteriorated due to his tendency toward heroic self-sabotage. In early 1943 he resigned as contributing editor at the New Republic over an essay that appeared in the magazine about the Soviet Union, and which he took to be overly charitable to the Stalinist regime.59 In 1943 labor groups set up a new organization called the American Labor Conference on International Affairs and installed Varian Fry as their executive secretary.60 This position, too, did not last long, in part because he did not remain in the good graces of his benefactor, Mary Jayne Gold, despite the fact that Fry had patched up their relationship since returning from France. Fry liked to describe the wealthy American as the aptly named “Gold,” and observed that she had much improved herself since arriving back in the United States. Gold was applying herself in a training program in international administration, a specialized master’s degree that the Unitarian Service Committee had 172 | geneva, lisbon, and marseille, 1943

helped to found at Columbia University. Gold was hoping to return to Europe and repeat the highlight of her life, the year she had spent in Marseille in 1940-41 working with Varian Fry, Albert Hirschmann (“Beamish”), Miriam Davenport, and her other friends. With the American Labor Conference on International Affairs launched, however, Gold soon decided that Fry and his projects were too conservative, and so she pulled her resources from the organization.61 Varian Fry had not given up on finding more active work and had sought a staff position with the oss. They turned him down, although the easygoing John Hughes had advocated hiring him. “Mr. Fry is probably the only qualified American expert on the means of moving the people around the continent of Europe despite regulations and occupations. His experience might be of great value to us,” wrote Hughes.62 However, a famously bad recommendation from the former treasurer of the Emergency Rescue Committee characterized Varian Fry as “highly unstable.” This missive had helped to quash Fry’s hopes to contribute further to wartime espionage.63 The oss, somewhat cautious in its hiring, did not change its mind about Varian Fry, but they did recruit several of his former staff, including Marcel Verzeano, Albert Hirschmann, and some of his former clients, such as Dyno Loewenstein. Varian Fry had already been rejected for service in the U.S. Army for a digestive problem that they took to be “psychological in origin.” His marriage, which had been fraying during his year in Marseille, came to an end after he returned to New York. Fry began a long period of psychoanalysis in 1943, which he found to be fascinating, to the bafflement of his European friends suffering in the trenches in France. This period seemed to be the beginning of a turning away from his earlier intense engagement in world affairs. rené zimmer’s work continued effectively, both his underground and his other projects. Repeating some aspects of the starvation study that he had supervised in 1941 and 1942, the clinic that Zimmer oversaw from behind the scenes examined tens of thousands of schoolchildren for signs of malnutrition and illness. Not surprisingly, René Zimmer continued to be popular with what was left of Marseille’s geneva, lisbon, and marseille, 1943 | 173

French administration. They did not give him any problems for his other work, of which they had some understanding. Zimmer’s patients now included Spanish refugees who had been left without support after the Mexican embassy closed, and the group that he was most proud of helping, inmates of political prisons. He was able to gain access to the political prisoners through the French Red Cross. The year 1943 had seen a tremendous strengthening of the resistance movement in France. René Zimmer was well poised to help with the medical aspects of resistance, just as he was already involved in propaganda and subterfuge. Part of Zimmer’s program was to support a military hospital for the Maquis. The Unitarian Service Committee’s dispensary on rue d’Italie still had valuable medical supplies and instruments, and Zimmer was able to use these stocks to attend to the needs of some of the armed French forces in their encampments in the countryside. However, as 1943 drew to a close, and Zimmer’s involvement in supporting the resistance grew, he feared that he had gone in too deep. Underground groups had freed a large group of political prisoners from the French prison known as Castres and had turned the group over to Zimmer for care. The group numbered over one hundred men needing food, clothing, and identity papers, as well as medical care. Zimmer and his network were already facing depleted supplies. Desperate, Zimmer sent a plea for funds to Noel Field in Switzerland, and Allen Dulles transmitted the message on to Robert Dexter. Field wrote, “Dr. Zimmer is doing first rate work and is in contact with both foreign and French groups. However, he is short of money. Subject to conditions set up by you or me, e.g. for relief for refugees lately freed from the Castres prison, or for medical assistance for Maquis, kindly authorize payment of the money under discussion to Dr. Zimmer.” Probably without Noel Field’s knowledge, Allen Dulles had added a comment of his own: “Because of the necessity for prior organization, it is improbable that a large amount can be wisely spent before the 1st of the year. Neither blocked francs nor dollars can be used. Moreover, the entire matter necessitates careful handling with Swiss authorities.”64 Whatever the “careful handling” called for, René Zimmer never received these funds, to his great disappointment.65 174 | geneva, lisbon, and marseille, 1943

by 1943 the tensions that had been developing between the Dexters and Charles Joy grew to the point where they came to dominate the Dexters’ correspondence. During their first stay in Portugal in 1941, the Dexters had openly admired Joy’s accomplishments in Lisbon. They had wondered how he had managed without much clerical help, money, or even heating fuel. Now they seemed to think that Joy was insubordinate in a general way and said as much in their letters back to headquarters. Both Robert and Elisabeth were writing letters outlining complaints against Joy and urging board members to explain to Joy that he needed to take more direction from Robert in Lisbon. Many of the Dexters’ letters went privately to Seth Gano, who was vetting the committee’s confidential material. Gano gave the Dexters little encouragement and wrote back that Joy was not shirking his responsibilities for raising money.66 Gano’s next letter was more critical of the Dexters: “If on the contrary each person devotes himself to panning somebody else for sins of omission or commission or for such suspected sins, we shall arrive nowhere.”67 Later, Gano wrote that it did not help that the Dexters were making continual reference to Joy’s cable about liquidating the Lisbon office. The cable was “water under the dam,” according to Gano, and the Dexters seemed to be building up the idea that Joy’s reference to the invasion of France in November 1942 as a calamity revealed that Joy was interested in the work in concentration camps to the exclusion of his interest in refugees and immigration cases. Even if he were more interested in camp work, wrote Gano, Joy had wholeheartedly cooperated with the Dexters for the relief of all the refugees in Portugal for whom they were working.68 Seth Gano added his own complaints. Robert Dexter was mentioning René Zimmer and the “Singer money” in his letters to Boston.69 The Singer money referred to Vichy’s earlier freezing of the Unitarian money, which was to have been transferred through a private company. Because the matter referred to spending money in occupied France, the reference was making Gano nervous, as he himself was becoming more involved in oss meetings. Several of Gano’s letters reminded Robert Dexter not to mention the French money, and Gano’s round geneva, lisbon, and marseille, 1943 | 175

of correspondence was posing its own problems because, if the oss had not noticed Robert Dexter’s indiscretion in the first instance, they would learn of it on their reading of the Unitarians’ mail.70 On the face of it, Charles Joy seemed to shrug off the various accusations and continue as a loyal deputy. He may not have seen much of the correspondence from the Dexters that arrived in Seth Gano’s private office. His main concern was that he felt that his experience was wasted in the United States and he wanted to return to more active duty abroad. Since his application to work in North Africa had failed, he hoped to return to Lisbon. In late 1943 Charles Joy made a move to push the Dexters out of Portugal entirely. He wrote to his contact Frederick Dolbeare at the oss office in London and suggested that he could take over the Dexters’ informant work. He even hinted that if the oss agreed, he could use this role as an excuse to urge the Unitarian Service Committee board of directors to transfer the Dexters from Europe back to the United States. Joy explained to Dolbeare that he should be in Lisbon because his title was European commissioner and that Robert Dexter should be in Boston because he was director of the Unitarian Service Committee. Joy’s suggestion did not have the intended consequence; oss notes between John Hughes and Fred Dolbeare hinted that they found some entertainment value in the tension between the Unitarians’ senior staff.71 Instead, Joy received a stiffly worded reply from Fred Dolbeare to the effect that as long as Mrs. Dexter was in Lisbon, it did not much matter who else was there.72 Charles Joy would remain in the United States for the time being, because he had found no alternative. The Dexters would remain greatly perturbed by what they saw as Joy’s insubordination. By the end of 1943, sixty refugees under the care of the Unitarians had managed to leave Lisbon during that year, according to the committee’s own count.73 About half of these people departed for the United States and one-quarter went to Latin America. A handful of families were among Varian Fry’s original clients and had been waiting in Portugal for years.74 The program entrusted to Howard Brooks to enable larger-scale emigration of Spanish Republicans to Mexico and other destinations was stalled, but about ten Spanish families did depart in 1943.75 176 | geneva, lisbon, and marseille, 1943

By 1943 five men on the Unitarian Service Committee executive board, as well as the Dexters, Noel Field, Charles Joy, and Howard Brooks, were all involved in espionage. Seth Gano, William Emerson, and Ray Bragg were all briefed on the general commitment to the oss. Even Frederick May Eliot, the president of the American Unitarian Association, was in the know. Martha Sharp, however, seemed to be entirely innocent on the subject, as neither Charles Joy nor any of the board of directors chose to confide in her on the matter. Her exclusion appears rather arbitrary because she probably would not have objected to the work on principle, given that it helped provide a lifeline to refugees and strengthened the resistance to German occupation. During her work with Donald Lowrie in the summer of 1940 to bring Czech soldiers and their families away from France, Martha had been willing to mix in with military projects and she had kept many secrets. Most likely, Robert Dexter did not want to recruit her for any of the oss projects, and her allies on the committee board did not think it was necessary to tell her anything about it. during this year of 1943, martha sharp was continuing to attend the case committee meetings and to raise money, but she wanted to do much more. In the summer, she decided to take a risk and found a new organization, “Children to Palestine.” The name of her program was descriptive of its purpose, as it supported travel expenses for Jewish orphans in Europe to find their way to Palestine and helped them with housing and job training when they arrived. Martha Sharp had in mind an interdenominational Christian program that would be the American support for the Youth Aliyah program run by Hadassah, the Zionist women’s organization. Martha Sharp’s idea for Children to Palestine had started to form in 1941 when she had attended a dinner at a local chapter of Hadassah. She later recalled that she had been “thrilled” to hear about Hadassah’s work and had immediately pledged to spend at least one month of her time each year toward the program’s goals. By now, Martha Sharp was a very experienced and effective speaker and her numerous appearances did little to blunt the energy of her geneva, lisbon, and marseille, 1943 | 177

performance, which was described as “riveting” and as a “tense recital.” Her talks drew upon her ongoing convictions and her past experiences in Czechoslovakia and France.76 Martha Sharp was able to recruit both funds and influential Unitarians for Children to Palestine. She asked one of the most esteemed religious leaders in New England — Samuel Atkins Eliot — to be director. Eliot was already over eighty years old, but to everyone’s surprise he quickly agreed, with the reply, “When the Queen commands, ’tis mine to obey.”77 He further explained, “I had been doing what was possible, by speaking and writing to check the spread of the poison of Anti-Semitism, but I had been completely baffled in the search for some sensible and practical way to help uprooted and plundered Jews. The doors were closed and one could only protest and sign more or less important petitions and assert one’s indignation and resentment. But here opened a door of opportunity.”78 The door of opportunity that Eliot was referring to included the movement of young people out of hiding in France toward ports that could take them to Palestine. At this time, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee had leased a number of Portuguese boats to take refugees out of Lisbon. The ships, including the large ss Nyassa, were now steaming toward Haifa, the port in Palestine, instead of toward New York City, which had taken in very few refugees since the U.S. entry into the war. Martha Sharp’s efforts during her speaking tour in the autumn of 1943 brought in money at a level that far surpassed the Unitarian contribution to the Unitarian Service Committee. In the first year, Children to Palestine had raised about fifty-three thousand dollars.79 Eventually, Children to Palestine developed education materials about Palestine for children in American Sunday schools, and many of these children helped with the collection projects. Samuel Eliot soon turned his directorship over to a younger person, but one of the first communities to be founded by Children to Palestine was named the Samuel Eliot Village.80 Martha Sharp’s activities were a tremendous boost of morale for her collaborators in Palestine, especially the founder of the Hadassah movement, Henrietta Szold. A year before her death in 1945, Szold 178 | geneva, lisbon, and marseille, 1943

wrote to Martha Sharp: “I cannot recall many incidents in my life so stirring, so faith-inspiring, as the contents of your letter, as the undertaking you have entered upon and influenced other[s] to espouse. . . . The acceptance by yourself and your distinguished Committee of the Youth Aliyah rehabilitation idea of the harassed Jewish people facing half-extermination, is the outstanding assurance that faith in the brotherhood of man is founded on a rock which neither Tammerlane, nor Attila, nor Hitler can dislodge.”81 Martha Sharp’s work with Children to Palestine and with Hadassah was the start of collaborations with these organizations and with the state of Israel that lasted long after the war. in the spring of 1943, noel and herta field had an emotional reunion with Joseph Weill, their mentor from their days in Marseille. Using an alias, Weill and his family had finally fled France and successfully crossed into Switzerland. In Geneva he had resumed working for ose, the Jewish children’s organization, and was starting new medical projects for refugees in the Swiss camps. Many of the original staff of ose were still in France working to help Jewish children hide and to assume new identities. The underground channels, such as the Garel network, were well underway, and from Switzerland, Joseph Weill and Donald Lowrie were still trying to support the efforts to keep the children safe. Joseph Weill personally liked Noel Field and had been impressed with his passion for talking about any number of subjects, although he did not share Field’s strong interest in politics. It was Weill’s impression on that day of their meeting in Geneva that the Fields had lost some of their confidence and seemed at loose ends. They seemed to be experiencing some of the same feelings of letdown and frustration that Varian Fry and Charles Joy had felt when they returned to safe surroundings. Noel Field confided some of these feelings to his mother: “I think of that past with a growing nostalgia, for though it was hard and often depressing, never in our lives before had we been so intensely alive and so — if I may say so — worth while. And I hate to think of all the things left undone, and the many hearts that must be crying for us in their still greater need.”82 geneva, lisbon, and marseille, 1943 | 179

It was also more difficult for the Fields to get a program underway, this time around, in an expensive country with a well-organized relief program. They were looking after some of the Unitarian clients who had crossed the border, but not many had shown up at their office. They were considering starting a program to provide aid to refugees who were not interned but who lacked the funds and connections needed to get medical care. But the Fields did not have resources for a large program.83 The Swiss camps were already providing quality medical treatment. Therefore, it was a relief when Joseph Weill invited the Fields to resume collaborating with him, and they immediately agreed. At this stage, Noel Field began several projects with Weill not aimed at providing medical care, but at helping doctors who were refugees. The vast system of internment and work camps in Switzerland, which were much better supplied with food and resources than any of the French camps, also had well-organized medical care. However, as a physician himself, Joseph Weill felt bad for the many refugee doctors who had been whiling away several years in various camps or hiding places without opportunities to practice their profession. One of Field’s projects with Weill was to help foreign doctors interned in the Swiss camps to stay current with the medical profession. They set up a specialized medical reading library, and a seminar and visiting program with many of the major Swiss universities.84 Noel Field soon added another morale-building project of his own, a rest/vacation home where refugees could spend a few days every so often. For families living in separate camps for men and women, the Unitarians’ rest home, called the Beau Sejour, provided a way for families to spend a few pleasant days together.85 The Fields were very proud of the Beau Sejour, although they were people who rarely enjoyed leisure time themselves. The collaboration between Joseph Weill and Noel Field seemed to be going well, but one evening Weill had an unexpected visit from a man who worked for the Swiss bureau responsible for refugees. The man, Pierre Picart, told Weill that he had better drop Noel Field because of his communist ties.86 Weill was torn. He had already seen hints of Noel Field’s strong interest in the Soviet Union and in the Spanish Republican cause. On the other hand, he had a great deal of 180 | geneva, lisbon, and marseille, 1943

experience working with the Fields and knew that the oss had brought him into their network. If Noel Field was acceptable to a U.S. government agency, why should he take issue because of his politics, Weill reasoned. Furthermore, he recalled that the Lowries still trusted him and that Field was still working with Robert Dexter, who Weill viewed as closely tied to the oss inner circle. Weill visited Ross MacClelland of the American Friends Service Committee and asked his opinion. MacClelland spoke long and convincingly of the integrity of the work that Noel Field and the Unitarians had been doing. That conversation helped make up his mind, and Weill decided that he would continue working with Noel Field as before. However puzzled Joseph Weill may have been about the seeming contradictions between Noel Field’s personal politics and his affiliations, he would have been astonished if he had known the extent to which the oss embraced Noel Field’s comrades. Through Noel Field, Allen Dulles was funding French communist groups in Switzerland and in their occupied homeland. Noel Field had finally resumed contact with René Zimmer in Marseille during the summer of 1943 with the assistance of a communist operative with ties to the French resistance.87 Also, Allen Dulles was supporting a mission to help Noel Field pass exiled German communists back into Germany to undertake various acts of sabotage against the Hitler regime. The particular politics of Noel Field’s contacts were not of concern to Dulles as much as their potential to help with oss plans for “northward penetration.” Noel Field’s life at this point might have evolved into high adventure both in his refugee work and in his clandestine projects, but for a serious illness that suddenly confined him to a hospital bed in Basel. He had contracted an eye disease and was laid up in bed for several months. With the advance of Germany into northern Italy in late 1943, Switzerland received a fresh wave of refugees who had opposed Mussolini. From his bedside, Noel Field added these refugees to his portfolio of projects and left-leaning clients.88 Noel Field eventually joined up with Donald Lowrie and, along with Joseph Weill and others, worked to bring small groups of people into better hiding places and across borders.89 Donald Lowrie and the Nimes Committee had finally been able to get five thousand American geneva, lisbon, and marseille, 1943 | 181

visas approved for Jewish children in France, guaranteed by President Roosevelt in October 1942.90 All thoughts of a legal exit for the children ended, however, with Vichy prime minister Pierre Laval reversing his promises and with the Allies landing in North Africa. They were now working to get extensions and to use the U.S. visas to convince the Swiss government to allow the children to stay in Switzerland temporarily. As many as a thousand children had crossed into Switzerland already, Donald Lowrie estimated in early 1943. In a letter to the New York office of the World ymca, he wrote, “It is one of the characteristics of life in Geneva now that we are constantly in the midst of undertakings, mostly concerning southern France, for the clandestine passage of information (or even people) in one direction or the other.”91 In his letter, Lowrie hints of a clandestine channel of information from the Unitarians in Lisbon to his office in Switzerland, which he hopes his friends will use to lessen the isolation he and Helen were feeling. “We would like so much to know what our nation is doing, how life feels at home, in the midst of war. If you could write of this and get it as least as far as Bob Dexter, it might eventually reach us, although even he reports that he has had no mail from home for two months.”92 At first, Donald Lowrie had been hopeful that the Germans would be too busy looking for de Gaullists to go after the refugees and the networks helping them. Indeed, the 1942 directive to close the World ymca office in Marseille was forgotten in a drawer for some time. But as the months went on, many in the rescue networks were themselves deported.93 Many of their closest collaborators were driven to go underground and take on assumed names. The World ymca and its network were still relying on escape routes worked out by the French Protestant network cimade. Genevieve Pittet was still overseeing the border crossings into Switzerland. In the summer of 1943, she decided that the short routes from Annemasse into Geneva were becoming too dangerous, and she moved her route to a long trek over the Jura Alps into Switzerland, north of Geneva. Her new route started in Saint-Claude and twenty miles later ended in Rousses on the Swiss border, today a popular cross-country skiing center.94 However, after witnessing the deportations from the French camps in the previous year, the rescue workers had no illusions about the fate 182 | geneva, lisbon, and marseille, 1943

of most European Jews. Lowrie sent another letter about the developments: “Then there is the ever-present horror of the Jewish deportations. By underground channels and two or three miraculous escapes we probably know more than you do at home of the unspeakable atrocities accompanying this slaughter of millions. For the past few years our work for refugees has brought us into specially close contact with Jews and helping these people has led to many sincere friendships. Knowing all that has happened and that still threatens those left alive in occupied territory shadows much of our thinking here.”95 One of Donald Lowrie’s reports about the deportations from France reached oss director William Donovan in Washington dc. Ironically, it was Donovan’s shock over hearing about the deportation of children in one of Lowrie’s reports that led to a demand to his deputy, Allen Dulles, for advice on what to do. Dulles did know a great deal about the deportations. In fact, Donald Lowrie had become one of his agents by this time and had received the code number 489.96 In reply to Donovan’s request that summer for suggestions on aiding four thousand children sent in boxcars to unknown points, Dulles replied, “A problem of this type hardly come [sic] within the scope of my activities here and since similar conditions exist in virtually all the countries which are under German domination, its ramifications are broad.”97 Ironically, the original source for the information in the autumn of 1942 on Hitler’s intention to kill all remaining Jews was a consultant to Allen Dulles, a German industrialist named Eduard Schulte, whose identity remained secret for many decades.98 His information on the “final solution” had been relayed to the West through Gerhard Riegner, representative of the World Jewish Congress in Switzerland, and then to Rabbi Stephen Wise in New York. Schulte eventually moved to Switzerland and joined Allen Dulles’s widening circle of agents and contacts. By the end of 1943, Donald Lowrie’s cables to New York were entirely grim, reporting that five of the ose staff had been deported while rescuing children, that all the children’s homes were in dissolution, and mass deportations were taking place from Nice. More U.S. visas for children were needed, including visas for fifteen hundred geneva, lisbon, and marseille, 1943 | 183

newly abandoned children. The underground networks were now protecting at least sixty-five hundred children, most of them still in hiding in France.99 As 1943 wore on, the reality of the genocide taking place in Europe was seeping into the consciousness of the wider American public and the U.S. government. A more aggressive pressure campaign began taking shape in July, under the leadership of the “Bergson Group,” called the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe. The group began a media campaign with full-page ads in national newspapers that were so heart-wrenching in their message that it was impossible for many people to remain unaffected, including the president of the United States. Eleanor Roosevelt confided that she had noticed that her husband was deeply disturbed by them.100 Murmurs of real interest in the U.S. Congress were stirring, but the various drafts of legislation still faced an uncertain future. Ironically, it was the bureaucratic delay of a money transfer that ultimately turned the tide, because it enraged certain parties and forced the question of rescue at the highest level of government. The granting of money licenses was the type of permission that the Unitarians had sought during the war and in recent months had obtained successfully for their work in Europe. The committee had received licenses from May 1943 to January 1944 for $108,580 to Switzerland.101 The World Jewish Congress, however, was forced to wait for a license, and the project they had in mind was of a large scale and of vital importance. They needed the money to help evacuate seventy thousand Romanian and French Jews. The key difference in the speed with which the organizations received licenses seemed related to their U.S. government connections. The Unitarians were on a fast track most likely because of their work with the oss, whereas the World Jewish Congress’s application was not being spirited along by any government insiders. In fact, it seemed to have been intentionally shelved. They had applied for the license in March 1943, but the U.S. State Department did not forward their request to the U.S. Treasury until July. The problem was not with the U.S. Treasury Department, because the Foreign Funds Control Unit of Treasury granted permission within 184 | geneva, lisbon, and marseille, 1943

twenty-four hours of hearing about the request. However, after the Treasury action, nothing happened between July and December. In the middle of December, the State Department finally issued the license to the World Jewish Congress. However, the delay had not gone unnoticed at the Treasury Department. When week after week passed and Treasury staff learned that the application was still stalled at the State Department, a young lawyer at Treasury named Josiah Dubois started to wonder what was going on. Dubois was thirty years old and served as the chief counsel for the Foreign Funds Control Division, which was responsible for issuing the licenses. He turned to his friend Donald Hiss, who he knew from his train commute. Hiss was a junior staff member at the State Department and was cautious in his reply, but he hinted of a cable from State sent in January 1943 outlining a policy aimed at blocking information from Switzerland having to do with the ongoing genocide. Josiah Dubois’s wife, Dorothy, described what happened next: “Donald told my husband that the file was sitting right on his desk and that nobody was allowed to take it out of the office, but that he was going to lunch . . . and the file would still be on the middle of his desk. [Dubois] read the file, took notes and went back to his office. He was in a rage.”102 On Christmas Day, Dubois went into his office and began writing a report with the shocking title “Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews.”103 A few weeks later, Josiah Dubois took the report and, along with his boss, Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau, and his colleague John Pehle, visited President Roosevelt. The president told the group that he did not want to read the report but he let Dubois summarize what he had written. The president was pale and it was clear that he knew a lot of what was in the document.104 Dubois had told Morgenthau, “If you want, you can tell the President — if the President doesn’t take any action on this report, I’m going to resign and release the report to the press.”105 Dubois did not resign. Pressure had been building in Congress to adopt a rescue plan and Senate leadership was threatening to hold hearings that would have been a major embarrassment for the president. After a brief discussion, the men from Treasury handed Roosevelt a draft of an executive order geneva, lisbon, and marseille, 1943 | 185

establishing a rescue commission, and the president agreed to the proposal. The commission was called the War Refugee Board, with John Pehle named as acting executive director and Josiah Dubois appointed as general counsel. Within a short time, Charles Joy jumped on a train and made his way to Washington dc to see John Pehle at his invitation.106 Joy outlined his experience with refugees and that of his growing organization with its offices in Lisbon, Geneva, Boston, and New York. He offered his assistance to the new commission, which was headed by a group of lawyers who felt passionately about the new enterprise but who had no experience in rescue. His overtures were not unwelcome and he returned to New York prepared to devote himself to the new government-sponsored program.

186 | geneva, lisbon, and marseille, 1943

7

New York, Lisbon, Paris, and Prague, 1944–45

on february 26, 1944, a dozen men gathered in a meeting room in Greenwich Village. A surviving transcript of the meeting revealed that most of the comments were brief, there were few disagreements, and no one attempted to make a joke. Charles Joy, Varian Fry, and Robert Dexter and others sympathetic to the rescue mission were there. John Pehle, the director of the U.S. government’s War Refugee Board, had come up from Washington and had brought several people with him, including general counsel Josiah Dubois, who had threatened to expose the refugee scandal, incriminating the president and the State Department.1 Robert Dexter had hurried back from Portugal earlier in the month, in time to attend this meeting for the benefit of the War Refugee Board, after almost two years away. By mid-morning Charles Joy and the others had outlined six projects for the War Refugee Board. A week earlier, at the opulent Harvard Club in New York, the Unitarians and Varian Fry and some of the others had met with one of Pehle’s staff and grilled him on whether the U.S. government was serious about helping this time.2 The man, a Mr. Friedman, had stood up to cross-examination, and they had been convinced that these men from the Treasury Department — inexperienced though they were — were smart people and strongly motivated. Afterward, Friedman had written a note to his boss, John Pehle, that this group had “more understanding and more first hand knowledge of how actual operations should be conducted than any other group or individual that we are likely to encounter.”3 Varian Fry had pulled himself away from his introspection and introduced himself to John Pehle at the February 26 meeting simply as “a writer, formerly active in France.” He had finished his memoir,

Surrender on Demand, in January and had had a battle with his editor, who had removed material critical of the U.S. government. Seeing the cuts, Fry wrote back, “I feel that what they say must be said, namely that at a time when the Jewish refugees in France were being treated like cattle the United States did virtually nothing. It doesn’t matter a damn that there is now a War Refugee Board: there was nothing then, when something could have been done.”4 Nonetheless, Fry was here now and volunteering his time in the hope that something could still be done. Louis Dolivet, the mysterious exiled leader of the Free World Association, was attending, along with several former ambassadors and foreign ministers from European countries.5 With one voice, the group had told the War Refugee Board staff that the United States should make it clear that it would take care of all refugees who made it to territories under Allied control, that the United States must take the lead or Britain would not follow. They listed the many ways that the United States could provide visas quickly.6 From Lisbon, Elisabeth Dexter had already sent along her detailed points on how to speed up the process.7 Fry brought up the ideas that he had published in the New Republic in 1942.8 Admit all refugees into the United States who can get here. Instead of making the refugees wait in Europe while their applications are being investigated, allow them in, and if there are any doubts, keep individuals in camps while checking their background. The idea of free ports and havens in U.S. territories was not a new one to the Unitarians either. In December 1939 Martha Sharp and Robert Dexter had gone to Washington dc to urge the newly elected governor of Alaska to allow Czechs to settle in the territory. The man, Ernest Gruening, said that he was sympathetic but that the people of Alaska were definitely opposed to having their country used as a refugee settlement. He said he believed, however, that they would be willing to admit a maximum of six Czech refugee families.9 The record does not show whether even these six families ever arrived in Alaska. Private individuals had been more generous than the Alaskan governor and had written to the War Refugee Board offering their own land as a site for temporary camps. 188 | new york, lisbon, paris, and prague, 1944–1945

During their long meeting convened on February 26 and the next day, the group worked on a rescue plan on what the Unitarians knew best — the bottleneck in Portugal. Pehle agreed to propose that the United States offer haven to all the refugees in Portugal so that Lisbon might admit new refugees now languishing in Spanish jails or hiding in France. Charles Joy made the innovative proposal that stateless refugees could be admitted under quotas for countries that were still undersubscribed. Since they were “stateless,” they could receive U.S. visas using the unfilled Russian quota, Joy suggested. The War Refugee Board’s paid staff was small in number and everyone in the room knew that they could not rely much on the U.S. Foreign Service staff overseas, although they had the mandate to cooperate. In late January, secretary of state Cordell Hull had sent a cable to U.S. embassies overseas demanding cooperation with the War Refugee Board: “The President has instructed the Secretaries, Treasury and War to make action for the immediate rescue and relief of the Jews of Europe and other victims of enemy persecution. . . . You should do everything possible to effectuate this policy of this Government, bearing in mind that time is of the essence.”10 A few of the responses from the State Department staff in Washington showed that the attitude Breckinridge Long and his close colleagues had exhibited for years was typical. A Mr. Travers complained that the schemes for refugee rescue and relief were “hairbrained,” and that he hoped that he was going to have nothing further to do with refugee matters. A Mr. Taft stated that according to consensus in the State Department, Hull’s telegram was one of the strongest that had ever been sent out and that some of the older people in the department were somewhat troubled by such a cable.11 Knowing well that such people were entrenched in the U.S. Foreign Service in Europe, the Unitarians and their friends took up the idea that the War Refugee Board (wrb) needed special representatives abroad who could make decisions on their own. Pehle seemed to agree. He had already begun to appoint special representatives of the wrb in a number of regions and soon chose Robert Dexter to become representative in Portugal. Charles Joy eventually put himself forward for a post in Cairo and pushed for Varian Fry to be placed in Algiers or in new york, lisbon, paris, and prague, 1944–1945 | 189

London, working with governments-in-exile. Joy wrote to John Pehle about Varian Fry: “Conditions may be a little difficult regarding his passport, but in view of the fact that no one else has the experience that he has had it would seem to us advisable to push hard for his validation. While the methods he uses are sometimes unconventional, he is indefatigable, and knows how to get large results.” Joy and Fry had a much longer wait to find out if they would be chosen. After the long February meeting, Charles Joy sat down and wrote a letter about it to Eleanor Roosevelt. He had visited her at the White House several weeks before, at her invitation. Mrs. Roosevelt replied to this letter with another friendly invitation to see her when he was next in Washington.12 The exact nature of Charles Joy’s meetings with Eleanor Roosevelt was not described in any of his correspondence, and these meetings were probably opportunities for the discrete exchange of information. The Unitarians’ new committee soon expanded to twenty members and adopted the cumbersome title “Committee on Special Refugee Problems, Humanitarian, Non-Sectarian, International.” In Washington, at the wrb, it came to be known as “Dr. Joy’s Committee.” Its existence was supposed to be secret and even other members of the Unitarian Service Committee were not informed.13 But when some members of the board found out that William Emerson, Robert Dexter, and Charles Joy were all heavily involved, they were not happy about the secrecy and complained that their colleagues at the International Rescue and Relief Committee would be offended because they were excluded. The fact that their dismissed former staff member, Varian Fry, had an important role may also have been a cause for concern. Charles Joy threw these objections aside, however, and over the next weeks met with his committee members and pounded out paper after paper on what the War Refugee Board could do. As a group, the committee had many contacts in the underground and offered suggestions on how these groups could be rewarded for hiding Jewish refugees still in France and for helping with border crossings. For instance, Paper Number 21 named a major Spanish underground leader living in Mexico, Jose Rodriguez Vega, and proposed that if the wrb would send Vega to Portugal, he would mobilize his followers to 190 | new york, lisbon, paris, and prague, 1944–1945

move refugees across the French-Spanish border.14 Paper Number 24 argues for major resources for the French underground so that, as a sideline, they would hide refugees and help them cross the borders. The board acknowledged the Unitarians’ underground contacts in France and rapidly gave the Unitarian Service Committee permission to send money for medical aid and for food packages to René Zimmer and the refugees he was still helping in France.15 although the unitarians had no idea, by this time rené zimmer was gravely injured and hiding in the countryside. In February 1944 he and his wife had awoken early to the knock of the Gestapo at the door of their Marseille apartment. While Fanny Zimmer greeted the visitors, her husband headed to their hiding place. In the back of their closet ran a large chute that opened onto their landlord’s apartment on the floor below, and René had already prepared for this occasion by fastening a rope at the top. He grabbed hold of the rope now and tried to shimmy down the narrow enclosure. At one point he became stuck and tried to loosen himself, but soon found himself in free fall, burning his hands as he slid down the rope. His fall was stopped not by the floor below but by a sharp pipe that ripped into his stomach. When he landed at the bottom, he listened carefully to the sounds of the visitors upstairs, oblivious to the blood flowing from his wound. The intruders took their time with their search and were distracted by several pictures of Hitler, which the Zimmers had placed among their papers for this eventuality. They did not seem to trust Fanny Zimmer’s explanation of why her husband was not at home, but she remained calm under their interrogation. When all was clear, Fanny Zimmer took René to see Dr. Carcassonne, the surgeon who had worked at the Unitarian Service Committee clinic earlier in the war. Dr. Carcassonne stitched him up without anesthetic, and René, assuming a false identity and false papers, traveled in excruciating pain with his family to a hiding place in the Dardogne countryside. One day, a truck filled with German soldiers drove up to the farmhouse where the family was staying, but Zimmer was out in the woods at the time and the soldiers found nothing incriminating and left.16 Zimmer spent several months in the remote village until he felt well enough to return to Marseille. new york, lisbon, paris, and prague, 1944–1945 | 191

By now, René Zimmer’s friend Danny Bénédite and his wife, Theo, had established a thriving unit in the woods at Vagasse. The small refugee community of around fifty workers living with the Bénédites had become experts at making charcoal. With the resistance constantly gaining recruits in France, this community decided to transform itself into a paramilitary unit, and in April 1944 become part of the Maquis, as the French resistance fighters were now called. They had arranged to receive a parachute drop of weapons, but in early May, while still awaiting the drop, the group received a visit from Wehrmacht troops. The Germans searched and interrogated the group and found nothing, but when they left, they took with them several members of the group, including Danny Bénédite and three others.17 News of Bénédite’s arrest reached New York through underground channels, and the International Rescue and Relief Committee wrote to the State Department that they “expect you to do everything for Danny,” knowing that springing someone from a Gestapo prison was all but impossible.18 Therefore, by April 1944, with Bénédite arrested and Zimmer injured, the Unitarians’ two most important contacts in France were incommunicado. with his new job with the war refugee board, and with the Allies closing in on German positions, Robert Dexter still hoped to accomplish his missions in Spain. However, after several months of trying, he was not even given permission to enter the country, let alone arrange for moving imprisoned refugees into other countries. The Jewish and Quaker organizations were also barred from setting up programs in Spain, and the War Refugee Board was unable to place a representative in the country. Despite the lack of official cooperation from Spain and the U.S. embassy, more than seven hundred refugees were believed to have arrived in the country in the early part of 1944, guided by Jewish youth groups armed and trained in self-defense.19 Part of the organizations’ problems lay with the U.S. ambassador to Spain, Carlton Hayes, an Ivy League historian who believed that he had more important matters to attend to than rescuing refugees. John Pehle met with Hayes to complain about his lack of cooperation in accepting a wrb representative and his failure to press the Spanish 192 | new york, lisbon, paris, and prague, 1944–1945

government to relax their border controls, as instructed.20 Although he could voice his disapproval, Pehle lacked the clout to oust the ambassador or to even place someone in Madrid without Hayes’s consent. The idea of free ports in the United States, which Charles Joy’s “Special Committee” had advocated, had not materialized, and at this point, all that the U.S. government had arranged was a temporary camp in North Africa (near Casablanca) for refugees from Spain and other regions. They hoped that the camp might convince Madrid to be more lenient about border crossings. The various private organizations, including the Unitarians, had already been making an effort for many years to remove any financial burden on Spain and had been supporting the imprisoned refugees.21 By this time, Elisabeth Dexter had received a promotion and was on the payroll. With her husband’s appointment to the War Refugee Board, she was now formally in charge of the Unitarian’s Lisbon office. She had remained on good terms with the Portuguese authorities and had earned the highest award of the Portuguese Red Cross, the Cruz Vermelha de Dedicacao, in the previous year.22 She had continued with the relief and counseling work that she and Robert had led in previous years. An example of the gratitude of their clients is expressed in a letter preserved from that time: I must convey to the Committee the thanks of a man who has known misery and was at the point of knowing more of it if Dr. Dexter had not extended his hand, the hand of a friend. I still recall the emotion of the last of June when I was lost on the streets of Lisbon, unable to get my bearings, with only 20 centimes in my pocket, having had no food for more than two days and not daring to stop anywhere for fear of being sent back where I had just come from, where the ‘new order’ reigns, where people are imprisoned and shot down when they refuse to submit to the caprices of Hitler’s agents. . . . For myself, as long as I shall be in this world, I shall continue to have the most profound and lively gratitude to this Committee.23 One of the projects that the Unitarians and their friends on the Special Committee had supported was the use of information and radio broadcasts to demoralize the enemy. The Unitarians already had new york, lisbon, paris, and prague, 1944–1945 | 193

experience with information campaigns in France dating from 1941, when Howard Brooks brought to the United States papers written by resistance groups about weaknesses in the German war machine and also enemy propaganda in the form of counterfeit resistance papers written by German and Vichy groups. Brooks had brought these papers to William Donovan in Washington before the oss was formed, and the material had provided an important introduction to the different underground groups and their methods. Eventually the oss supported a propaganda campaign in France that included some of René Zimmer’s activities. Psychological warfare tactics that consisted of encouraging Alsatians and disenchanted Germans to defect developed from this work. With the War Refugee Board, the information program entered a new phase. The Unitarians, with the Special Committee in New York, worked on developing this angle. The idea was to publicize the change in attitude of the United States toward Jewish refugees specifically. During that long meeting in Manhattan in late February, Josiah Dubois sat quietly listening and had said almost nothing throughout the day. When the discussion came up on how general the message should be about Allied support for the victims of Nazism and whether the message should mention the Jewish people, Dubois spoke confidently, “We want to get specific propaganda broadcasts on the Jews. That has never been done.”24 Charles Joy agreed and suggested that the War Refugee Board should go to the War Department to explain why focusing on the Jews was an important psychological weapon. Varian Fry’s input seemed to close the discussion. “It may be a good strategy to pretend to be just as stupid as we always have been but only do this for humanitarian reasons,” Fry said.25 Soon John Pehle could write to his boss, the treasury secretary, “O.W.I. [Office of War Information], at our request, has started a program to bring home to the people in Germany and the satellite countries our determination to forestall further exterminations of the Jews and other persecuted minorities and to facilitate their escape.”26 Although Charles Joy had taken on the role of writer for the Special Committee, he continued to press for a position with the wrb in the Near East. He spared no self-promotion in striving for the post. “Since 194 | new york, lisbon, paris, and prague, 1944–1945

the Fall of 1942, I have been in complete charge of our Committee activities everywhere,” he wrote.27 This claim was unlikely considering that the other staff — Noel Field, Robert Dexter, and René Zimmer — were acting largely independently due to the isolation of wartime conditions. John Pehle seemed interested in Joy but the application first had to clear the State Department. A State Department reply came in the form of a rejection letter in the spring of 1944. Charles Joy was so disappointed that he sought an explanation. Adolph Berle, a colleague of Breckinridge Long at the State Department, told Joy that he had been turned down because “he had been so active in the rescue of refugees of various and sometimes mutually hostile political convictions as to arouse certain opposition and criticism.”28 The wording of the explanation seemed to show a disregard for the very purpose of the War Refugee Board, and Varian Fry’s bid to work in London or Algiers had the same fate. The State Department’s influence was having the effect of keeping the most experienced rescue workers at home in the United States. During this time, Varian Fry was persevering in putting more pressure on the State Department’s visa division. He knew of a refugee whose visa application to the United States had been recently refused — despite his impressive references and experience. Fry described this incident in a letter to the War Refugee Board and asked if they could do anything, because the State Department’s policies did not seem to have changed much.29 In May, with about two dozen project proposals completed, the Special Committee was told that it must dissolve.30 Part of the reason was that the War Refugee Board now worked with other networks — especially the World Jewish Congress and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. The Jewish organizations were funding the vast majority of the wrb’s projects because President Roosevelt’s executive order had not been followed by a sizable appropriation.31 Competent leaders like Joseph Schwartz at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee were heavily involved contributing their expertise to the wrb program. The reason given for terminating the Special Committee was that the wrb was embarrassed about associating with some of the committee’s new york, lisbon, paris, and prague, 1944–1945 | 195

members. This time, the controversy was not about the presence of Varian Fry but that of two of the Europeans — Alvarez Del Vayo had been the foreign minister in Spain in 1936 but was removed from office after convincing Stalin to provide military aid to the Spanish Republic.32 Another member, Charles Davila, had been the foreign minister of Romania, and was identified with the politics of that communist country. The presence of these individuals on the Special Committee was probably especially uncomfortable for John Pehle, who was sensitive to Breckinridge Long’s persistence about the dangers of communist refugees.33 Charles Joy was aware that the War Refugee Board staff might change their mind about working with the committee if he asked Davila and Del Vayo to leave, but he was not willing to drop them.34 Instead, Joy wrote a veiled criticism of the wrb’s treatment of his committee to John Pehle and agreed to disband.35 The Unitarians had their own worries about some of the people on the Special Committee and were most concerned about Louis Dolivet, although Howard Brooks had worked with him for years. Unitarian board member Percival Brundage made his own investigation into the charge that Dolivet was a closet communist, and received a number of reference letters avowing that Dolivet was opposed to any revolutionary means. Brundage then concluded, rather naïvely, that the charges were without merit. In truth, there was evidence that Dolivet had been head of a communist-sponsored propaganda organization in Europe called Rassemblement Universal de la Paix.36 It is also possible that he had been a Stalinist agent and that Dolivet was a pseudonym for a Romanian-born man.37 After the war, the Free World Association dissolved, and Dolivet went into the movie business and produced some films with Orson Welles. In his work for the War Refugee Board, Dolivet focused his advice constructively on the problem of helping refugees to move out of France and to travel through Spain. in late spring, with the special committee abolished and Joy and Dexter prevented from working in North Africa and Spain as they had hoped, it seemed that the enterprise was losing momentum. However, this was a pivotal period in the war, with the tide turning definitively in the Allies’ favor. June saw the Allied landings at 196 | new york, lisbon, paris, and prague, 1944–1945

Normandy on D day, and not long after, Noel Field left Switzerland to make a bold foray into southeastern France. The region was not yet entirely liberated, but Field sailed in, escorted by the Maquis. On this trip, Field traveled with the head of the French delegation in Switzerland, with papers signed by the local French government, which had been part of the clandestine movement a week earlier. The group even gave Field his own car and driver, and he used them to head westward through the mountains. Noel Field’s success at arriving in France this way, and without a U.S. passport, astonished the staff in Boston. They also were very surprised when they heard that Field was providing supplies to native Frenchmen in the region instead of to refugees. Field explained that he had thought it necessary to help the French people who had been treated most brutally by the Nazis. “To come to the French and tell them that we wanted to help the scattered foreign refugees here and there but we are uninterested in the harrowing suffering of the French population under our very noses — such an attitude not only would not be understood, but it would inevitably create hostility both towards ourselves, towards Americans and America, and toward the foreign refugees themselves.”38 One of Field’s projects was to set up a community room and canteen in a remote village in the Maurienne Valley and to arrange for Renee Lang, who had headed up the Unitarian’s kindergartens in the French internment camps, to go into the region. The Unitarian Service Committee staff in Boston was negative about Field’s initiative in France, but after hearing the Dexters’ defense of the project, agreed to it and saw to it that it was paid for. Noel Field’s return to France most likely had another level of support that involved not just the fighting French but American missions as well. Allen Dulles, the oss director in Bern, had been supporting resistance operations in southeastern France in 1944 and used the area to prepare for the penetration of anti-Nazi operatives into Germany.39 During his years in Switzerland, Field had met regularly with Dulles, and was still a go-between for risky missions that involved European communists returning to enemy territory. The French forces that escorted Field most likely had enjoyed considerable resources from the oss. new york, lisbon, paris, and prague, 1944–1945 | 197

Although Noel Field was in a privileged position touring southern France during that summer of 1944, he was nearly killed on the road. With his Free French companions, Field had headed through the mountains to Lyon, which was not yet liberated, and the group had been caught by enemy fire. Noel Field had lain in a muddy field while a German plane bombarded the ground with bullets. The payload managed to miss Field’s tall frame and he and his group continued to flee by car, but the speeding vehicle overturned and Field smashed headfirst through the front windshield. Field survived his injuries and returned to Switzerland, hoping to be back in France soon, this time to oversee the reopening of the relief organization’s medical clinic in Marseille, as soon as the city was liberated.40 As it turned out, the Unitarian dispensary played a role in the ensuing battle. French troops made an assault on the city toward the end of August, and resistance groups in the city joined the fighting, which went from street to street and house to house. In one of his proudest moments, René Zimmer opened the Unitarian dispensary as a first-aid station for resistance fighters. The French authorities had preserved the contents of the dispensary — despite Zimmer’s absence and the demands on space in the overcrowded city. The local authorities sent word out to Noel Field that they would like to see the Unitarian Service Committee staff return to resume managing the clinic. Field wrote to the Boston office: “The ose [Jewish children’s aid organization] is waiting to get started, [René] Zimmer is waiting to get started, and the place is waiting, the instruments are waiting, the French authorities are waiting, the refugees are waiting.”41 What was holding up Noel Field at this point was authorization to travel from the United States. He needed word from the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, and it was slow in arriving. In the meantime, Field arranged for a colleague from his Marseille days, Herta Tempi, to open an office in Paris.42 The Unitarian Service Committee office in Paris had an auspicious beginning with Herta “Jo” Tempi at its head. She was able to position a clandestine relief program in the city months before it was liberated. Tempi’s unusual situation of representing an American 198 | new york, lisbon, paris, and prague, 1944–1945

23. Herta “Jo” Tempi, 1946. Unitarian Universalist Service Committee Collection, bms 15033, Box 3, Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University.

organization — the Unitarian Service Committee — while the country was still technically under German occupation was due to the ventures of a resistance fighter who had traveled from Geneva to Paris to hand-deliver her appointment letter and resources, at the risk of his own life. The messenger, Andre Atlan, had carried messages into France in the past, to help Noel Field communicate with Unitarian Service Committee contacts in Marseille and neighboring areas. Typically, the messages were written in invisible ink using lemon juice and urine. On his trip on behalf of Tempi, however, Atlan was new york, lisbon, paris, and prague, 1944–1945 | 199

caught by the Germans. He was ordered to show his papers and take off his clothes and he did so, albeit very slowly, and the bored soldiers neglected to check the beret still on his head, which was loaded with papers and money. Only one armed soldier was left to guard Atlan, and the naked man took advantage of an opportune moment to run off, successfully dodging the bullet fired his way. Another resistance fighter named Dr. Jourdan, who had also been used as a messenger for the Unitarian Service Committee, was later caught and shot.43 The liberation of the city in August meant that Tempi could work openly, and she provided some funds for medical care and clothing, although her resources were limited. Tempi joined some of the other organizations in their casework for Jewish refugees, and specialized in the cases of German and Austrian refugees. Tempi sent to Boston headquarters numerous short summaries of her cases. One she described was a Jewish man from Poland with the initials M.R.S., who had been interned for three years in different camps in the northern zone of France. When he was liberated, he returned to Paris but found that the building manager had rented his apartment and that all his possessions were gone. This man was so malnourished by the time he visited a French relief committee that he fainted in the waiting room. When Tempi heard about his case, she contributed toward his stay in a hospital.44 Tempi also opened an outlet in an old, atmospheric neighborhood on the Place de Valois to distribute clothing, and the American Unitarians were able to help with donations on a massive scale. The committee rented a warehouse in New York City to collect and store the clothing and sent twelve tons of the goods to Paris over the next year. The clothing ranged from overalls and other work clothes to fine suits and shoes and boots. The office provided fitting and tailoring, although many of the refugees arriving in the tattered outfits they had worn every day for several years did not want to wait for that. Some of the visitors were survivors of Mauthausen and other death camps,45 and Tempi installed a sympathetic, sociable person in the clothing salon, an older German refugee who himself had survived several French internment and labor camps. 200 | new york, lisbon, paris, and prague, 1944–1945

24. Clothes depot, Unitarian Service Committee, probably Paris ca. 1945. Unitarian Universalist Service Committee Collection, bms 16076, Box 2, Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University.

One of Tempi’s case descriptions was of a “Mrs. Sp.,” an Austrian refugee whose husband owned a mineral-water export business. The family came to France in 1940 with the flood of refugees from Belgium. The husband was deported in 1942 and the mother and child lived for a long time in hiding in a convent in the country. Mrs. Sp. returned to Paris, planning to go back to Belgium where she had left all her relatives. Eventually, she found out that she no longer had a family because all her relatives had been deported. This woman was deeply depressed and Jo Tempi’s staff found her some work.46 Jo Tempi herself was already a somewhat controversial person, although she enjoyed the strong loyalty of her Paris staff and the Unitarian leaders who had supported her position. In his memoirs, Joseph Weill said that he had met her and had distrusted her because her eclectic friends were of such diverse political loyalties.47 Charles Joy, new york, lisbon, paris, and prague, 1944–1945 | 201

however, was obviously enraptured from the start, and his emotions spilled over into an essay he wrote for the Christian Register, “She Has Known Terror,” which said very little about her work: She perceives quickly the true inwardness of any problem, and elucidates it with equal ease in French, or German, or English. . . . She is sometimes severe with her subordinates, but they worship her in spite of it. They work as late as she does, and weep sometimes when she compels them to go home. . . . She has certain definite masculine traits — the ability to deal firmly and competently with harsh realities, with critical and dangerous circumstances, with intricate and baffling problems, yet she is essentially and charmingly feminine, and sometimes craves a security that she has never since her earliest childhood known. She is the strong oak on which the weak lean; she could be the vine that clings lovingly to it.48 Charles Joy had met Tempi during his tour to Marseille in 1941 and had written back to Boston headquarters that she was “a very competent person but a new name to you, . . . the Secretaire Sociale to do the work that Mrs. Field has done.”49 Joy’s introduction to Tempi had come through Noel Field who had met her in Switzerland some time before. The American journalist Flora Lewis had interviewed Tempi in detail, and her description was less businesslike: “He [Noel Field] was swept off his feet by a vital communist woman, fiercely exciting, tangy and sharp . . . a veritable tigress with gleaming, irresistibly fascinating claws.”50 Some of the basic facts about Jo Tempi are that she was born in Germany as Herta Sommerfeld, and was drawn to communism from a very young age. After the rise of Hitler, her radical politics aroused suspicions, and the manager at the bank where she worked had her arrested for her subversive opinions.51 She managed to escape and flee Germany, eventually settling in France after marrying a Frenchman named Tempi.52 The marriage did not last, but she retained her French identity papers and found work of various kinds, including a job with the Rassemblement Universal de la Paix, the communistsponsored media organization. Her time there apparently coincided with the period when Louis Dolivet had been the organization’s 202 | new york, lisbon, paris, and prague, 1944–1945

head.53 After 1940 she spent some time volunteering in French internment camps and was in regular touch with Noel and Herta Field about her work. During this time she remarried, and though her new husband was a Russian named Snowsko-Borowski, she still went by “Tempi.”54 Jo Tempi undoubtedly spent a good amount of her energy trying to help fellow communists, especially those from Germany. After the liberation of Paris, she emerged as rather isolated in relation to the other relief organizations, although a falling out with the Quakers was understandable in light of their willingness to help newly interned Germans and Vichy collaborators.55 Tempi was resolute in her refusal to aid the “new internees,” a position that headquarters shared with her. It may be that Tempi’s politics were the reason she was not invited to join the reunited Nimes Committee, the old relief coordinating committee that had started with Donald Lowrie in late 1940, and which had resumed in Paris with most of its original members and Donald Lowrie again at its head.56 Noel Field was aware of Jo Tempi’s exclusion from the Nimes Committee but retained full confidence in her. “Mrs. Tempi, from all reports I get, not only from her but also from others, is doing a really swell job. . . . Although my inability, on account of nonvalidation of my passport, to come to Paris, is a grave setback for our work and makes things increasingly difficult for Mrs. Tempi, she knows enough about our organization from the past for me to be satisfied that she will manage yet awhile longer by herself,” he wrote.57 In Switzerland, Noel Field’s projects were going well. He had joined with the ose, Jewish Children’s Aid Society, to set up a dental laboratory for refugees, similar to the lab they had managed in Marseille. The clinic made dentures for survivors of the concentration and death camps, and treated children who had survived the Buchenwald death camp.58 The dental laboratory was linked to one of the refugee children’s homes and offered the young people an apprenticeship in dentistry, a new skill they could acquire while preparing to emigrate from Switzerland.59 Field’s relationship with Joseph Weill and ose was still productive, and he was also pleased with the rest home for refugees that he had started the previous year. new york, lisbon, paris, and prague, 1944–1945 | 203

New money from the War Refugee Board meant that Noel Field could enlarge the role he had played in Marseille as the rich benefactor. The Unitarian Service Committee’s budget for 1944 was greatly improved, and U.S. government funds made up the vast majority of the resources since the Unitarian contributions had diminished to only a small percentage of the spending.60 Field received the rather large sum of fifty-one thousand dollars from the wrb early in the year.61 Some of his funds supported a group of German political refugees in hiding in southern France and financed the escape of a small number of these refugees to Switzerland and to Spain.62 Many refugees in Switzerland were finding living allowances after meeting Noel Field. It is not clear how Field chose his cases, but Flora Lewis relates a story where a Hungarian refugee noticed that a group of Hungarian students in Switzerland had suddenly sworn allegiance to communism before applying to receive Noel Field’s relief funds. After the Hungarian refugee publicized his observations, he apparently lost his own stipend from the Fields.63 Noel Field’s own account of his casework portrays refugees from a range of ages and from different countries but of no particular political cast. His reports often noted that a person was in danger because of his Jewish origin but the refugee was trying to do a lot for himself. One of Field’s charming accounts is of three young refugees who were in their late teens when they met up in France early in the war. They had stuck together throughout and made their escape to Switzerland where they lived like a family, sharing household chores while they were studying and eating, thanks to Noel Field’s relief fund.64 Personally, Noel Field became more restless as the war was drawing to a close. His friend Joseph Weill noticed that he was becoming distant and recalled that “[Field] said that he would like to leave to go to the East to serve the people who were achieving their liberty.”65 At this point, Field was working with the oss to support the National Committee for a Free Germany, or calpo, the western arm of the Soviet anti-Nazi organization. Noel Field had recruited his foster daughter to help with the oss missions to bring anti-Nazi communists back into Germany. Erika Glaser had finished her studies at the University of Geneva and was 204 | new york, lisbon, paris, and prague, 1944–1945

glad, finally, in early 1944 to be more closely involved in the communist networks with which she identified so strongly. Erika sometimes started the journey to accompany a refugee returning to Germany with a streetcar ride out of Geneva toward the French border. Many of her charges were German communists returning to their home country as a part of Dulles’s strategy to hasten the collapse of the Nazi regime, which now appeared to be inevitable. Noel Field had not told Erika about the oss role in these missions and she did not suspect so at the time.66 Allen Dulles supported Noel Field’s idea of having the newly opened Paris office of the oss work with the German communists that Field had been helping to prepare for “northward penetration.” The following telegram from Allen Dulles summarizes their common mission, which landed on the desk of a young oss officer in Paris, Arthur Schlesinger Jr.: Noel Field, our 394 prior liberation of France, maintained close contact with anti-Nazi German group composed of German political refugees, deserters, etc. This group actively engaged since November 1942 in clandestine propaganda and sabotage with headquarters largely Marseille, later Paris. Thru Field, we furnished part of funds for financing this group’s activities. From Field I understand group is now continuing active work in France under name National Komittee Freies Deutschland für der Western. While group now working largely with ffi [Free French of the Interior], Field understands they have some representatives working with our troops. Possible that group contains valuable personnel for German penetration and consider it urgent that Field discuss whole problem with you and put you in touch with certain of their leaders who are now in Paris and whom he knows personally.67 The program tried to give the appearance of uniting antifascist groups, but for the most part communists were involved and social democrats kept their distance. Noel Field had presented Allen Dulles with a proposal to support calpo and to choose individuals who the oss wanted to sponsor to return to Germany. Under Field’s influence the oss formalized cooperation with calpo in January 1945.68 Noel Field argued that Jo Tempi at the Unitarian Service Committee’s office in new york, lisbon, paris, and prague, 1944–1945 | 205

Paris was well placed to provide advice on the nominees. Dulles agreed to introduce Field to the oss office in Paris, and sent the following cable: “During period German occupation France, Field, who was at Marseille until November 1942, developed contact with nucleus which developed into calpo. Through Field I assisted finance work to extent and under conditions he will explain.”69 When Noel Field visited Arthur Schlesinger Jr. at the Paris office of the oss, however, Schlesinger regarded him with suspicion and undertook to sabotage the idea. He arranged to have someone visit Jo Tempi in her office and make off with some of the lists of names sitting on a desk. Schlesinger then argued to his oss colleagues that the Unitarian Service Committee was not secure enough in keeping confidential information, and he succeeded in getting the Paris oss office to agree to reject calpo.70 Although Noel Field had succeeded, for a time, in winning Dulles’s support for his political missions, he had had little success at interesting the oss director in his broader work on behalf of refugees. Dulles showed little sympathy for the aims of the War Refugee Board and was reluctant to take up suggestions arriving from Washington. For instance, the wrb wanted to set up more underground channels for refugees to enter Switzerland, and in March 1944 they had stated this intention. In reply, Dulles sent a message saying that experts were needed for military channels and that sending inexperienced workers would do more harm than good. He made his impatience with the idea and the mandate of the War Refugee Board known with his dismissive letter: “If it were publicized that I am in any way connected with refugee relief work I would be swamped with a multitude of applications, visitors, and irritations which would gravely handicap me in carrying out my other duties.”71 Fortunately for the refugees, Switzerland had been relaxing its borders as the German war machine went on the defensive across Europe. John Pehle had tried to make assurances to Switzerland that the U.S. government would see to it that all refugees that arrived in Switzerland after a certain date would be removed after a reasonable length of time at the end of the war.72 In early 1945 a War Refugee Board staff member estimated the number of persons rescued since the 206 | new york, lisbon, paris, and prague, 1944–1945

establishment of the board. The movement of persons from France to Spain was calculated to have been 2,638, and from Spain to Portugal, 1,532. The number entering Switzerland from Italy was estimated to have been far greater, at 9,172.73 as the war refugee board’s representative in portugal, robert Dexter had not seen the activity he had hoped for. He had been refused entry into Spain and was not able to turn the decision around. As a result, few new people were seeking his help to enter Portugal. Jewish organizations had been working on the evacuation of refugees from Spain and Portugal to Palestine and had sent out many hundreds from the region earlier in the year. During his visit back to the United States, Dexter had praised their success with this project.74 With Robert Dexter working at the U.S. consulate in Lisbon as representative of the War Refugee Board, Charles Joy was given a promotion in September and named executive director. Because of the tensions that had long been simmering between them, the Dexters and Charles Joy were poised for a confrontation in the autumn. The Unitarian Service Committee’s board of directors had even convened a “subcommittee on relationships between Dr. Dexter and Dr. Joy.” Going point by point, they submitted their conclusions in a terse document that listed various complaints made by Robert and Elisabeth Dexter and then their conclusions as to whether the charges were valid. Robert Dexter had complained that Charles Joy’s trip to London during the summer of 1942 had caused problems for the organization, that Joy had been guilty of “dictatorial insubordination” and “indiscreet relationships,” and that he had been lax in fund-raising.75 The subcommittee disagreed on most of these counts, though they did not comment on all of them, including the point about “indiscreet relationships.” The reference to Joy’s trip to London was rather mysterious, but Seth Gano hinted at an espionage mission when he warned Robert Dexter that he should not raise any matters that could not be discussed before the full committee. The subcommittee pointed out that differences invariably arise from a situation where the director in Lisbon (Dexter) was out of touch with the home office in Boston because of the distance and isolation of working in Europe. Their decision, that greater authority should new york, lisbon, paris, and prague, 1944–1945 | 207

be given to Joy’s position in the United States, greatly angered the Dexters. Instead of accepting a shared directorship with Joy, they both decided to leave the organization. The Dexters handed in their resignations in October. Within a month, Robert Dexter was also out of the War Refugee Board. The board was phasing out the work of its representatives at that time, and there seemed no reason to prolong the tenure of the Lisbon representative.76 Soon afterward, however, Robert Dexter accepted a position with the Church Peace Union, a liberal internationalist organization endowed by Andrew Carnegie, which was made up of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish organizations interested in supporting the newly formed United Nations. Not long after starting their work with the Church Peace Union, the Dexters found themselves dropped from the oss network as well. They had been planning to return to Europe in the spring of 1945 as representatives of the Church Peace Union. As in previous years, they wrote to John Hughes and George Pratt at the oss and told them about their travel plans. The Dexters would be going to London soon and would be willing to turn in any information of interest to the oss, they wrote.77 George Pratt, who had replaced Arthur Goldberg as head of the oss Labor Division, was keen to use them. The Labor Division had concentrated on encouraging German defections and sabotaging industrial production.78 In January 1945 Pratt asked the oss to intervene on behalf of the Dexters at the State Department to give them passports, as the oss had intervened for them in previous years.79 The reply, an unequivocal “no,” came from Russell Forgan, a close friend of Allen Dulles and the new commander of the oss in the European theatre.80 Forgan charged that both Allen Dulles (number 110) and William Donovan (number 109) wanted to drop them from all oss operations.81 “110 does not feel dexters are particularly secure and that mr. dexter is inclined to be temperamentally indiscreet. he feels they are better suited for welfare work than for our type operations. suggest therefore that we forget them. 109 agrees.” Although he had been facilitating the Dexters’ involvement with the oss for years, John Hughes, the head of the New York oss office, 208 | new york, lisbon, paris, and prague, 1944–1945

did not fight for them. Instead, he wrote timidly to Forgan that he had only been suggesting that they accept information from the Dexters, not that they would involve them in their projects.82 Most likely, Dulles’s complaint against the Dexters also applied to Charles Joy and possibly to Noel Field. Several of Robert Dexter’s letters transmitted by the oss had mentioned René Zimmer and hinted at clandestine activities. The oss would have known about these lapses because John Hughes and others had been reading most of the Unitarians’ correspondence. In one of his cables, Dulles had complained that Charles Joy and Robert Dexter should be more careful when wiring Noel Field because some of their messages alluded to “underground methods” and their secret contact with René Bertholet.83 The lack of security of the Paris office under Jo Tempi and Noel Field had been exposed as well. After the Dexters resigned, Charles Joy and others in the Boston office did not pick up further oss missions. The oss itself was winding down. While Noel Field’s stature and responsibilities continued to grow, worries about his political loyalties circulated in the wider community. Varian Fry was one of the first Americans to sound an alarm and sent off a letter in March 1945 to his old friend Danny Bénédite, who had now been freed from Gestapo prison, advising him to cut all ties with Field. “You remember Noel. If you or any of your friends still have any relations with him at all, I advise you to break them immediately and completely. . . . I can only add that I am in possession of evidence against him which I am sure you would accept as adequate grounds for an immediate rupture if I were able to send it to you.”84 With communication resumed between Varian Fry and some friends from his former office in Marseille, Fry learned about the deaths of some of his staff and colleagues he had left behind in France. In early 1945, with many people enjoying the prospect of victory on the horizon, Varian Fry turned to writing letters to government staff in the State Department, showing his deep anger for the deaths of his friends. In the files of the War Refugee Board are letters from Varian Fry concerning the fate of his former staff. The communication from Fry jumps out in its uniqueness amidst the voluminous correspondence of the War Refugee Board. One series of letters is addressed to a Howard new york, lisbon, paris, and prague, 1944–1945 | 209

Travers, chief of the visa division at the State Department, and accuses Travers’s staff of complicity in the death of former staff members Mr. and Mrs. Jacques Weisslitz: Unless it was because he did not possess a fortune, it is difficult for me to imagine what reason can possibly have been found for rejecting his visa application. If there was any evidence adduced that he was sympathetic with Communism, Nazism, or Fascism, it seems to me that, in justification of the decision reached in his case, it should be revealed. As for your offer to inform me regarding the procedure to be followed by Mr. and Mrs. Weisslitz in having their cases reopened, I am very much afraid that I shall never have occasion to avail myself of it. Mr. and Mrs. Weisslitz were deported in open cattle cars to an unknown destination in Eastern Europe solely because of their Jewish ancestry. If you are in any doubt of the fate which almost certainly overtook them at their arrival, I refer you to the report of the War Refugee Board entitled, “German Extermination Camps — Auschwitz, and Birkenau.”85 martha sharp ascended from the fallout of the dexters’ resignation by immediately accepting the position of director for Spain and Portugal. She had been working a heavy speaking and fund-raising schedule for Hadassah and Children to Palestine, but for years she had wanted to return to Europe and now seemed like a good time. Waitstill was working overseas with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (unrra), and they had given up their house in Wellesley Hills. Their children were in boarding school, because she apparently agreed with Waitstill’s idiosyncratic sentiment that “it would be better to keep them [the children] in a cold stable institutional environment, such as has bred the brave self-confident sons of Old New England, than to reestablish a home, and then break it up with endless departures.”86 In February 1945 the ss Serpo Pinto pulled up to the dock in Lisbon with Martha Sharp on board. She had intended to leave for Portugal soon after the Dexters’ resignation in October, but it took months for 210 | new york, lisbon, paris, and prague, 1944–1945

the passport and visas to come through. Since her arrival in 1940, she was not any more used to the noise in the city but enjoyed the exotic atmosphere around her modest Portuguese Hotel. “If it isn’t the rollicking night life which commences at midnight and goes unabated until 4 A.M., it is the women going to get the fish at 6 A.M. which they sell from door to door from shallow baskets on their heads.” However, if her letters are any indication, the atmosphere of the city was now quite different from the nervousness that Varian Fry, the Dexters, and Charles Joy had observed in earlier years. After years of fearing an invasion, the mood of the Portuguese and refugees had calmed down. Germany’s military signed a complete surrender on May 7, 1945.87 Martha Sharp was on her own in Lisbon on ve day (Victory in Europe) and sat down that evening and wrote a long detailed letter to Charles Joy. Her relationship with Joy was apparently very formal, or alternatively, she had passed ve day sitting in the office. She summarized her dramatic success in gaining the release of many Spanish prisoners. Nonetheless, she wanted to delay closing the Lisbon office and feared that Joy would disagree: “One must see through to a satisfactory and dignified conclusion one’s old responsibilities (before taking on new ones). I believe that in all our work we must cut off more gradually than we did in the case of Spain.”88 Her own contract was up a few days after ve day but she wanted to stay in Lisbon long enough to see her remaining work through, although she missed her family a great deal. As Martha worked in Portugal, she looked longingly at the private elementary school located near the beach and wrote to her children of her dream that they would be studying and swimming there. “I felt that you should return to Fenn [in Massachusetts] excepting that I wanted to be together so much.”89 She paid the fee for the Lisbon school, although she probably knew the plan would not come to pass. During her half-year in Portugal, Martha Sharp managed to finish the work on behalf of Spanish Republicans that Charles Joy, Robert and Elisabeth Dexter, and Howard Brooks had started. She was able to liberate about 125 Spanish Republicans from Portuguese prison and arrange for their emigration to Latin America when Venezuela took one group and Mexico accepted a larger number.90 Howard Brooks had new york, lisbon, paris, and prague, 1944–1945 | 211

spent much of 1943 in Portugal trying to emigrate Spanish Republicans to the western hemisphere.91 Robert Dexter had worked on the problem in 1944 with the War Refugee Board and had helped gain the U.S. secretary of state’s consideration to grant the Spanish Republicans temporary visas on their way to Mexico, but by the time Dexter resigned, neither the transit visas from the United States nor the visas to Mexico had arrived.92 Before Martha left for Portugal, Charles Joy had given her a detailed letter of advice on how to avoid trouble in Lisbon. Among his main points was that she should have nothing to do with “illegals,” people who had entered the country without their proper papers. Even meeting with these people could get her into trouble with the Portuguese International Police and jeopardize the entire program, Joy warned. He told her that it was impossible to outwit the Portuguese police and that helping these people in some way could mean the closing down of the whole show, not just in Portugal but elsewhere as well.93 As it turned out, Martha Sharp was able to free the imprisoned men precisely because she dared to confront the higher-ups in the Portuguese police. Soon after she arrived, she sought detailed advice from the U.S. embassy in Lisbon about whom to talk to at the International Police and how. Accordingly, she refused to meet with a subordinate and insisted on seeing the Portuguese first captain himself. The captain agreed to see Martha and was probably entertained by meeting such an assertive American woman. He admitted that both he and Martha had a common interest in removing foreign political prisoners who were a burden to Portugal, and he granted Martha access to the men.94 Meanwhile, Waitstill was having a disappointing experience overseas with the un Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in the Middle East.95 He was frustrated with his level of responsibilities and the long periods of inactivity, not to mention the long separation from his family. He had been attracted by the idea of working for the new United Nations. “This is the first earnest step toward one world, and I want to be in on it,” he had said.96 On a personal level, however, he had felt that he no longer wanted to be a minister without Martha’s help, though it took several years before he vented his feelings about it to Martha: “I could see that our work had become solely my work 212 | new york, lisbon, paris, and prague, 1944–1945

and that [there] was no use of staying any longer. . . . we could not tell anything about the future except that Mother would be off to the potlatch somewhere else tonight.”97 Although the ministry had become a lonely one, being posted alone abroad was even more difficult. Waitstill stayed with unrra for about a year and felt that the highlight was his visit to Palestine. He recalled that he believed he was the “last Christian to confer with Miss Henrietta Szold,” the founder of Hadassah. She had arranged his tour of Palestine, which at that time was still under the British Mandate.98 Waitstill shared Martha’s passionate hopes for the development of a Jewish homeland and was able to visit the construction of the buildings for young people that Martha had funded through Children to Palestine. In autumn, Waitstill had a chance to do what he and Martha had wanted to do for years — return to Prague. In July 1945 Waitstill had been appointed administrator of American Relief for Czechoslovakia and he was able to obtain a rare visa to enter the country.99 The ban on travel to Czechoslovakia was very strict, but former president Eduard Benes and foreign minister Jan Masaryk had recommended him personally.100 “He and his wife have done a remarkable piece of work during the crucial months in Czechoslovakia and Mr. Sharp is among those whose services I value very highly indeed,”101 wrote Masaryk. Shortly before boarding his flight from London, Waitstill had a feeling that this trip might be his last. Two planes had crashed on the London-Prague run that week alone, and one of his favorite colleagues had been on one of the fatal trips.102 Waitstill took out a new life insurance policy and boarded the flight anyway. In September, Martha Sharp astonished the staff back in Boston by also managing a quick trip into Czechoslovakia on an observation mission, also for American Relief for Czechoslovakia. Charles Joy had been denied permission to enter, and once again Martha was the target of a colleague’s jealousy and admiration. “In all frankness I must say I was disgusted that the psrcb had forbidden the exploratory trip. . . . Later it was all explained to me, and I was delighted that you were able to go in,” wrote Joy.103 She had stopped in Paris on her way to Prague but had found Charles Joy was not there to talk to her, and the staff were not able new york, lisbon, paris, and prague, 1944–1945 | 213

to help much with travel arrangements.104 Hassles related to this trip were contributing toward her feeling that her colleagues were not responsive. Whatever her encounters with Jo Tempi were, Martha later described her as “an incompetent.” Martha was able to reunite with her old friends, Donald and Helen Lowrie, who were now working in Paris. She also met the Fields for the first time, as they had come out to Paris to see her, but Martha was skeptical of his plans and saw him as “a visionary who wants to spread all over Europe.”105 Martha spent nine days in Czechoslovakia and traveled to parts of the country that no American had seen since before the war. She was most outraged by the widespread malnutrition she saw among Czechoslovakian children. She felt that German children were better off and was infuriated to learn that the Allies proposed increasing food aid to the Germans. She returned immediately to the United States and staged a series of press conferences in time to promote a U.S. food-sharing program to Czechoslovakia.106 She fulfilled some seventy-five speaking engagements over the next two months.107 She noted that on one single morning she had received eighteen requests to speak.108 This time around, however, Martha no longer even had a home in Boston. Her children were still in boarding school and Waitstill was still overseas. She leased a small apartment in the city so that she would have somewhere to meet with their children over the Christmas holidays.109 Despite her successes, Martha Sharp was once again frustrated with her colleagues on the committee. She felt that Noel Field was showing little interest in her work. In Boston, her inquiries were meeting with long delays. She had suffered years of snubs at board meetings, and although she had recently been the director for the Lisbon office, she felt that her treatment from Boston had not improved. “They dawdled on for an hour and a half and then when the afternoon was nearly over I was invited to report at 4:30! I spoke for half an hour. They were obviously excited, but there was no time for questions,” she complained to Waitstill.110 Charles Joy tried to salvage the situation at the last minute by offering Martha Sharp the position of director of the Service Committee’s rehabilitation homes. He cabled that if she was not willing to accept 214 | new york, lisbon, paris, and prague, 1944–1945

the appointment, they should also offer her a position as associate European director. He did this without consulting Noel Field, but his efforts did not have their intended effect, and Martha Sharp announced her resignation.111 The return to Prague in 1945 was a letdown for the Sharps. Though Martha was also offered a position with the American Aid to Czechoslovakia, she turned it down as well. She was about to start a new chapter in her career, this time helping Palestine bring Jews who were facing extreme hardships in North Africa and the Middle East to the new Jewish state. For the time being Waitstill was alone in Prague. One lonely evening, Waitstill wrote in a long letter to Martha how being in Czechoslovakia reminded him how much life had changed for them since their first trip in 1939. “Seven years ago at this hour you and were getting off the train here in Wilson station, and all our world has been different ever since. I would not have wanted to vegetate all that time in some stuffy parish . . . “ he wrote. But the bulk of the letter mourned the loss of the stable family life that they had once enjoyed and related to Martha his feelings about the emotional toll from “the uncertainties and comings and goings of a very deeply changed public life.”112 The end of the war was anticlimactic for the Sharps and brought to an end Martha Sharp’s seven years of work with the Unitarian Service Committee. However, the committee was now in very good shape financially and poised to spread out into many regions of Europe. Over the next year, the Unitarian Service Committee added relief programs in Marseille, Lyon, Prague, Warsaw, Munich, and Vienna.113 The committee also found itself in a prestigious position with a high reputation in the U.S. government and among other organizations. For instance, the Hebrew Immigrant and Sheltering Society had a luncheon in Charles Joy’s honor soon after Victory Day: “From overseas, we of hias have had enthusiastic and heartwarming word of the gratefulness of our people to the Unitarians and to Dr. Joy. The local women thus welcome all the more gladly this opportunity to know one whose faithful friendship has been of so much assistance in hias work abroad.”114 The wartime relationship with the U.S. government had been complex and difficult, but this stage of the committee’s work was uncontroversial and unhindered. President Harry Truman cabled his new york, lisbon, paris, and prague, 1944–1945 | 215

congratulations: “It is heartening to know that the Unitarian Service Committee which was active throughout hostilities in supporting all relief activities, is continuing its work to assist the victims of war in their struggle back to a life of security self respect and happiness.”115 The president’s telegram addressed the Unitarians’ relief work present and past, and he was correct that the people who had brought these projects into being — Charles Joy and Noel Field — were still on the scene. The others, those who had been most driven by a mission of rescue — Robert and Elisabeth Dexter, Martha and Waitstill Sharp, and Varian Fry — had left to search for new roles in the postwar world.

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Conclusion robert dexter One day in the spring of 1955, [Hans] Karl Subak, now “Carl,” received a note from Elisabeth Dexter. Elisabeth hinted that Robert was not well, and that it would be a good idea if Carl visited them. It had been a long time since he had last seen them, sometime before the summer of 1942 when the Dexters had left Boston for another stay in Lisbon. In the intervening years, Carl had joined the U.S. Army, married, and moved to Chicago. The Dexters’ daughter, Harriet, now Pennington, had moved to the western United States with her husband and four children. Robert and Elisabeth were still in Belmont, Massachusetts. Early in the summer, Carl pulled up at the Dexters’ large Victorian house on Pleasant Street. The tennis court in the backyard, which had seen little use even before the war, was now completely overgrown. Elisabeth seemed the same as ever, but Robert was noticeably thinner and did not say much. The visit was rather awkward, and Robert seemed to take little interest in his guest, although Elisabeth had expected that he would be cheered at seeing the young man whose life he had helped to save. At one point, however, Robert became more animated and suggested that they take a trip to the North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts, the site of the first battle of the American Revolution. The group piled in the car and drove out to Concord but when they arrived, Robert had a change of heart and said that he would remain where he was. After some coaxing, he did leave the car and walk to the river. When he stood for a photograph on the bridge, one elbow on the wooden siding, he looked poised despite the darkness of his expression. A few months later, Carl received an announcement of Robert Dexter’s death. In lieu of flowers, the notice said, please send contributions to the Unitarian Service Committee. Elisabeth followed up with a letter: Yes, Mr. Dexter had seemed better and was certainly in better spirits than for some time. Your visit was the first of a number of happy

25. Robert Dexter on the North Bridge, Concord, Massachusetts, summer 1955. Courtesy of the author.

occasions this summer which gave him great pleasure — having Harriet and her family here and the Lochheads and calls from my nephew and niece and their children. I’m so glad that he had this happy summer and that he was spared any more suffering. I’d forgotten all his activities in Vienna but they were characteristic. He had always been so bursting with energy that it was very hard to “be careful.” But he’s had a happy useful life. And I do want you to know, Carl, what a satisfaction it always was to us both to have had a hand in bringing you here. We were proud of you.1 218 | conclusion

Robert Dexter had not had a known physical illness when he died at age sixty-eight, and the circumstances of his passing were not detailed. Elisabeth had written frankly about her husband’s depression in an essay that she intended as a sociological piece on the risks of retirement. She wished to design a survey to help people plan projects and goals for a new life so that they would not retire unprepared, as Robert apparently had. Her husband had always had a very interesting job, she explained, but had no real hobbies or other interests aside from a tepid interest in gardening. When he had retired from the Church Peace Union in 1950 during a serious illness, they had been unprepared for the lack of activity that awaited him, she wrote.2 Those activities that did engage him seemed to be related to his earlier ties to Unitarian organizations. He had continued to attend the First Church in Belmont and had taught Sunday school to older children.3 He seemed to have put aside any writing projects in the field of sociology and worked on his memoirs about his time with the Unitarian Service Committee in Europe. His drafts were preserved, and a few years later, the staff director at the Service Committee thought to comment on a piece of the writing that Robert had been working on shortly before he died. The draft chapter was devoted to his regrets over having allowed Noel Field to have worked for the committee.4 Four members of the Field family had disappeared behind the Iron Curtain in 1949. Noel Field and his brother, Hermann, were abducted separately, and Herta Field and their foster daughter, Erika Glaser, had disappeared while looking for Noel. The disappearance of the Fields had received widespread coverage in the American press for years. After Noel and Herta Field were released in late 1954, they chose to remain in Hungary, one of the countries where they had been imprisoned. Their decision not to return to the United States seemed to confirm the suspicion that Noel Field was a communist, and it was Noel Field’s political loyalties that seemed to most trouble Robert Dexter: Personally I am quite convinced that I as Director — and I take the major blame myself — and the committee in the last analysis should have made a much more intensive study of Noel Field’s record. We may not have been able to find out much more than we already knew, conclusion | 219

but at least we would not have been blaming ourselves later for not making the effort. I suppose that one lives and learns, but in this case the U.S.C. paid a very high price for our lack of knowledge, a price that most of us would rather have avoided, if possible. I want here and now to express my own personal feeling of guilt. It was because I was so favorably impressed by the Fields that I brought Field into contact with various American diplomatic officials, first in France and later on when after the break with the U.S. he had moved to Geneva. I have wished many times since that I had not done so, but perhaps in the long run it was the best thing to have done, Perhaps, it was these contacts that enabled our officials to finally put the Red Marker on Field.5 Robert Dexter’s worry that Noel Field had betrayed U.S. interests may have been misplaced, however. Although Noel Field believed in communism, he was never shown to have leaked U.S. intelligence that may have been entrusted to him. A number of people who worked with him attested that it was unlikely that he was passing American secrets on to the Soviets, and he was not accused on the American side of any such dealings. Stalin had exploited a different idea, that Noel Field had betrayed Soviet interests during his work with the Office of Strategic Services. Noel Field’s name was called up time and time again during Stalin’s show trials, and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people were killed because of a presumed association with “the American spy,” Noel Field. The exposure of Noel Field had been more than an embarrassment to Robert Dexter, because the outcome had affected his personal freedom. Perhaps fearing for Dexter’s safety, the U.S. government had withdrawn his security clearance, which meant that he was not permitted to travel outside the United States. Beyond the indignity of having his loyalty to his country questioned, being confined to the United States at this stage probably felt like an internment. For most of his professional life, Robert Dexter had enjoyed the role of ambassador and fact-finder on foreign travels. As a strong Anglophile, Robert Dexter probably regretted deeply the travel restrictions that kept him from visiting the country where he had maintained life-long ties. 220 | conclusion

Robert Dexter could easily have cleared any charges that he was a communist or a fellow traveler, but he could not have removed himself from the risk of the calamity that befell the Fields. The Fields had disappeared one by one and it was not at all far-fetched to imagine that Robert could vanish one day in some European capital. The U.S. Secret Service had fears of further abductions of anyone associated with the Fields, and they spent considerable money escorting Herta Field’s American sister, Gertrude, to Germany and back during her occasional visits to meet Herta.6 Robert Dexter may also have been deflated by his treatment from the Office of Strategic Services. Throughout his years with the Unitarian Service Committee, Robert had always placed what he saw as the Allies’ wartime interests first, and threw himself heart and soul into the various missions of the oss. At the end of the war, however, the oss dropped the Dexters without so much as a thank you. The directors of the intelligence organization had not hesitated to put this small group of rescue workers in danger physically and professionally, while Allen Dulles, John Hughes, and the others were able to continue with career positions in the U.S. government. They became very quiet about the collaboration with leftist organizations that they had so energetically encouraged during the war, and in the end their collaborators at the Unitarian Service Committee were left alone to defend themselves. As Robert Dexter stood on the North Bridge that day shortly before his death, on the site that symbolized the birth of his country, his overriding emotion was, mostly likely, loneliness. elisabeth dexter After her husband’s death in 1955, Elisabeth Dexter put their unfinished World War II memoir aside and turned instead to writing a history of the role of women in the early years of the American Republic, a topic that took her far away from the recent past.7 She picked up her World War II memoirs again in the early 1960s but gave it up again, as she explained to Martha Sharp: “I had fair progress for some months and then was struck with painful trouble with my eyes. I had dreadful headaches, and from that time on have had to get new conclusion | 221

glasses about twice a year. There was probably something wrong with the eyes anyway, but the usc [Unitarian Service Committee] research certainly contributed. Most of my research material consisted of faint carbon copies — flimsies — and when I got to the unhappy part, toward the end of our service, I found the emotional impact upset me more than anyone would think sensible. Anyway, I decided that I could not continue.”8 Elisabeth encouraged Martha Sharp to write the memoir that she would not finish. In the mid-1960s Elisabeth Dexter was again confronted with intense memories of her wartime years after the release of Flora Lewis’s book about Noel Field, Red Pawn (1964). Elisabeth wrote to her old friend Helen Lowrie that she thought that the book was a true account of Noel Field and that she had talked at length to Lewis when she was writing it. Her only reservation about the book, she wrote, was that she wished that Lewis had made clear that it had been Charles Joy, rather than her husband, who had been charmed by Jo Tempi.9 It was another visitor to Elisabeth Dexter’s house in Belmont who would write the first influential book on the complicity of the U.S. government in the Holocaust. It was a PhD student named David Wyman, who was writing Paper Walls (1968), a comprehensive work that described the U.S government’s indifference to the unfolding genocide and the State Department’s policy of obstructing visa applications.10 In her interview with Wyman, Elisabeth Dexter spoke obliquely about her anger toward Charles Joy and the fallout at the Unitarian Service Committee, but as in her written correspondence she seemed to refrain from describing the real reason for her disillusionment.11 Although she finished her book on early American social history, Elisabeth Dexter never did publish their wartime memoirs, although she accumulated numerous drafts and tentative titles, including “Last Port of Freedom,” “Bottleneck Europe,” and “At the Edge of Hell.” Despite the richness of their experiences during the war, the Dexters’ manuscript is a cautious work that retreats from a frank description of their far-reaching work on behalf of refugees and the Office of Strategic Services. Elisabeth Dexter died peacefully in 1972 at the age of eighty-five. 222 | conclusion

noel and herta field From the time of his release from prison in 1954 until his death from cancer in 1970 at the age of sixty-six, Noel Field lived quietly with his wife in an elegant neighborhood in Budapest.12 Herta survived her husband by many years but also lived out her remaining days in Hungary. During the last phase of his life, Noel Field had worked for a governmental publishing house and had made little contact with ties from his past. His one public communication came in the form of a magazine article published in 1961 entitled “Hitching Our Wagon to a Star,” where he described his long-standing loyalty to communist principles.13 By this time, the Unitarian Service Committee had recovered from the aftermath of the Noel Field controversy and had flourishing programs, especially in the American South where it was involved in rural development and the civil rights movement. After Noel Field and his family disappeared behind the Iron Curtain in 1949, the incident had become a soapbox for anticommunist sermonizing and a series of speculative articles in American newspapers. One article by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. even made the claim that Noel Field became interested in antifascist activities only after Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941.14 Of course, Noel Field had joined the Unitarian Service Committee several months before Hitler’s invasion of Russia, and so it did not play into his decision to help refugees. Those who worked with him and benefited from his help did not doubt that, in much of what he did, he was motivated by humanitarian aims. During the years of Noel Field’s disappearance, some of the original group, including Robert Dexter, met with the board of the Unitarian Service Committee to discuss how to help Field. Noel Field’s sister, Elsie Field, appealed to the Unitarian Service Committee to make a statement to the effect that Noel Field had been employed by the oss and so could not have been a communist. However, when she learned that Stalin was using Noel Field’s ties to the oss to charge and persecute old guard communists, she changed her mind. “It is strange that last time when I came to you for help it was to try to clear Noel of the charges (rumors) of being a communist and a Russian spy — and this time it is to try to clear him of being an American spy! Perhaps these two extremes can convince people that Noel was neither, but just a conclusion | 223

rather naïve and trusting liberal,” wrote Elsie Field.15 In the Eastern block, some of the statements about Noel Field were fantastic indeed. For instance, in 1951 Czechoslovakian information minister Vaclav Kopecky announced: “Let us remember how the whole international network of Anglo-American espionage was unmasked in connection with the well-known Noel Field.”16 The breakthrough for the Fields began in late 1953 when a member of the Polish Secret Police defected to the West and admitted to having interrogated the Fields himself under trumped-up charges. The U.S. State Department responded with a statement: “The United States government requests immediate consular access to these American citizens and the conclusion of arrangements for their repatriation at the earliest possible date.”17 Once the Fields announced they were staying in Hungary, the U.S. government washed their hands of them. charles joy Charles Joy had emerged at the end of the war with a high reputation as the head of a relief program of global reach. However, by August 1946 he had lost the directorship and his job after his extramarital affair with Jo Tempi became public. The relationship might have been ignored, if it were not for a conservative group of Unitarians who were eager to undermine the liberal staff and board of the Unitarian Service Committee. A member of this group tipped off an fbi agent to follow Joy and Tempi during her speaking tour in the United States. The Unitarian Service Committee was already in the sights of the fbi due to the interest shown in it by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The liaison was exposed after the pair took an overnight train from Boston to New York and the porter told inquirers that the two had spent the night together.18 Charles Joy denied any wrongdoing, but he was not believed and the board’s decision to fire him was nearly unanimous.19 Jo Tempi submitted her resignation soon after, but because she was considered to be indispensable, the board did not accept it and asked her to return to France. However, by this time, reports from Europe of her communist activities were filtering back to Boston, and she herself was attracting suspicion. Ray Bragg, who was now acting director of the Unitarian Service Committee, traveled to Europe to investigate 224 | conclusion

and went through the records of the Paris office, which he did not find reassuring. Over breakfast, Bragg asked Tempi to leave the organization, but given her stubborn, fiery temperament, he was setting himself up for a messy fight. The board of directors wrote out six charges against her, including “indiscretion,” “[sexual] immorality,” and the fact that she was a European and they wished to keep only American directors. The document went to Noel Field, who was still the European director, and he reviewed the charges. Point by point, Field defended Tempi and sent his remarks back to Boston. He defended her competence and leadership and scoffed at the evidence they had used against her, including, as he described it, the findings of the “ ‘amateur sleuth’ who snooped on railway trains, at ticket offices and in hotel registers.”20 But Field did not succeed, and Tempi soon received her final notice. She retaliated by creating a “first-rate incident,” as Robert Dexter described it, which included destroying most of the Paris files and firing her staff so that the committee would be forced to pay them severance. After resigning from the Unitarian Service Committee, Jo Tempi disappeared from relief circles. Charles Joy, however, managed to fulfill his long-standing dream to work in relief and development in Africa. Over the next decade he worked for Save the Children Federation and for care, where he maintained a senior position for many years. After he retired from active overseas service in 1954, he spent the remainder of his long life writing books on various subjects, including travel books for children and a book on the life and thought of Albert Schweitzer.21 Although he had penned thousands of pages of meticulous correspondence about his wartime work, he did not attempt to publicize his work with the Unitarian Service Committee. One might wonder if, had the Unitarians not been put under siege after the war, they would have spoken out more about what they knew of the U.S. government’s response to the Holocaust. In effect, they had been maligned by some in Congress and treated unsympathetically in much of the press, developments that would have been met with relief by members of the State Department. It is probably true to say that, in the eyes of the State Department, Charles Joy was the next most notorious American, after Varian Fry, when it came to helping refugees. It was through his efforts that the conclusion | 225

committee enlarged its refugee and relief work and sustained much collaboration with organizations and individuals. Most likely, Joy was deeply upset about his dismissal from the committee and decided to start an entirely new chapter of his life in Africa, and later as an author. His writing, although prodigious, tended to have a short shelf life, and among Unitarians, he is most remembered for having commissioned in 1941 the artwork that became the symbol for Unitarian Universalism — the flaming chalice. Charles Joy died in 1978 at the age of ninety-three. varian fry After the war, Varian Fry continued for a time to work in journalism, but the career that had been fired by a passion for international affairs and compassion for refugees eventually was applied to the private sector. He took on long-term contracts to write for Coca-Cola and other companies, which provided him considerable financial resources to support his family — which now included a wife and three children. For a time, these lucrative positions provided the means to pursue expensive hobbies and to live in a large house in Connecticut with ample space to display the artwork that some of his wartime clients had given to him. However, although he owned a few outstanding pieces related to his rescue work, few of his former clients bothered to stay in touch. An exception was the sculptor Jacques Lipschitz, who conveyed his gratitude and his friendship to Fry for the rest of his life. Like the Unitarians, a leftist taint had haunted Varian Fry in the immediate postwar years, despite the fact that he had never been a communist sympathizer and, in fact, his views had become more conservative since his return to the United States. Soon after the war, he had bought a documentary film company that had sought to bid for U.S. military film contracts, but the company was barred on the grounds that Fry had been “a Communist Party member since 1937.” The charges were of course untrue, but it took many months and the testimony of prominent friends to clear his name.22 Much later, in the mid-1960s, Varian Fry began to revisit his year in Marseille. His reengagement began with the idea to create a book of lithographs to which some of the greatest artists of the twentieth 226 | conclusion

century would contribute, including those that had personally relied on Varian Fry during their escape from Europe. The artwork would address the archetype of the refugee in the image of Aeneas fleeing Troy, and the proceeds would go to the International Rescue and Relief Committee, which had roots in the organization that had sent Fry overseas in 1940. Fry took several trips to Europe for the project, but the trips were disappointing. Most of the artists were not cooperative, and some of his formerly close friends no longer had time for him. During his trip in 1965 he was admitted to a Paris hospital with a heart condition, which may have been imagined. The feeling that he had not been appreciated enough for what he had achieved in Marseille continued to wear on him after he returned home. By this time, his long-time contract work with the Coca-Cola Company had come to an end as well.23 His wife recalled that he was experiencing wild mood swings and that his personality and their marriage seemed to be deteriorating. In 1967 Fry received his first major honor for his wartime work, but the award was for his achievements in helping the French resistance when he evacuated British soldiers from France, not for his help to refugees.24 The honor originated with his trip to France. When Varian Fry had seen the writer Andre Malraux, Malraux had greeted him warmly and insisted that he should be wearing the Croix de Chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur on his lapel.25 Malraux had lobbied the French authorities on Fry’s behalf, and Mary Jayne Gold, the young American who had helped him in Marseille, had written a glowing reference. Varian Fry’s emotional investment in revisiting his year in Marseille intensified as he worked on a new version of his memoir, Surrender on Demand, this time for a high-school audience. For the revision, Fry’s publisher had asked him to elaborate on the “underground railway” through Spain. By chance, Varian Fry heard from his estranged colleague from a quarter-century earlier, Donald Lowrie, who got in touch with Fry under the pretense of trying to track down Charles Joy. A few years earlier Lowrie had already published The Hunted Children, a moving memoir of his work in France. Their letters were long and affectionate as they compared notes about incidents that they had never been able to talk about openly. Fry wrote approvingly, “Like you, I now conclusion | 227

‘Free Lance,’ and like you, I find it far more agreeable than skivving for someone else.” From the distance of time, Varian Fry could revisit a point that had nagged him many years earlier. Presumably, the most controversial work that Fry had undertaken in France in 1940 and 1941 had been the evacuation of British soldiers from southern France in contravention of America’s accommodation to Vichy authority. The U.S. consulate and his own organization in New York had warned him about this involvement and had referred to it in their decision to withdraw him from France. However, as Fry well knew, Donald Lowrie had also broken Vichy “laws” in his work on behalf of Czech soldiers, just as Fry had used “illegal” means to help refugees and British soldiers. Lowrie now wrote about some of these activities: In actual fact, not only were naval units detached, but there was quite a phony little fleet available for these purposes. One submarine, at least, one large trawler and several large fishing boats — all “converted.” We used them all the time and one occasion (1942) 132 men appeared from the beach near Perpignan — by arrangement, of course. Agents went in and out too, on these things. As for the West-East route through Spain, we had a very special one (from Gibraltar) for top priority people, one at a time, in both directions and O.S.S. may have had the same from Lisbon (not from Gib. I know) since the U.S. Embassy in Madrid “played better than ours.26 Lowrie’s military involvement had fueled Fry’s suspicions over his own government’s inhospitable treatment of his work in Marseille. During the bitter final weeks of writing his book in 1943, Varian Fry had scrawled out his thoughts on this question of why Donald Lowrie had been allowed to stay in France, whereas he, and Frank Bohn of the International Labor Organization, had been asked to leave: But I couldn’t help wondering whether the Department would have acted with such haste if we [Frank Bohn and Fry] had been snatching aristocrats from the fury of an extreme left government instead of rescuing writers, artists and underground workers, most — though, 228 | conclusion

by no means all — of whom were leftists, from the fury of a fascist government. Why had it let us down and not Donald Lowrie, the representative of the Y.M.C.A? . . . The only difference between his case and ours was that he was the representative of an organization which by no stretch of fancy would be called Left, and had been acting in behalf of Czech soldiers, whereas we both came to France as the representatives of organizations which were tainted with leftism in the eyes of many, and had been helping refugees, many of whom were frankly of the left.27 Varian Fry, who had never been naïve, had long understood that the State Department had wanted to keep out refugees who had politics (and racial backgrounds) they did not like, but it was easier for them to say they were acting so as not to aggravate their delicate relationship with Vichy authorities. Varian Fry seemed to have forgotten, however, that Donald Lowrie was not the only American who was not let down. The Unitarians had also been allowed to remain in France and Portugal, albeit, in Charles Joy’s case, by the skin of his teeth. Donald Lowrie sent another long letter to Varian Fry in December 1967, but he never received it. Fry had spent the year depressed over the failure of the art lithograph project. His own career had now narrowed to the job of teaching Latin to high-school students, and he had moved on his own to Connecticut to teach at a private high school while his family remained in Manhattan. When he did not appear at the school one day, Connecticut state police entered the house after receiving a worried call from Varian Fry’s wife. They found him dead, sitting upright in bed, surrounded by manuscript pages for the new edition of Surrender on Demand. As in Robert Dexter’s death, the physiological reasons for Fry’s death remained obscure, though he had certainly had a depressive episode in his final weeks. The silence that hung over Varian Fry’s wartime heroism continued for many years after his death. Interest in heroes of the Holocaust, including Raoul Wallenberg and Oskar Schindler and the village of Le Chambon, which emerged in the 1980s, bypassed Varian Fry and the Unitarians altogether. The Unitarian Service Committee had become the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee during the 1960s and conclusion | 229

was active in the American civil rights movement. Unitarian leadership had invested in material on the committee’s service during World War II, but the intended audience was limited to Unitarian Universalist organizations. Varian Fry’s obscurity was disturbed only after the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum opened its doors in 1993 and featured him in their first special exhibit, “Varian Fry: Assignment Rescue 1940-1941,” the story of Varian Fry’s year in Marseille.28 More recognition followed, most notably, Yad Vashem’s Righteous Among the Nations Award in 1996. Fry was the first American to receive the award, and the tree planted in his honor stands on a prominent spot in the memorial in Jerusalem.29 Then secretary of state Warren Christopher attended the ceremony and praised Varian Fry’s bravery and apologized for the State Department’s treatment of Fry and his mission. The irony of the ceremony would not have been lost on the man it honored, who as a humanitarian rescuer, oss informer, and wrb advisor had understood so well the obstructive policies and duplicity of his own government. Christopher’s apology took place a few years after he had demanded that United Nations troops withdraw from their attempted humanitarian mission in Rwanda. It followed less than a decade after the State Department’s ineffective response to the genocide in Bosnia, which also took place during Christopher’s tenure.30 If Varian Fry had lived to an advanced age, he would have enjoyed the knowledge of what had become of some of his old haunts in Marseille. His beloved Villa Air Bel was respectfully preserved as a local arts center in honor of the artists who had gathered there during World War II. In the old city, a small plaza was inscribed with a new name in 2000. During his year in Marseille, Fry had endured hostility and patronizing lectures from staff at the U.S. consulate, but now the plaza outside the U.S. consulate is named Place Varian Fry.31 martha and waitstill sharp After the war, Martha and Waitstill Sharp resumed living together in Boston. Waitstill’s hopes for returning to a more normal family life after his many months living alone in Prague were already put aside, however, in 1946 when Martha decided to run for Congress. She ran on an anti-isolationist platform and her opponent was Joe Martin, a popular 230 | conclusion

Republican who was the minority leader in the U.S. Congress. Her race was a long shot but her prospects took a sharp dive after late-breaking reports were published to the effect that she had been mixing with communists during her time with the Unitarian Service Committee. One of the newspaper stories was from a local Catholic priest, a Father Ambrose Bowen, who reported that Martha would be subpoenaed to talk before the House Un-American Activities Committee about her connection with a “Communist Front organization.”32 The committee members were apparently interested in the Unitarians’ past work with an organization called the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. This committee had looked after members of the International Brigadiers who had fought in Spain, and other backers of the Spanish Republican cause. American sponsors of the organization had included several Unitarians, among them Frederick May Eliot and some of the very prominent refugees, including Heinrich Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger.33 This committee had paid for transportation and food for some of the Unitarian clients. However, the collaboration was unremarkable given that the Unitarians had worked with all the groups that actively helped refugees in the region at that time, and the Joint Anti-Fascists had worked with other groups, including the Quakers.34 The House Un-American Activities Committee’s interest in the Unitarians seemed to be entirely related to the smear campaign against Martha Sharp because, after the election, the congressional committee seemed to lose all interest in the investigation. Joe Martin was able to further malign Martha’s reputation with a reference that described his opponent as “the little lady in the red dress.”35 Martha Sharp lost the race and never ran for political office again. After the election, Waitstill accepted a ministry in Chicago, and Martha worked on a number of missions for the newly formed state of Israel. She later worked in the Truman administration for the National Security Resources Board in Washington dc, and Waitstill became director for an organization in Chicago working on race relations, which meant that he and Martha continued the commuting marriage that they had been living for many years.36 The long separations were continuing to take a toll, as they had since the early days of the Unitarian Service Committee, and Martha and Waitstill eventually divorced and conclusion | 231

married other people. Waitstill died in 1983, and his widow sent the sad news to Marta Feuchtwanger. The warm correspondence between the Sharps and the Feuchtwangers had never ceased.37 Martha Sharp outlived all of her colleagues, dying in 1999 at the age of ninety-four. Like the others, in her lifetime she received rather minor recognition for her work in France and Portugal, including awards from the Red Cross in those countries.38 However, many of the children that she had brought out of France in 1940 had the pleasure of meeting her again at a reunion when they were of middle age and could appreciate the rarity of what she had done.39 It might be true to say that of all the exceptional Americans who shaped this story of rescue, Martha Sharp was the most resilient and the most able to continue her engagement in public service and human rights after the war. The other Unitarians in this story did not recover easily from the various scandals that all had their origins in regimes — both American and Soviet — looking for scapegoats. Noel Field’s suffering was the most extreme, but Robert Dexter’s later years would have undoubtedly been much longer and more satisfying if he had not been drawn into the red-baiting that enveloped the committee’s personalities. While Martha had been the target of McCarthyism during her 1946 congressional bid, she put the episode aside, along with her ambitions in politics, and set forth in a new direction to help the development of the state of Israel. She had many successes in that work, which she sustained, to some extent, for the rest of her life. Ten years after Varian Fry’s tree was planted in the Garden of the Righteous at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, two more plaques were inscribed nearby for the Sharps, in honor of an American couple that had found themselves almost by chance in Prague in 1939 and had never looked back.

232 | conclusion

Afterword william f. schulz In many ways the story you have just read is a familiar one. Not familiar in its details, for they have never been collected before — and no one who cares anything about the history of the Holocaust, or indeed of human rights, can feel anything but deep gratitude to Susan Elisabeth Subak for retrieving them for us and weaving them into such a compelling narrative. But familiar in other ways, both positive and negative. In a positive sense the heroes of the story are almost mythic in stature. Like Odysseus and so many legendary characters who came after him, they left loved ones behind and set out on a perilous journey filled with potential pitfalls, holding in their hands the very lives of those who had been entrusted to them. What the Sharps, Dexters, Charles Joy, Varian Fry, and all the others did at risk to themselves was extraordinary, and it inevitably provokes in us the perennial question, “Would I have done that?” And indeed, like so many heroes who came before them and since, many of them suffered lasting damage as a result of their heroism, as the last chapter makes clear. How extraordinary too that in an era when women had yet to claim the full measure of their power, so many of the leaders of this drama — Martha Sharp, Elisabeth Dexter, Lotta Hitschmanova, Jo Tempi — were women. At the same time the story reminds us of what a short distance we have come in the past sixty plus years. It is not just that the conflicts among the players sound so familiar. (Why is it, I often asked myself during my years as executive director of Amnesty International USA, that people who are engaged in the most serious life and death issues can be so noble in that pursuit and so petty in their treatment of one another?)1 It is that the fundamental issues with which these characters wrestle are still with us. The most obvious of those issues is the genocide that prompted their engagement in the first place. Since World War II, the world has witnessed five other instances of mass slaughter — in Cambodia, Iraq (against the Kurds), Rwanda, Bosnia, and now Sudan.2 The number of refugees worldwide stands today at 11.5 million with another 26

million internally displaced within their own countries.3 Asylum seekers fleeing persecution still face enormous skepticism from authorities to whom they seek to make their cases.4 And the proclivity among the rescuers to “play favorites,” to accept more refugees from one country (or class) over another for political reasons rather than on the basis of need, is still commonplace, as witness the fact that any Cuban who reaches U.S. shores is automatically granted entry while Haitians, for example, are inevitably turned back. This is not to say, however, that there has been no progress. Indeed, if any good thing could be said to have emerged from the nightmare our heroes lived through, it was the birth of the notion of universal human rights (as opposed to rights that could be claimed by virtue of one’s citizenship in a particular country). Were it not for the Holocaust, we might never have had the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, with its affirmations that “everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person,” or the Convention on the Prevention or Punishment of the Crime of Genocide that entered into force in 1951 with its commitment that “persons committing genocide . . . shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.”5 Moreover, the proliferation of human rights treaties that emerged in the postwar period sparked the birth of international nongovernmental organizations (ngos) devoted to the monitoring of violations of those treaties, beginning with Amnesty International in 1961. But monitoring, be it by un treaty bodies or independent ngos, is of only limited sufficiency without enforcement. One of the most promising developments of the modern era is that international law and institutions have evolved to a point where impunity for at least the most serious human rights crimes is no longer inevitable. For centuries genocidal leaders could feel great confidence that, absent military defeat by another power, they would almost invariably go unpunished for their deeds. But starting with the War Crimes Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia (established by the un in 1993) and for Rwanda (1994), that began to change. In 1999 the British Law Lords (the United Kingdom’s highest court) ruled that sovereign immunity did not protect General Augusto Pinochet, former dictator 234 | afterword

of Chile, from prosecution for crimes against humanity, and indeed that when it came to crimes like torture and genocide, any country on earth has the power to prosecute those responsible — has, that is, what is called “universal jurisdiction” — if it can get its hands on them. But certainly the apex of these developments was the establishment in 2002 of the International Criminal Court (icc), charged with prosecuting genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, which has already issued indictments against alleged criminals in Congo, Uganda, and Sudan, and is attempting to indict the president of Sudan as well. We have a long way to go before international jurisprudence will be a reliable resource for deterring violence, and of course the United States’ own recalcitrance — President Clinton’s refusal to submit the icc treaty to the Senate for ratification after his signing it; President Bush’s “unsigning” of that treaty; and the United States’ insistence that countries in which U.S. military personnel are deployed exempt them from the jurisdiction of the court — has been a major stumbling block, but we are farther down this path today than I had any reason to hope we might be when I took up my work with Amnesty International USA in 1994. And if the icc is successful in its early prosecutions, imagine how much easier it will be to make the case to the American people that ratifying the court’s statutes such that future Saddam Husseins could be dealt with judicially rather than militarily is clearly and convincingly in America’s best interests. With the effective criminalization of human rights crimes, we advance the day when the norms of a civilized world will preclude torture and mass atrocities (and, not incidentally, mandate the shunning of those who commit them) as convincingly as they already do piracy and slavery.6 And yet laws, even enforceable ones, are not enough. As Samantha Power makes clear in her classic study of genocide, A Problem from Hell, the reason those five genocides I referenced earlier were allowed to take place (and, in the case of Darfur, still are being allowed) is largely because of both governmental and public indifference. It is not because of ignorance. Especially today the flow of electronic information makes the commission of human rights crimes in even the most remote locations a matter of public record in days, if not hours. Nor can it any longer be a question of national sovereignty, that last refuge afterword | 235

of the scoundrel regime, because in 2006 the United Nations agreed that the international community had a “responsibility to protect” those at risk of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity when their own governments failed to do so, even to the point of military intervention. And it cannot be some natural abhorrence of the use of force since governments engage in that all the time. No, it is a matter of will. As Power says of the U.S. government, “Simply put, American leaders did not act [against the perpetrators of genocide] because they did not want to. They believed that genocide was wrong, but they were not prepared to invest the military, financial, diplomatic or domestic political capital needed to stop it.”7 And what was true of American leaders was just as true of European and many others. Nor did the publics to which those leaders were theoretically accountable demand action either. So how can we generate the necessary public outcry? The best way I know is to tell the stories and then organize to stop the bloodshed. There are, it is true, innumerable practical reasons to stop genocide — because it destabilizes whole regions and makes them more vulnerable to security breaches, economic collapse, and health crises and more likely to become havens for terrorists, to name just the most obvious — but it is the dramatic personal tale that is most likely to stir the conscience. I’ll give you just one example from my own experience. When I visited the enormous Kalma Refugee Camp in southern Darfur a few years ago — ninety thousand teeming people who had been burned out of their villages, their menfolk murdered, many of the women battered and sexually assaulted — I was struck by a thousand things: The children who called out to us repeatedly the only English word they knew, ironically enough, “Okay, Okay” (with the thumbsup sign) when nothing was okay, absolutely nothing was okay. Or the police sent by the Sudanese government to guard the camp — many of whom were suspected of having raped and murdered more than one of those they were supposed to be guarding. But what really took my breath away was this: a young woman who, amid the utter squalor and degradation, her clothes, such as they were, tattered and falling off, wore around her neck a lovely piece of jewelry — just glass no doubt but a turquoise-colored glass that sparkled constantly in the relentless sun. 236 | afterword

At first I thought it was a religious symbol and I asked our Arabicspeaking translator to ask her what it was. “She says ‘It is me,’ ” he told me. At first I didn’t understand and thought she had said simply “It is mine” and he had mistranslated. “What did she say?” I asked. “Did she say it is hers?” “No,” he said definitively. “She said, ‘It is me.’ ” And suddenly I understood. When the women workers who led the strike in 1912 against the textile mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts, were being hosed down and beaten by the police, they shouted, “Give us bread and roses,” and that chant, which meant “We demand bread to eat, yes, but we demand our dignity, too” — has been a watchword of the labor movement ever since. And here in this dreadful camp was the very same demand. This piece of jewelry, this small, sparkling piece of glass around my neck: “This is me! This is how I know that I retain a tiny hint of my humanity. I require bread to live, of course. So do the cows, goats, sheep, pigs — bless them all. But none of them decorate themselves with turquoise glass; only humans do that. Only humans look on a sparkling piece of glass and call it beautiful. And I am a human being! Still. And I demand roses, too.” Telling the stories that put a human face on the victims of atrocities is the first part of the formula. Martha Sharp no doubt did that in all those talks she gave around the country about her experiences in Nazi-dominated Europe. And then organizing to stop the crimes, either directly, as the actors in this book did in their efforts to rescue the vulnerable, or indirectly, through pressure on governments and intergovernmental organizations to find the will to mobilize the force to stop the slaughter, as the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, which grew out of the story told here, has been doing now for more than sixty years. Indeed, it is exactly because not all of us can do the former, can set out for war-torn Europe or visit the refugee camps of Darfur, that we have institutions like the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, so that even if we cannot go ourselves, we can be a part of the lives of those who do. Every one of us can be a part of institutions that make such heroism possible and in that measure can claim a degree of kinship with the righteous among the nations. afterword | 237

The roles of victim and rescuer are complex ones, the differential in power between the two making for some tricky dynamics. Are the motives of the rescuers pure? How can the victim, once safe, begin to reclaim sovereignty over her own life? Some years ago the poet James Wright wrote a poem called “Saint Judas” that has always haunted me. “When I went out to kill myself / I caught a pack of hoodlums beating up a man,” it begins. “Running to spare his suffering / I forgot my name, my number, how my day began.” In some way the plights of others can put our own troubles in perspective and in this sense “rescue” the rescuers as readily as the rescued. “Flayed without hope,” the poem ends, “I held the man for nothing in my arms.”8 Ultimately, of course, it matters far less what our motives are than what our actions achieve. In the case of the “American Relief Workers Who Defied the Nazis,” they gave new life to the persecuted, and in the process, new hope that we too might forget our names, our numbers, how our days began, and hold all that is vulnerable and precious for nothing in our arms. William F. Schulz, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, served as executive director of Amnesty International USA from 1994 to 2006 and as president of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations from 1985 to 1993. He is currently chair of the board of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee.

238 | afterword

Acknowledgments I am grateful to many people who lent their time to the research and writing of Rescue and Flight, and especially to Charlie Clements, president of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (uusc). Several years ago in a small town in New Mexico, Charlie picked up a biography of Varian Fry in the discount bin of a bookstore and became intrigued by the scattered references to the Unitarians. This incident was my good fortune, because his own curiosity and knowledge about what a small group of Americans was doing in southwest Europe during World War II sustained this work in many ways. The book is richer for his insights and enthusiasm, and thanks to Charlie, lots of material vital to this story, which might have otherwise been overlooked, was uncovered in uusc file cabinets in Cambridge. Larry Benaquist and Ghanda Di Figlia generously shared material they had discovered during their own efforts to understand the wartime history of the Unitarian Service Committee. Artemis Joukowsky III’s long-standing dedication to documenting the work of his grandparents, Martha and Waitstill Sharp, embodies a tremendous resource that will enhance our knowledge of the U.S. response to the Holocaust for many years to come. Carolivia Herron and members of the Washington dc Jewish writer’s circle helped improve the storytelling at the start of the writing in 2005. Jim and M. L. Landfried of First Church Belmont Massachusetts cast a helpful eye over most of the later chapter drafts as did Kim Kelley. A number of specialists on various aspects of the history of the period contributed through fruitful discussions or reviews of drafts: Severin Hochberg, Steve Luckert, Rafael Medoff, Walter Meyerhof (now deceased), Hana Papanek, Melissa Rosenbaum, Justus Rosenberg, Pierre Sauvage, Christel Trouvé, Lenore Weitzman, and David Wyman. The staff of the archives that I haunted over the years in person or over the phone usually went out of their way to hunt for material or to fulfill my requests promptly. A few deserve special mention. At the start of my research, John Taylor (now deceased) of the National

Archives and Record Administration in College Park, Maryland, led me right to declassified documents on the Unitarians. Wendy Anthony at Skidmore College undertook her own search of articles about the Dexters within the college archives. Fran O’Donnell at Andover-Harvard Theological Library, with her thorough knowledge of Unitarian holdings, was helpful over the entire time frame of the project. My keen copyeditor was Lona Dearmont. At the University of Nebraska Press, Heather Lundine made this book a reality.

240 | acknowledgments

Notes preface 1. See Feingold, Politics of Rescue. 2. L. Dexter, “Memoir of Elisabeth Anthony Dexter,” unpublished manuscript. 3. Elisabeth Anthony Dexter, Colonial Women of Affairs: Women in Business and the Professions in America before 1776. 4. See Marino, A Quiet American; Isenberg, A Hero of Our Own; and Sauvage, “Varian Fry in Marseille.” 5. On Lewis Dexter’s undergraduate career, see Boston Sunday Journal, February 3, 1935. 6. Elisabeth Dexter to Hans Subak, October 12, 1938, Belmont ma, in the author’s possession. 7. Berkley, Vienna and Its Jews, 270. 8. Robert Dexter to Percival Brundage, March 6, 1941, Boston, Unitarian Universalist Service Committee Records, bms 16185, Box 1, Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University (hereafter cited as uusc Records, ahtl). 9. Charles Joy to Lisbon office, April 24, 1941, Boston, bms 16185, Box 1, uusc Records, ahtl. 10. Elisabeth Dexter and Robert Dexter, “Learning the Ropes,” in “Last Port of Freedom,” unpublished manuscript, Robert and Elisabeth Dexter Papers, Box 16, Folder 9, John Hay Library, Brown University (hereafter cited as Dexter Papers). 11. E. Dexter and R. Dexter, “Last Port of Freedom.” 12. Robert Dexter to Boston office, July 1, 1941, Lisbon, bms 16185, Box 1, uusc Records, ahtl. 13. Unitarian Service Committee, 10/21/40, Decimal Files, State Department, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park md (hereafter cited as nara, College Park). introduction 1. Howe, For Faith and Freedom, 176–77. 2. National Council of Churches, Association of Religion Data Archives. 3. National Council of Churches, Association of Religious Data Archive. 4. Commission of Appraisal, Unitarians Face a New Age. 5. Carl Subak, conversation with author, July 2005. 6. E. Dexter and R. Dexter, “Last Port of Freedom.”

7. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution, 208; Dawidowicz, War Against the Jews, 87. 8. Dawidowicz, War Against the Jews, 216–17. 9. Carl Subak, conversation with author, July 2005. 10. E. Dexter and R. Dexter, “Last Port of Freedom.” 11. Henry, Norbert Fabian Capek, 212. 12. Henry, Capek, 212. 13. Henry, Capek, 206. 14. Ghanda Di Figlia, “To Try the Soul’s Strength,” 13. 15. Anna Fenn, “A Point of View: The Founding of the Unitarian Service Committee,” February 8, 1980, Unitarian Universalist Service Committee Records, ca. 1935–2006, Accession: 2008–19, Box 3, Folder 34, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington dc (hereafter cited as uusc Records, ushmm). 16. Robert Dexter estimated that at least twenty thousand refugees in Czechoslovakia were in immediate need of emigration assistance and that the Unitarian program should attempt to provide material assistance including medical aid. He made the optimistic argument in his report that aiding the refugees could help restore the Czechs’ faith in democracy. “The dangerous tendencies toward anti-Semitism and nationalism grow largely because of a feeling of desertion — ‘that we are another Ethiopia,’ as one Czech expressed it.” R. Dexter, “Confidential Report Czechoslovakian Mission,” undated, Dexter Papers, Box 14, Folder 3. 17. Strauss, “At Peace with Its Purpose.” 18. Robert Dexter to Robert Yarnall, September 13, 1938, Boston, Dexter Papers, Box 14, Folder 11. 19. Robert Dexter to Louis Cornish, October 8, 1938, Boston, Dexter Papers, Box 14, Folder 12. 20. Waitstill Sharp, Martha Sharp, and Robert Dexter, “How Americans Helped a Nation in Crisis,” Report of the Commission for Service in Czechoslovakia, 1939, Box 4, Folder 64, uusc Records, ushmm. 21. Robert C. Dexter, “And They Call This Peace,” Christian Register, December 15, 1938, 740–41; “Confidential Report, Czechoslovakian Mission,” Dexter Papers, Box 14, Folder 3. 22. Frederick May Eliot to Cordell Hull, telegram, “America Was Once a Haven,” Christian Register, December 1, 1938. 23. “It [the 1924 Immigration Law] is based primarily on sound sociological principles; first, that the United States is approaching, if it has not already reached, a situation where it does not need increased population; and second, that in selecting applicants for admission shall exclude those groups whose home environment, tradition, and standard of living make them more difficult to assimilate.” R. C. Dexter, Social Adjustment. 24. Henry Wilder Foote, “The Deadly Infection of Anti-Semitism,” Christian Register, December 1, 1938, 708–9. 25. Di Figlia, Roots and Visions, 18. 242 | notes to pages xx–xxiv

26. Vetter, “Charles Rhind Joy.” 27. See Lewis, Red Pawn. 28. “Elisabeth Anthony Dexter,” Dexter Papers, Box 19, Folder 31; Di Figlia, “Soul’s Strength,” 4, 6. 29. Lowrie, Hunted Children, dust jacket. 30. The American staff were Robert and Elisabeth Dexter, Charles Joy, Martha and Waitstill Sharp, Noel Field, and Howard Brooks, of the Unitarians; Varian Fry, Leon Ball, Mary Jayne Gold, Charlie Fawcett, and Miriam Davenport of the Emergency Rescue Committee; Joseph Schwartz and Herbert Katzki of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee; and Donald Lowrie and Tracy Strong of the World ymca. 1. prague, 1939 1. Waitstill Sharp to Robert Dexter, February 24, 1939, Prague, Box 4, Folder 65, uusc Records, ushmm. 2. Waitstill Sharp to Robert Dexter, March 13, 1939, Prague, Box 4, Folder 65, uusc Records, ushmm. 3. Di Figlia, “To Try the Soul’s Strength,” 20–22. 4. Rosalind Lee to Robert Dexter, April 7, 1939, Swansea, Sharp Collection, Box 2, Folder 8. 5. Martha Sharp to Brackett Lewis, March 31, 1939, Paris, Box 4, Folder 65, uusc Records, ushmm; W. Sharp to R. Dexter, March 13, 1939. 6. M. Sharp to B. Lewis, March 31, 1939. 7. Waitstill Sharp, interview by Ghanda Di Figlia, October 17–19, 1978, bms 16222, uusc Records, ahtl. 8. M. Sharp to B. Lewis, March 31, 1939. 9. Bazarov, “Schmolka and Steiner: The Return of the Heroes.” 10. Martha Sharp and Waitstill Sharp, “Cooperation and Relief in Czechoslovakia,” in How Unitarians Helped a Nation in Crisis, Report of the Commission for Service in Czechoslovakia, 1939, Box 4, Folder 64, uusc Records, ushmm. 11. Martha Sharp, “Emigration Case Work,” in How Unitarians Helped a Nation in Crisis, Report of the Commission for Service in Czechoslovakia, 1939, Box 4, Folder 64, uusc Records, ushmm. 12. M. Sharp, “Emigration Case Work.” 13. Pederson, “Vita: Eleanor Rathbone,” 34. 14. Di Figlia, “Soul’s Strength,” 16. 15. Refugee questionnaires from clients in Prague, Sharp Collection, Box 9, Folder 82. 16. M. Sharp, “Emigration Case Work.” 17. Waitstill Sharp to Robert Dexter, April 24, 1939, Sharp Collection, Box 8, Folder 64. notes to pages xxv–7 | 243

18. Waitstill Sharp to Robert Dexter, June 13, 1939, London, Sharp Collection, Box 2, Folder 8. 19. Robert Dexter to Waitstill Sharp, June 21, 1939, Boston, Sharp Collection, Box 7, Folder 60. 20. Di Figlia, “Soul’s Strength,” 14. 21. Waitstill Sharp, interview. 22. Baker Memorial Issue, The Tech, 1950, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge ma. 23. Di Figlia, “Soul’s Strength,” 9. 24. Jeanette Hopkins, “Books that Will Not Burn,” Christian Register, June 1955 (cited in Notable American Unitarians, http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/ unitarians/arnoldapp.html); Wilson, Brief History of Beacon Press. 25. Henry, Capek, 216. 26. Henry, Capek, 216. 27. Henry, Capek, 217. 28. Mastny, Czechs under Nazi Rule, 17. 29. Mastny, Czechs under Nazi Rule, 18. 30. Henry, Capek, 119. 31. Henry, Capek, 114–15. 32. Henry, Capek, 126. 33. In addition to his other talents, Norbert Capek was a prolific writer of hymns, and his songs further enhanced the visibility of the growing religious movement. Capek had introduced an annual ritual to a church where ritual was almost entirely absent. His “flower service,” where flowers brought by individual congregants are gathered up in large vases and then passed out later in the service, had become a popular springtime ritual in most American Unitarian congregations. Henry, Capek, 142. 34. Henry, Capek, 188. 35. Henry, Capek, 189, 315. 36. Worried that their Czech friends would face foreclosure on the property, between the early 1930s and Robert Dexter’s visit in 1937, American Unitarian headquarters in Boston sent various representatives to appraise the security of their investment. However, because of increasing income from rentals in the palace, the Boston visitors were able to attest, by the late 1930s, that the Unitaria church was not only solvent but very much thriving in Prague. A notable feature of the Czech Unitarian congregants was their relative affluence compared with the typical Czech churchgoer. Both in their middleclass background and their higher levels of education, the Czech Unitarians resembled their American Unitarian brethren. Norbert Capek himself was an exception to this profile. He was the only child of a poor tailor from a small village in Bohemia and had been deprived of all but a basic education. In later years, he received a dubious PhD from the nonaccredited “Oriental 244 | notes to pages 7–13

University” in the United States. Despite his humble origins and lack of higher education, he was unquestionably a talented intellectual who was able to attract a wide range of scholars and professionals to his church. Henry, Capek, 91, 149–50. 37. Henry, Capek, 224–25. 38. Henry, Capek, 224. 39. Henry, Capek, 217, 225. 40. Martha Sharp to Seth Gano, December 5, 1939, Wellesley ma, Sharp Collection, Box 9, Folder 85; Waitstill Sharp to Robert Dexter, August 17, 1939, Paris, Box 4, Folder 65, uusc Records, ushmm. 41. Martha Sharp, “Tales of a Church Mouse,” 23, manuscript, 1987, Sharp Collection, Box 30, Folder 3. 42. Waitstill Sharp to Robert Dexter, April 25, 1939, Box 4, Folder 65, uusc Records, ushmm. 43. M. Sharp to B. Lewis, March 31, 1939; M. Sharp and W. Sharp, “Cooperation and Relief in Czechoslovakia.” 44. Di Figlia, “Soul’s Strength,” 23. 45. R. Lee to R. Dexter, April 7, 1939. 46. M. Sharp to B. Lewis, March 31, 1939. 47. Martha Heller to Martha and Waitstill Sharp, December 3, 1939, Sharp Collection, Box 5, Folder 36. 48. Waitstill Sharp, interview. 49. Virginia Wastcoat to Robert Dexter, March 27, 1939, London, Box 3, Folder 41, uusc Records, ushmm. 50. Nicholas Winton, interview by Arwen Donahue, November 17, 1995, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. 51. M. Sharp to B. Lewis, March 31, 1939. 52. Nicholas Winton, interview in the documentary film Nicholas Winton: The Power of Good (2001) by Matej Minac. The first of the children’s transports left Prague on March 14, 1939, and numbered twenty children who left by air. The eighth and last transport left on August 2, 1939, and numbered sixty-eight children. Movement for the Care of Children from Germany, Ltd., British InterAid Committee, London, included in Emanuel and Gissing, Nicholas Winton and the Rescued Generation, 127. 53. R. Lee to R. Dexter, April 7, 1939. 54. Emanuel and Gissing, Nicholas Winton, 108–10. 55. M. Sharp, “Church Mouse,” 130. 56. M. Sharp, “Church Mouse,” 128. 57. London, Whitehall and the Jews, 148. 58. London, Whitehall, 143–44. 59. London, Whitehall, 148. 60. London, Whitehall, 104. notes to pages 13–20 | 245

61. London, Whitehall, 161. 62. London, Whitehall, 114. 63. London, Whitehall, 142. 64. Waitstill Sharp, interview. 65. Field and Field, Trapped in the Cold War, 168–69. 66. Lewis, Red Pawn, 116–17; Field and Field, Trapped in the Cold War, 124. 67. Field and Field, Trapped in the Cold War, 168. 68. Jones, “Rev. Waitstill Sharp: ‘Front Seat to History.’ ” 69. Duncan Howlett, “Survey of Poland,” in How Unitarians Helped a Nation in Crisis, Report of the Commission for Service in Czechoslovakia, 1939, p. 27, Box 4, Folder 64, uusc Records, ushmm. 70. Di Figlia, “Soul’s Strength,” 52. 71. Petr Samojsky, Prague Unitarian Congregation, personal communication, November 24, 2005. 72. Henry, Capek, 226. 73. Henry, Capek, 228–29. 74. A member of the Prague church, Otto Schoenberger, left Waitstill 610,000 Czech crowns in return for the promise of repayment in American dollars once he completed his emigration. Robert Dexter to Mr. Marean, December 19, 1939, Sharp Collection, Box 7, Folder 60. 75. Henry, Capek, 243–44. 76. Henry, Capek, 256–57. 77. Brompton, “Politics of the German Occupation,” 259. 78. Henry, Capek, 267. 79. M. Sharp and W. Sharp, “Cooperation and Relief in Czechoslovakia.” 80. Special cable to the New York Times, July 30, 1939, London. 81. Waitstill Sharp, interview. 82. Howlett, “Survey of Poland,” 27. 83. M. Sharp, “Church Mouse,” 143. 84. M. Sharp and W. Sharp, “Cooperation and Relief in Czechoslovakia.” 85. W. Sharp to R. Dexter, August 17, 1939. 2. marseille and lisbon, 1940 1. Boston Evening Globe, January 15, 1940, 1. 2. Mildred Boie, “The Homeless Millions of Europe,” Christian Register, May 15, 1940. 3. “Prague Relief Fund Drive Is Once More On,” Boston Globe, February [day unknown], 1940. 4. Christian Register, April 7, 1938, 235. 5. Seth Gano, “Religion at Work,” Christian Register, May 15, 1940, 72–74.

246 | notes to pages 20–28

6. Unitarian Service Committee minutes, May 29, 1940, bms 16185, Box 1, uusc Records, ahtl. 7. Robert Dexter to Malcolm Davis, May 18, 1940, Boston, bms 16185, Box 1, uusc Records, ahtl. 8. Brooks, “Frederick May Eliot.” 9. Di Figlia, “To Try the Soul’s Strength,” 31. 10. Waitstill Sharp, interview by Ghanda Di Figlia, October 17–19, 1978. 11. Di Figlia, “Soul’s Strength, 32. 12. Dawidowicz, War Against the Jews, 487. 13. See Marrus and Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews. 14. See Ryan, “Vichy and the Jews”; Marrus and Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews. 15. Bauer, American Jewry and the Holocaust, 44. 16. Bauer, American Jewry and the Holocaust, 47. 17. Waitstill Sharp, interview. 18. Lawrence Benaquist to Thomas Scoville, October 27, 2003, personal communication containing excerpts from Martha Sharp’s journal. 19. Lowrie, Hunted Children, 14. 20. Lowrie, Hunted Children, 19. 21. Lowrie, Hunted Children, 40–41. 22. Lowrie, Hunted Children, 42. 23. Lowrie, Hunted Children, 44. 24. W. Sharp to M. Sharp, August 10, 1940, Lisbon, Sharp Collection, Box 4, Folder 30. 25. See Marino, Quiet American. 26. Varian Fry to Mrs. Roosevelt, June 27, 1940, Varian Fry Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 27. Varian Fry to Mrs. Roosevelt, July 18, 1940, Fry Papers. 28. FDR to Mrs. Shipley, July 1940, Box 14, Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt. 29. Handlin, A Continuing Task, 80. 30. Varian Fry, manuscript, “Surrender on Demand,” 19, Fry Papers. 31. Waitstill Sharp to Robert Dexter, August 12, 1940, in M. Sharp manuscript, part 2, chapter 21, Box 4, Folder 63, uusc Records, ushmm. 32. Fry, manuscript, “Surrender on Demand,” 19. 33. Varian Fry to Eileen Fry, August 12, 1940, Fry Papers. 34. Waitstill Sharp to Monsieur Charpentier, August 11, 1940, Fry Papers. 35. July 2, 1940, Breckenridge Long Papers, Box 211, Manuscript Division, U.S. Library of Congress, cited in Kassof, “Intent and Interpretation,” 67. 36. Kassof, “Intent and Interpretation,” 67. 37. Ryan, “Vichy and the Jews,” 190.

notes to pages 28–40 | 247

38. Waitstill Sharp and Martha Sharp, “Journey to Freedom: The First Chapter of Unitarian Service,” 1941, p. 21, Unitarian Service Committee, Box 3, Folder 43, uusc Records, ushmm. 39. W. Sharp and M. Sharp, “Journey to Freedom.” 40. W. Sharp to M. Sharp, August 10, 1940. 41. Marino, Quiet American, 64–69. 42. Martha Sharp Cogan, interview by Ghanda Di Figlia, April 16, 1979, bms 16222, uusc Records, ahtl. 43. Eleanor Lane to Samuel Eliot, August 18, 1940, Samuel Atkins Eliot Papers 1869–1951, bms 594, Box 15, Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University. 44. Fry, Surrender on Demand, 18–19. 45. Donald Lowrie, Waitstill Sharp, Martha Sharp to Minister [Juraj] Slavik and [Brackett] Lewis, August 27, 1940, Marseille, Sharp Collection. 46. Donald Lowrie to Varian Fry, December 4, 1967, Fry Papers. 47. Fisera memoir, Joseph Fisera Archive, rg-43.028m, Acc.1999.a.0069, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. 48. Waitstill Sharp to Robert Dexter, August 18, 1940, Lisbon, Box 4, Folder 63, uusc Records, ushmm. 49. In her 1978 interview with Ghanda Di Figlia, Martha Sharp mentioned that the Czech soldiers boarded fishing boats in France and were taken to North Africa where they boarded regular troop ships to England. The transport from France was paid for by the organization American Relief for Czechoslovakia. Martha does not say what role she had in this project. Martha Feuchtwanger recalls that when she met Martha Sharp in September 1940, she was dressed as a fisherwoman. Marta Feuchtwanger, “Oral History,” August 13, 1975, Tape XX, Side 1, Feuchtwanger Memorial Library. 50. Lowrie, Hunted Children, 110. 51. Lowrie, Hunted Children, 113. 52. Ninon Tallon to Waitstill Sharp, November 16, 1940, Lisbon, Sharp Collection, Box 4, Folder 27. 53. See Marrus and Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews; Ryan, “Vichy and the Jews.” 54. Fry, Surrender on Demand, 53. 55. Meyerhof, In the Shadow of Love, 44. 56. Meyerhof, In the Shadow of Love, 49. 57. Waitstill Sharp, taped interview by Ghanda Di Figlia, 1978. 58. Fry to Otto Meyerhof, September 18, 1945, Fry Papers. 59. Antonia Feuchtwanger, “Amid the Menace of War, Sanary-sur-Mer was a Refuge under the Sun,” New York Times, October 9, 2005. 60. Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, 35. 248 | notes to pages 40–48

61. Marta Feuchtwanger, “Other Notes for a Speech,” undated, Feuchtwanger Memorial Library. 62. Varian Fry’s notes, Fry Papers. 63. Feuchtwanger, Teufel in Frankreich, 347. 64. Feuchtwanger, Teufel in Frankreich, 348. 65. Feuchtwanger, “Other Notes for a Speech.” 66. Feuchtwanger, Teufel in Frankreich, 352. 67. Marino, Quiet American, 197–98. 68. Feuchtwanger, Devil in France 265. 3. lisbon and marseille, 1940 1. One of the visitors was Franz von Hildebrand, a young Austrian Catholic monarchist who had worked for Varian Fry in Marseille during the previous month. Marino, Quiet American, 122. 2. Tallon’s uncle was former French premier Edouard Herriot. Time magazine, August 29, 1946. 3. Charles Joy to Robert Dexter, September 20, 1940, Lisbon, bms 16185, Box 1, uusc Records, ahtl. 4. Beginning in late September 1940, proof of ability to proceed from Lisbon including reservations for a definite sailing were necessary to receive a Portuguese transit visa. Wyman, Paper Walls, 151. 5. Information is based on intercepts of Spanish and German coded communications, known as ultra, that were declassified in 1997, held in the Public Records Office, London. Marino, Quiet American, 178–79. 6. “Unitarian Service in Wartime: Lisbon and Our Work There as Seen Through Eyes of Dr. Joy,” Christian Register, November 15, 1940, 439–41. 7. Vetter, “Charles Rhind Joy.” 8. Varian Fry to Eileen Fry, October 1, 1941, Lisbon, Fry Papers. 9. Telegram, Secretary of State Cordell Hull to U.S. Representative in Vichy France, September 18, 1940, 811.111 Refugees/267, State Department, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington DC (hereafter cited as nara, Washington dc). 10. Severin Hochberg, Historian, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, personal communication, March 21, 2006. 11. Charles Joy to Robert Dexter, October 7, 1940, Lisbon, Joy Papers, bms 347, Box 49. 12. Varian Fry, “Our Consuls at Work.” 13. Joy to Dexter, October 7, 1940. 14. Charles Joy to Robert Dexter, Letter 24, January 1941, Joy Papers, bms 347, Box 49. 15. Marino, Quiet American, 210. notes to pages 48–60 | 249

16. Helen O. Lowrie to “Friends,” November 23, 1940, Donald A. and Helen O. Lowrie Papers, 1939–1944, 15/35/53, Box 4, University of Illinois Archives. 17. Lowrie, Hunted Children, 53. 18. Brozan, “War Refugees Honor Their Deliverer.” 19. Weapons of the Spirit (1987) is an Emmy-award winning documentary by Pierre Sauvage. Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed. 20. W. and M. Sharp, “Journey to Freedom,” 18. 21. Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, 27. 22. Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, 232. 23. Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, 232. 24. M. Sharp, “Journey to Freedom,” 25. 25. M. Sharp, “Memorandum: Emigration from France to the United States of America,” November 26, 1940, “Assignment Rescue,” 2000.062.01, Box 105, Folder 2, Institutional Archive, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. 26. M. Sharp to W. Sharp, September 27, 1940, Marseille, Sharp Collection, Box 4, Folder 28. 27. M. Sharp to W. Sharp, October 5, 1940, Vichy, Sharp Collection, Box 4, Folder 28. 28. M. Sharp, interview. 29. M. Sharp to H. Lowrie, December 2, 1940, Lisbon, Sharp Collection, Box 2, Folder 4. 30. M. Sharp to W. Sharp, October 5, 1940, Vichy, Sharp Collection, Box 4, Folder 28. 31. Di Figlia, “Soul’s Strength,” 45–46. 32. Stefan Zweig to Miss Adams, July 29, 1940, “Assignment Rescue,” 2000.062.01, Box 53, Institutional Archive, ushmm. 33. Charles Joy to Robert Dexter, December 6, 1940, Lisbon, Joy Papers, bms 347, Box 49. 34. Fernandez, “Stefan Zweig.” 35. Ryan, “Vichy and the Jews,” 92. 36. Lowrie, Hunted Children, 83. 37. W. Sharp, interview by Ghanda Di Figlia, 1978. 38. Lowrie, Hunted Children, 84. 39. Lowrie, Hunted Children, 87. 40. Ryan, “Vichy and the Jews,” 277. 41. Charles Joy to Robert Dexter, Letter 24, January 1941. 42. Fry, Surrender on Demand, 40–41. 43. Ebel, “An Unsentimental Education.” 44. Fry, Surrender on Demand, 41. 45. Fry, manuscript, “Surrender on Demand,” 12. 46. Fry, Surrender on Demand, 45. 250 | notes to pages 60–69

47. Marino, Quiet American, 303. 48. Margit Subak Elsohn, interview by Elisabeth Pozzi-Thanner, May 2001, New York City. 49. M. Subak Elsohn, interview. The account is also based on conversations with the author in March 2005. 50. “List of Persons Who Sailed from Lisbon After Being Assisted by the Unitarian Service Committee During the Period 1940–44,” Box 4, Folder 79, uusc Records, ushmm. 51. N. Tallon to W. Sharp, November 16, 1940. 52. Marino, Quiet American, 150. 53. Fittko, Escape through the Pyrenees, 101. 54. Fittko, Escape through the Pyrenees, 122–26. 55. Charles Joy to Robert Dexter, October 2, 1940, Joy Papers, bms 347, Box 49. 56. See Fittko, Escape through the Pyrenees. 57. Fittko, Escape through the Pyrenees, 142. 58. Marino, Quiet American, 284. 59. Otto Meyerhof to Waitstill Sharp, December 23, 1940, bms 16030, Box 1, uusc Records, ahtl. 60. Otto Meyerhof to Robert Dexter, January 8, 1941, bms 16030, Box 1, uusc Records, ahtl. 61. Meyerhof, In the Shadow of Love, 59. 62. Fittko, Escape through the Pyrenees, 133. 63. Meyerhof, In the Shadow of Love, 64. 64. Meyerhof, In the Shadow of Love, 66. 65. Gold, Crossroads Marseilles, 234–35. 66. Charles Joy to Varian Fry, January 31, 1941, Fry Papers. 67. Joy to Dexter, October 2, 1940. 68. Sumner Welles to Eleanor Roosevelt, January 10, 1941, Washington, Box 14, Welles, Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt. 69. Anne Schmaltz, memo on Marion Harris Niles, personal communication, January 2006. 70. Charles Joy to Robert Dexter, February 2, 1941, Lisbon, Joy Papers, bms 347, Box 49. 71. Charles Joy to Robert Dexter, January 11, 1941, bms 16185, Box 1, uusc Records, ahtl. 72. Joy to Dexter, January 11, 1941. 73. “Unitarian Service in Wartime,” Christian Register, November 16, 1940. 74. Charles Joy to Robert Dexter, January 31, 1941, Lisbon, in Hotchkiss, “Wartime Origins of the Flaming Chalice.” 75. Charles Joy, “Report on Our Relief Work,” April 30, 1941, Lisbon, Joy Papers, bms 347, Box 49. notes to pages 70–83 | 251

4. marseille, 1941 1. Memorandum, American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, “Report on the projects realized in the internment camps thanks to the assistance of the Unitarian Service Committee,” February 19, 1941, ar 33/44, #602, American Joint Distribution Committee Archives (hereafter cited as jdc Archives). 2. In his report, Charles Joy wrote that the newly installed windows transformed the lives of some fourteen thousand persons by reducing the excessive mortality rate. He also reported that they had bought a range of sanitary supplies, including picks and shovels for sanitation and gardening, and had set up education programs for about one thousand children under six, with personnel chosen from among the camp residents. At the Argeles camp, they had installed a number of pumps and supplied crutches and other orthopedic apparatus. Memorandum, “Report on the projects realized,” February 19, 1941. 3. Charles Joy to Marion Niles, March 21, 1941, Lisbon, Joy Papers, bms 347, Box 49. 4. Field and Field, Trapped in the Cold War. 5. Joy to Niles, March 21, 1941. 6. Lewis, Red Pawn, 25–28. 7. Lewis, Red Pawn, 85. 8. In the winter, Charles Joy, Donald Lowrie, and others on the Nimes Committee had tried to win the support of the American Red Cross. They had brought Hiram Bingham of the U.S. consulate on a tour of the camps, and Bingham sent a heartfelt report to Washington dc describing the terrible conditions. Bingham had toured the camps on his own initiative and expense and was not encouraged to go, as his colleagues at the U.S. consulate in Marseille pointed out in another letter. The proposal did not have a very warm reception in Washington, and the relief groups in France continued to scramble to collect the resources for minimal food and medicine. Office of the Exhibitions, “Assignment Rescue,” 2000.062.1, Box 106, Institutional Archives, ushmm. The American Friends Service Committee had about a dozen volunteers in southern France, and in their office in Toulouse, headed by Helga Holbeck, they organized meals for the camps where the existing diet was not sufficient to keep some people alive. McClelland, “I have come out of the night and you fed me.” 9. Weill, Le Combat d’un Juste, 237. 10. Brooks, Prisoners of Hope, 144–45. 11. Noel Field to Robert Dexter, June 10, 1941, Marseille, bms 16024, Box 4, uusc Records, ahtl. 12. Weill, Le Combat d’un Juste, 236. Although few records survive from the Marseille office, some of the correspondence includes brief descriptions of refugee cases, and two reports on individual casework for the months of April and May 1941 describe ninety-five refugee cases that the Marseilles office was actively following. “Brief Report of the Individual Case Work During the Month of April and May,” bms 16024, Box 4, uusc Records, ahtl. 252 | notes to pages 84–88

13. Charles Joy and Donald Lowrie had signed a letter on behalf of the entire Nimes Committee and sent it to Richard Allen, director of the American Red Cross, arguing that such aid would help desperate people who were the enemies of Germany and would not in any way aid the German war machine. In their letter they listed the many organizations that made up the “Nimes Committee” and noted that Varian Fry and the Centre Americain de Secours was not an official member. Letter to Richard Allen, November 12, 1940, Marseille, Office of the Exhibitions, “Assignment Rescue,” 2000.062.1, Box 53, French Concentration Camps, Institutional Archives, ushmm. 14. Marino, Quiet American, 17–18. 15. Lewis, Red Pawn, 27. 16. Friedman, No Haven for the Oppressed, 110–11. 17. Marino, Quiet American, 272. 18. Fry, Surrender on Demand, 206. 19. Marino, Quiet American, 279. 20. Marino, Quiet American, 275. 21. Varian Fry to Eileen Fry, Marseille, May 1, 1941, Fry Papers. 22. Marino, Quiet American, 292. 23. Marino, Quiet American, 285. 24. “We understand that the U.S. Lines is prepared to send one or more of its ships to Lisbon and we urgently request your cooperation in obtaining permission for them to send such ships or for us to charter a special ship or ships for this purpose.” Percival Brundage to Sumner Welles, March 17, 1941, Boston, State Department, 840.48 Refugees, Microfilm 2482, Roll 29, nara, College Park. 25. Breckinridge Long to Percival Brundage, March 19, 1941, State Department, Refugees 840.48, Microfilm 2482, Roll 29, National Archives. 26. Unitarian Service Committee minutes, March 25, 1941, Boston, bms 16185, Box 1, uusc Records, ahtl. 27. Joy, “Report on Our Relief Work,” April 30, 1941. 28. Wyman, Paper Walls, 164. 29. Robert Dexter to Ernest Coulter, October 9, 1940, Boston, bms 16185, Box 1, uusc Papers, ahtl. 30. Marino, Quiet American, 298. 31. Marino, Quiet American, 298; Varian Fry journal, Fry Papers. 32. Marino, Quiet American, 288. 33. Wischnitzer, Visas to Freedom, 168–69. 34. Martha Sharp to Hiram Bingham, Marseille, November 26, 1940, Office of the Exhibitions, “Assignment Rescue,” 2000.062.1, Box 105, Folder 2, Institutional Archives, ushmm. 35. Breckinridge Long to Robert Dexter, January 11, 1941, bms 16185, Box 1, uusc Records, ahtl. notes to pages 89–94 | 253

36. From Buenos Aires, Hiram Bingham complained about the U.S. official tolerance of the German-controlled Peron regime, the sanctuary provided to Nazis, and the funding of the German war machine via Argentina. His requests to transfer to a position in Washington DC were refused and he resigned from the Foreign Service at the end of the war. Hiram Bingham to Ambassador, “Extent of German Influence in Argentina and Desire for Transfer,” September 2, 1945, Buenos Aires, Office of the Exhibitions, “Assignment Rescue,” 2000.062.1, Box 105, Folder 2, Institutional Archives, ushmm. 37. Unitarian Service Committee, Postcard, 1941, bms 16185, Box 2, uusc Records, ahtl. 38. Robert Dexter to S. K. Frankenstein, January 11, 1941, bms 16185, Box 1, uusc Records, ahtl. 39. Robert Dexter to Mrs. Richard Alberty, January 7, 1941, bms 16185, Box 1, uusc Records, ahtl. 40. Seth Gano, “Report of the Unitarian Service Committee to the Board of Directors of the American Unitarian Association,” May 23, 1941, bms 16044, Box 1, uusc Records, ahtl. 41. Robert Dexter, “The Hard Way to Help Britain,” Christian Register, January 1, 1941. 42. Town of Shelburne, Nova Scotia, “History,” http://www.auracom.com/ tnshelb/Shelburne3.htm#History (accessed August 6, 2008). 43. Robert Dexter, “Women in Politics — England and America,” Skidmore Alumnae Bulletin (Skidmore College), vol. 11, October 1924, 5–6. 44. “Policy votes,” January 21, 1941, bms 16044, Box 2, uusc Records, ahtl. 45. Elisabeth Dexter to Miss Boie, November 7, 1941, Belmont ma, Dexter Papers, Box 14, Folder 35. 46. Robert Dexter to Seth Gano, September 3, 1941, Lisbon, Dexter Papers, Box 14, Folder 32. 47. Martha Sharp to Elisabeth Dexter, June 6, 1941, Boston, Dexter Papers, Box 14, Folder 29. 48. Elisabeth Dexter wrote of the incident to Seth Gano: “She [Martha Sharp] may have got a lot out of her system in the letter she wrote me, and I hope that with her story before you, you may have been able to convince her that some of her charges were due to complete misunderstanding.” Elisabeth Dexter to Seth Gano, July 9, 1941, Lisbon, Dexter Papers, Box 14, Folder 31. 49. Robert Dexter to Harry Hooper, September 23, 1941, Lisbon, Dexter Papers, Box 14, Folder 32. 50. Robert Dexter to Harriet Dexter, April 3, 1941, Belmont, bms 16185, Box 1, uusc Records, ahtl. 51. L. Dexter, “Memoir of Elisabeth Anthony Dexter.” 52. L. Dexter, “Memoir of Elisabeth Anthony Dexter.” 254 | notes to pages 94–99

53. E. Dexter and R. Dexter, “Last Port of Freedom,” chap. 1, p. 17, Dexter Papers. 54. Robert Dexter to Seth Gano, May 3, 1941, bms 16185, Box 2, uusc Records, ahtl. 55. Wyman, Paper Walls, 194. 56. Wyman, Paper Walls, 192. 57. Breckinridge Long to Adolf Berle and James Dunn, June 26, 1940, Visa Division, General, 1940, Long Papers, U.S. Library of Congress. 58. E. Dexter and R. Dexter, “Last Port of Freedom.” 59. Robert Dexter letter, May 11, 1941, Lisbon, in E. Dexter and R. Dexter, “Last Port of Freedom,” 11. 60. Varian Fry to Danny Bénédite, October 2, 1941, Lisbon, Fry Papers. 61. Brooks, Prisoners of Hope, 147. 62. Charles Joy to Robert Dexter, December 27, 1940, Lisbon, bms 16185, Box 1, uusc Records, ahtl. 63. Robert Dexter to Louis Dolivet, April 3, 1941, Boston, bms 16185, Box 1, uusc Records, ahtl. 64. Hugh Fullerton to Freeman Matthews, May 26, 1941, Marseille, 811.20251/4, State Department, nara, College Park. 65. Brooks, Prisoners of Hope, 80. 66. Breckinridge Long to Dean Acheson, October 5, 1942, Washington, Long Papers, Box 206. 67. Howard Brooks to Boston usc, September 11, 1941, Marseille, bms 16024, Box 1, uusc Records, ahtl. 68. Elisabeth Dexter to Harry Hooper, June 24, 1941, Lisbon, Dexter Papers, Box 14, Folder 29. 69. Elisabeth Dexter to Harry Hooper, July 29, 1941, Lisbon, Dexter Papers, Box 14, Folder 31. 70. Robert Dexter to Harry Hooper, June 13, 1941, Lisbon, Dexter Papers, Box 14, Folder 29. 71. “The Letter that Did Not Come,” 1941, Fry Papers. 72. Wyman, Paper Walls, 197. 73. Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, 257, 262. 74. Wischnitzer, Visas to Freedom, 168–69. 75. E. Dexter to Gano, July 9, 1941. 76. E. Dexter to Gano, July 9, 1941. 77. Robert Dexter to Elisabeth Dexter, July 25, 1941, Lisbon, Dexter Papers, Box 14, Folder 31. 78. Carl Subak, conversation with author, July 2005. 79. R. Dexter to Gano, September 3, 1941. 80. Field to Dexter, June 10, 1941, Marseille, bms 16024, Box 4, uusc Records, ahtl. notes to pages 100–109 | 255

81. Brooks, Prisoners of Hope, 151. 82. “Saving the Future in Europe,” Unitarian Service Committee, May 1942, Boston, ar 33/44, #337, jdc Archives. 83. “Dr. Zimmer’s Report on Medical Service for the Month of May, 1941,” ar 33/44, #602, jdc Archives. 84. Field to Dexter, June 10, 1941. 85. “Saving the Future in Europe,” jdc Archives. 86. “Saving the Future in Europe,” jdc Archives. 87. Sanger, Lotta and the Unitarian Service Committee Story, 22. 88. Sanger, Lotta, 25. 89. See Sanger, Lotta. 90. Fullerton to Matthews, May 26, 1941. 91. Charles Joy wrote, “I first learned of this mission in Lisbon, when I was told that the new Free World Association, of which Louis Dolivet is the guiding spirit, had raised the money to send Mr. Brooks to France, to establish contact with the secret leaders of the DeGaulle movement. . . . I had personally assured the consul-general in Marseille that all of our work in France was wholly regular, and that we had no secrets from him. . . . Mr. Brooks has dispatched a special report for the F.W.A. to Colonel Donovan, who heads the new information bureau for the government.” Charles Joy to Seth Gano, “Confidential Memorandum,” September 29, 1941, Boston, bms 16024, Box 1, uusc Records, ahtl. 92. Harry Hooper, “Notarized Statement,” October 1, 1941, Boston, bms 16135, Box 1, uusc Records, ahtl. 93. “There have, of course, been numerous indications here for a long time that certain of the relief organizations operating in unoccupied France were dabbling in espionage work of a rather primitive kind and endeavoring to assist in the clandestine escape of British soldiers from France . . . and that Mr. Varian Fry . . . had accepted British money and various commissions from Sir Samuel Hoare, British ambassador in Madrid. . . . There is no question in my mind and, I think, there is no question in Mr. Fry’s mind, that if he remained here long enough he would find himself in jail.” Fullerton to Matthews, May 26, 1941. 94. Eleanor Roosevelt to Eileen Fry, May 13, 1941, Fry Papers. 95. Breckinridge Long, “Memorandum,” February 21, 1941, Washington dc, Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt. 96. Isenberg, Hero of Our Own, 204. 97. Marino, Quiet American, 308. 98. Brooks, Prisoners of Hope, 282. 99. Isenberg, Hero of Our Own, 204. 100. Marino, Quiet American, 302–3. 101. Isenberg, Hero of Our Own, 211. 102. Varian Fry to Eileen Fry, October 1, 1941, Lisbon, Fry Papers. 103. Varian Fry to Danny Bénédite, October 21, 1941, Fry Papers. 256 | notes to pages 109–115

104. Cable, Mary Gold to Miriam Davenport, Lisbon, Marian Davenport Ebel Archive, 1991.158.023, ushmm. 105. Fry, manuscript, “Surrender on Demand.” 106. Varian Fry to Danny Bénédite, October 20, 1941, Fry Papers. 107. “Liste Complete des Clients du Centre Americain de Secours,” bms 16007, Box 20, uusc Records, ahtl. 108. Fry, manuscript, “Surrender on Demand.” 109. Ryan, Vichy and the Jews, 277. 110. “List of Persons who Sailed from Lisbon,”uusc Records, ushmm. 111. “The Letter that Did Not Come,” 1942, uusc Records, ushmm. 112. Voelkische Beobachter, October 4, 1941, Fry Papers. 113. Charles Joy to Robert Dexter, November 15, 1941, Lisbon, Joy Papers, bms 347, Box 49. 5. marseille, 1942 1. Samuel, Rescuing the Children, 34; Fayol, Les Deux France, 124. 2. Samuel, Rescuing the Children, 56. 3. Samuel, Rescuing the Children, 30. 4. Lowrie, Hunted Children, 236. 5. Zeitoun, L’Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants, 10. 6. “Saving the Future in Europe,” jdc Archive. 7. Unitarian Service Committee, “Report on Medical Work in November 1941,” ar 33/44, #602, jdc Archive. 8. By November 1941 the Unitarian Service Committee’s medical program was about twenty thousand dollars in debt. Robert Dexter approached the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in New York to ask them to fund the medical program in France. They agreed largely on the strong recommendation of Joseph Schwartz in Lisbon and the fact that the Unitarians’ Marseille clinic was run jointly with the Jewish Children’s Aid Society (ose). R. Dexter to Morris Troper, November 8, 1941, Boston, ar 33/44, #602, jdc Archive. 9. Winfred Overholser, “Rescue from Starvation,” date and publisher unknown, probably late 1942, ar 33/44, #602, jdc Archive. 10. William Emerson to Robert Dexter, February 14, 1942, Boston, bms 16044, Box 2, uusc Records, ahtl. 11. Noel Field, “Report,” March 6, 1942, Marseille, bms 16007, Box 9, uusc Records, ahtl. 12. Field, “Report,” March 6, 1942. 13. Hugh Fullerton, “Confidential Memorandum,” U.S. Department of State, February 6, 1942, 811.20251/5, State Department, nara, College Park. 14. Photo #16234, American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Photo Archives, ushmm. notes to pages 115–128 | 257

15. Marion Ascoli to Varian Fry, February 7, 1942, New York, Fry Papers. 16. Lawrence Dame, “S.S. ‘Nyassa,’ ” Unitarian Service Committee, Joy Papers, bms 347, Box 49. 17. Sanger, Lotta, 27. 18. Sanger, Lotta, 28. 19. Charles Joy to Robert Dexter, April 14, 1942, Lisbon, Joy Papers, bms 347, Box 49. 20. Varian Fry to Danny Bénédite, December 24, 1941, New York City, Fry Papers. 21. Alexander Laing to Sumner Welles, December 23, 1941, filed June 29, 1942, Hanover, 811.111 Refugees/1871, Box 157, State Department, nara, Washington dc. 22. Varian Fry to Danny Bénédite, January 20, 1942, New York City, Fry Papers. 23. Varian Fry to Robert Dexter, April 22, 1942, New York City, bms 16024, Box 5, uusc Records, ahtl. 24. Fry, “Our Consuls at Work,” Nation, May 2, 1942, 507–9. 25. Fry, “Justice for the Free French.” 26. Fry, “Giraud and the Jews.” 27. Joy reported that no Emergency Rescue Committee clients had come through in “long weeks.” Charles Joy to Robert Dexter, March 20, 1942, Lisbon, Joy Papers, bms 347, Box 49. 28. Danny Bénédite to Varian Fry, quoting a cable from Charles Joy, April 3, 1942, Fry Papers. 29. Danny Bénédite to Varian Fry, March 31, 1942, Fry Papers. 30. Fry, manuscript, “Surrender on Demand.” 31. Fry, manuscript, “Surrender on Demand.” 32. Charles Joy to Robert Dexter, April 14, 1942, Lisbon, Joy Papers, bms 347, Box 49. 33. Charles Joy to Robert Dexter, January 20, 1942, Lisbon, Joy Papers, bms 347, Box 49. 34. Robert Dexter, “Curriculum Vitae,” Skidmore College Archives, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs ny. 35. Jim Landfried, Belmont Unitarian Church archives, personal communication, 2006. 36. To Miss Bryan from unknown writer quoting Charles Joy, May 14, 1942, bms 16031, Box 2, uusc Records, ahtl. 37. Unitarian Home Service Committee, Box 4, Folder 61, uusc Records, ushmm. 38. Waitstill Sharp to Lion Feuchtwanger, March 31, 1942, Wellesley Hills ma, Feuchtwanger Memorial Library. 39. Lion Feuchtwanger to Waitstill Sharp, April 8, 1942, Los Angeles, Feuchtwanger Memorial Library. 258 | notes to pages 129–135

40. Martha Sharp, interview. 41. Minutes, Unitarian Service Committee, Executive Committee, April 8, 1942, Dexter Papers, Box 14. 42. Robert Dexter to William Emerson, May 17, 1942, Lisbon, bms 16044, Box 2, uusc Records, ahtl. 43. Dexter to Emerson, May 17, 1942. 44. Frederick Eliot to Martha Sharp, quoted in Di Figlia’s “Soul’s Strength,” 57. 45. “West and East Pull Together,” Standing By, January 1943, Unitarian Service Committee Bulletin, ar 33/44, #337, jdc Archives. 46. “Case Committee Minutes,” May 7 1942, bms 16007, Box 4, uusc Records, ahtl. 47. John Hughes to Leon Dostert, July 22, 1942, New York, Stack 250, Row 64, Comp. 34, Shelf 3, Entry 217, Box 1, Folder 6, oss, nara, College Park. 48. “I am writing you now however in regard to the fate of one of our co-operating organizations, the Centre Americain de Secours in Marseille. Our Unitarian Service Committee acted as their representative in Lisbon. This organization, as you probably know, was especially concerned with political and intellectual refugees, strong anti-Fascists and those in most immediate danger in France. I have recently received word that their office has been closed by order of the Laval Government and that some of its staff have been placed under arrest. Unfortunately, since last autumn they have had no American staff members, although their activities are entirely supported by an American group, the International Rescue and Relief Committee. . . . Word has just reached us that at the present moment they have fifty-three refugees with visas for the United States or Mexico and whose transportation is possible, whose departure may be prevented by the closing of the office.” Robert Dexter to Cordell Hull, June 19, 1942, Stack 250, Row 64, Comp. 34, Shelf 3, Entry 217, Box 1, Folder 6, oss, nara, College Park. 49. Robert Dexter to Allen Dulles, June 20, 1942, New York, Stack 190, Row 9, Comp. 6, Shelf 2, Entry 160a, Box 12, Folder 99, oss, nara, College Park. 50. Allen Dulles, “Confidential Memo,” July 21, 1942, Stack 250, Row 64, Comp. 34, Shelf 3, Entry 217, Box 1, Folder 6, oss, nara, College Park. 51. John Hughes to Leon Dostert and Allen Dulles, July 22, 1942, New York, Stack 250, Row 64, Comp. 34, Shelf 3, Entry 217, Box 1, Folder 6, oss, nara, College Park. 52. “Setup arranged with Mr. and Mrs. Dexter,” August 13, 1942, Stack 250, Row 64, Comp. 34, Shelf 3, Entry 217, Box 1, Folder 6, oss, nara, College Park. 53. Petersen, From Hitler’s Doorstep, 7. 54. Robert Dexter, “Confidential Memorandum to Five Members of Board of Directors,” July 31, 1942, Boston, bms 16007, Box 9, uusc Records, ahtl. notes to pages 135–139 | 259

55. John Hughes to Robert Dexter, July 16, 1942, New York, Stack 250, Row 64, Comp. 34, Shelf 3, Entry 217, Box 1, Folder 6, oss, nara, College Park. 56. Elisabeth Dexter to Seth Gano, September 3, 1942, Lisbon, Dexter Papers, Box 14. 57. E. Dexter and R. Dexter, “The oss,” in “Last Port of Freedom,” Dexter Papers. 58. L. Dexter, “Memoir of Elisabeth Anthony Dexter.” 59. Leahy, I Was There, 71. 60. “Secret Memo,” Henry B. Hyde to John C. Hughes, Washington, October 31, 1942, Stack 250, Row 64, Comp. 21, Shelf 1, Entry 210, Box 536, Folder 18753, oss, nara, College Park. 61. Charles Joy to Joseph Hyman, January 29, 1943, Boston, ar 33/44, #602, jdc Archives. 62. Nobel Foundation, “Leon Jouhaux.” 63. See Laqueur and Breitman, Breaking the Silence. 64. “Outline of report presented at Case Committee meeting,” October 8, 1942, Boston, bms 16007, Box 4, uusc Records, ahtl. 65. Charles Joy, “Report of Activities in Europe, 1941–42,” September 14, 1942, Unitarian Service Committee, Joy Papers, bms 347, Box 49. 66. “Outline of report presented at Case Committee meeting, October 8, 1942. 67. Marion Niles, “Case Committee Report,” October 13, 1942, bms 16007, Box 4, uusc Records, ahtl; René Zimmer, “Report of Our Activities During the German Occupation of Marseilles (1942–1944),” bms 16035, Box 1, uusc Records, ahtl. 68. “Confidential Notes on an Interview with Marshal Petain,” August 6, 1942, Vichy France, Lowrie Papers. 69. Fry, manuscript, “Surrender on Demand.” 70. Donald Lowrie to Tracy Strong, September 17, 1942, Geneva, Paul B. Anderson Papers, 1909–1988, 15/35/54, Box 1, University of Illinois Archives; Lowrie, Hunted Children, 229–35. 71. Samuel, Rescuing the Children, 93–94. 72. Pittet, “Passages de frontiers.” 73. Pittet, “Passages de frontiers.” 74. Raymond Bragg to William Emerson, September 3, 1942, Boston, bms 16044, Box 2, uusc Records, ahtl. 75. Robert Dexter to Ray Bragg, September 28, 1942, Geneva, Dexter Papers, Box 14. 76. Zimmer, “Report of Our Activities.” 77. Petersen, From Hitler’s Doorstep, appendix. 78. Lewis, Red Pawn, 143. 79. Dexter to Bragg, September 28, 1942. 260 | notes to pages 140–149

80. Elisabeth Dexter to [Karl] Hans Subak, October 10, 1942, Lisbon, Dexter Papers, Box 14. 81. Bénédite, La Filiere Marseillaise, 326–33. 82. Donald Lowrie to Paul Anderson, October 27, 1942, Geneva, Lowrie Papers. 83. Administrative Officer to Sumner Welles, September 12, 1942, Washington dc, Eleanor Roosevelt Papers. 84. Medoff, “They Spoke Out.” 85. Fry, “Massacre of the Jews.” 86. L. Dexter, “Memoir of Elisabeth Anthony Dexter.” 87. Edward Darling, “War Without Bullets: The Story of the Noel Field’s Escape from the Nazis,” reprinted from Christian Register, January 1946. 6. geneva, lisbon, and marseille, 1943 1. Noel Field to his mother, December 2, 1942, Geneva, ar 33/44, #337, jdc Archives. 2. Noel Field et al., “Memorandum by Mr. Field Regarding ‘calpo,’ for oss,” February 13, 1945, Box 5, Folder 97, uusc Records, ushmm. 3. Zimmer, “Report of Our Activities.” 4. Charles Joy, “Report of Activities in Europe, 1941–42,” September 14, 1942. 5. Zimmer, “Report of Our Activities.”. 6. Zeitoun, L’Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants, 78. 7. Zimmer, “Report of Our Activities.” 8. Early in 1943 the director of the “Joint” in Lisbon, Joseph Schwartz, gave the American press numbers that were hopeful, that 100 to 150 persons were crossing into both Switzerland and Spain each day. He estimated that about twelve thousand people had escaped deportation from France, and many of these people had made it to North Africa, which now had a refugee community of about twelve thousand. “Memorandum for the Files,” January 19, 1944, from Joseph Schwartz report to the New York Times, February 9, 1943, Reel 18, Frames 15–16, Papers of the War Refugee Board, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park ny (hereafter cited as wrb Papers). 9. Zimmer, “Report of Our Activities.” 10. Field, “Memorandum by Mr. Field Regarding ‘calpo.’ ” 11. Field, “Memorandum by Mr. Field Regarding ‘calpo.’ ” 12. Charles Joy to Joseph Hyman, November 21, 1942, Boston, ar 33/44, #602, jdc Archives; “Good News from France!” Standing By, February 1943, ar 33/44, #337, jdc Archives. 13. Seth Gano to Robert Dexter, February 8, 1943, Boston, Stack 190, Row 9, Comp. 6, Shelf 2, Entry 160a, Box 12, Folder 98, oss, nara, College Park. 14. Danny Bénédite to “Friends,” October 4, 1942, Fry Papers. notes to pages 149–159 | 261

15. Bénédite, La Filiere Marseillaise. 16. Henry B. Hyde to John C. Hughes, October 20, 1942, Geneva, secret, Stack 190, Row 6, Comp. 4, Shelf 3, Entry 92, Box 117, Folder 10, oss, nara, College Park. 17. Varian Fry to René [Bertholet], January 12, 1942, New York, nara, Stack 190, Row 6, Comp. 4, Shelf 3, Entry 92, Box 117, Folder 10, oss, nara, College Park. 18. “Eva” may have been German but certainly was comfortable in the French language and used it for correspondence. The person probably had the initials ew and may have been Eva Wasserman, who worked for a time at the International Rescue and Relief Committee office in New York. Eva Wassermann was from Vienna, had come to the United States in 1939. She married another émigré, Hermann Broch, during the war. Some of the letters from Varian Fry to René Bertholet in 1942 are also initialed by an ew, and by late 1942 she seems to be reporting to John Hughes at the oss. John Hughes to Russell D’Oench, November 26 1942, New York, nara (see René/Eva folder number). It is also possible that Eva was Eva Levinski, who worked with Toni Sender and Dyno Loewenstein in advising the labor division of the oss. Memorandum by Paul Kohn, Dyno Loewenstein, Eva Levinski Pfister, and Toni Sender to Allen Dulles, May 27, 1942, Folder 832, Box 66, Entry 168, oss, cited in Mauch, Shadow War Against Hitler, 228). A correspondent with many ties to refugees and socialists in exile and a significant amount of influence was Louis Dolivet, who may have been part of the Eva network. 19. Arthur Goldberg to Mortimer Kollender, June 8 1943, Stack 190, Row 6, Comp. 4, Shelf 3, Entry 92, Box 117, Folder 10, oss, nara, College Park. 20. Fry, Surrender on Demand, 100. 21. Bénédite, La Filiere Marseillaise, 340. 22. Memorandum, Charles Joy, November 9, 1942, Dexter Papers, Box 14, Folder 47. 23. “North Africa Campaign,” in Dear and Foot, Oxford Companion to World War II. 24. “North Africa,” Standing By, January 1943, ar 33/44, #337, jdc Archives. 25. John C. Hughes to Charles Joy, October 31, 1942, New York, nara, rg 226, Stack 250, Row 64, Comp. 34, Shelf 3, Entry 217, Box 1, Folder 6, oss, nara, College Park. 26. John Hughes recommends Charles Joy to Henry Hyde and Arthur Roseborough, Correspondence, October 8, 1942, and October 22, 1942, New York, Stack 250, Row 64, Comp 34, Shelf 3, Entry 217, Box 1, Folder 6, oss, nara, College Park. 27. Charles Joy to Robert Dexter, January 11, 1943, Boston, Stack 250, Row 64, Comp. 21, Shelf 1, Entry 210, Box 536, Folder 18753, oss, nara, College Park. 262 | notes to pages 160–163

28. Charles Joy to Robert Dexter, December 29, 1942, and January 8, 1943, Stack 190, Row 9, Comp. 6, Shelf 2, Entry 160a, Box 12, Folder 99, oss, nara, College Park. 29. Breckinridge Long to Charles Joy, December 30, 1942, Washington, bms 16020, Box 1, uusc Records, ahtl. 30. Memo, December 30, 1942, 840.48 Refugees/35/9, Box 1249, Microfilm, 3519, Roll 33, State Department, nara, College Park. 31. Henry B. Hyde to John C. Hughes, November 16, 1942, Washington, Stack 250, Row 64, Comp. 21, Shelf 1, Entry 210, Box 536, Folder 18753, oss, nara, College Park. 32. Lloyd Hyde to Frederic Dolbeare, January 14, 1943, Stack, 190, Row, 9, Comp, 6, Shelf, 2, Entry, 160a, Box 12, Folder 99, oss, nara, College Park. 33. “The National War Fund,” Standing By, April 1943, ar 33/44, #337, jdc Archives. 34. “United Czechoslovak Relief,” July 9, 1943, Entry 160a, Stack 190, Box 13, Folder 450, oss, nara, College Park. 35. A third organization that was a member of Refugee Relief Trustees of the National War Fund was the American Committee for Christian Refugees, which helped refugees who had already arrived in the United States. 36. Charles Joy, “Report on Trip to Ecuador,” June 30 to August 19, 1943, ar 33/44, #337, jdc Archives. 37. Charles Joy to Robert Dexter, February 15, 1943, Boston, Stack 250, Row 64, Comp. 34, Shelf 3, Entry 217, Box 1, Folder 6, oss, nara, College Park. 38. L. Dexter, “Memoir of Elisabeth Anthony Dexter.” 39. Frank Kingdon to Mr. Thomas, April 6, 1943, New York, Stack 190, Row 9, Comp. 6, Shelf 2, Entry 160a, Box 12, Folder 98, oss, nara, College Park. 40. L. Dexter, “Memoir of Elisabeth Anthony Dexter.” 41. John Hughes to Elisabeth Dexter, April 3, 1943, New York, Stack 190, Row 9, Comp. 6, Shelf 2, Entry 160a, Box 12, Folder 99, oss, nara, College Park. 42. John Hughes to Elisabeth Dexter, June 10, 1943, Stack 190, Row 9, Comp. 6, Shelf 2, Entry 160a, Box 12, Folder 98, oss, nara, College Park. 43. McIntosh, Sisterhood of Spies, 77–78. 44. Shils, “Arthur Goldberg.” 45. “The Purpose of the Labor Section,” George Pratt to David Bruce, March 23, 1944, Folder 493, Box 48, Entry 110, oss, nara, College Park, and “Goals of the oelr [Office of European Labor Relations],” memo submitted by Paul Kohn, Dyno Lowenstein, Eva Levinski Pfister, and Toni Sender, cited in Mauch, Shadow War Against Hitler, 16, 228. 46. “Interoffice Report,” Toni Sender, June 14, 1943, Stack 250, Row 64, Comp. 21, Shelf 1, Entry 210, Box 536 (also called 258), Folder 18753, oss, nara, College Park. 47. Shils, “Arthur Goldberg.” notes to pages 163–170 | 263

48. Shils, “Arthur Goldberg.” 49. Arthur Goldberg to Mr. Hyde, March 17, 1943, Entry 92, Stack 190, Box 254, Folder 46, oss, nara, College Park. 50. Arthur Goldberg to Mortimer Kollender, June 8, 1943, Stack 190, Row 6, Comp. 4, Shelf 3, Entry 92, Box 117, Folder 10, oss, nara, College Park. 51. C. Katek to Whitney Shepardson, London, November 15, 1943, Entry 160a, Stack 190, Box 13, Folder 450, oss, nara, College Park. 52. Blahoslav Hruby to Mr. Muller, June 24, 1943, Entry 160a, Stack 190, Box 13, Folder 450, oss, nara, College Park. 53. C. Katek to Whitney Shepardson, London, November 15, 1943, Entry 160a, Stack 190, Box 13, Folder 450, oss, nara, College Park. 54. C. G. Byrde to Mrs. Pitt, October 18, 1943, kv2/1407, British Secret Intelligence Service, Public Records Office, London. 55. “Re: Robert Cloutman Dexter,” unsigned memorandum, August 1, 1946, kv2/1408, No. 5, British Secret Intelligence Service. 56. H. A. R. Philby to Miss Bagot, Secret, September 28, 1946, kv2/1408, No. 4, British Secret Intelligence Service. 57. Varian Fry to Jean Gemahling, January 9, 1945, New York, 1993.12.1, ushmm. 58. Fry, Surrender on Demand, 106. 59. “Mr. Fry and Russia,” New Republic. 60. American Labor Conference on International Affairs, “Guide to the American Labor Conference on International Affairs Records, 1939–1950.” 61. Varian Fry to Jean Gemahling, January 9, 1945, New York, 1993.12.1, ushmm. 62. John Hughes to Allen Dulles, April 30, 1942, Stack 190, Row 9, Comp. 6, Shelf 2, Entry 160a, Box 13, Folder 117, oss, nara, College Park. 63. Robert Ullman, memo, September 16, 1942, Stack 190, Row 8, Comp. 5, Shelf 7, Entry 136a, Box 3, Folder 58, oss, nara, College Park. 64. Dulles Telegram 1187–88, December 2, 1943, cited in Petersen, From Hitler’s Doorstep, 167. 65. Zimmer, “Report of Our Activities.” That autumn, René Zimmer had asked permission to have a “serum” sent for his use. The application went through the State Department, which refused to cooperate. December 15, 1943, Group pi-157, Entry e-200, Box 1249, State Department, nara, College Park. 66. Seth Gano to Robert Dexter, February 15, 1943, Boston, Stack 250, Row 64, Comp. 34, Shelf 3, Entry 217, Box 1, Folder 6, oss, nara, College Park. 67. Seth Gano to Robert Dexter, March 11, 1943, Boston, Stack 190, Row 9, Comp. 6, Shelf 2, Entry 160a, Box 12, Folder 99, oss, nara, College Park. 68. Seth Gano to Robert Dexter, April 27, 1943, Boston, Stack 190, Row 9, Comp. 6, Shelf 2, Entry 160a, Box 12, Folder 98, oss, nara, College Park. 69. Robert Dexter to Charles Joy, June 16, 1943, Lisbon, Stack 190, Row 9, Comp. 6, Shelf 2, Entry 160a, Box 12, Folder 99, oss, nara, College Park. 264 | notes to pages 170–175

70. Seth Gano to Robert Dexter, February 8, 1943, and February 15, 1943, Stack 190, Row 9, Comp. 6, Shelf 2, Entry 160a, Box 12, Folder 99, oss, nara, College Park. 71. John Hughes to Lloyd Hyde, October 20, 1943, Stack 190, Row 9, Comp. 6, Shelf 2, Entry 160a, Box 12, Folder 98, oss, nara, College Park. 72. Fred Dolbeare to John Hughes, October 15, 1943, Stack 250, Row 64, Comp. 34, Shelf 3, Entry 217, Box 1, Folder 6, oss, nara, College Park. 73. “List of Persons Who Sailed from Lisbon,” uusc Records, ushmm. 74. “Liste Complete des Clients du Centre Americain de Secours,” bms 16007, Box 20, uusc Records, ahtl. 75. “List of Persons Who Sailed from Lisbon.” 76. Chelsea Evening Record, May 6, 1946, cited in Di Figlia, “Soul’s Strength,” 77–78. 77. “Anti-Semitism and ‘Children to Palestine,’ ” Samuel Atkins Eliot Papers, bms 594, Box 9 ahtl. 78. Samuel Eliot, Message to Hadassah newsletter, December 29, 1943, Boston, cited in “Anti-Semitism and ‘Children to Palestine,’ ” Eliot Papers. 79. Shirley Cibley, Jewish Advocate, May 16, 1945, cited in Di Figlia, “Soul’s Strength,” 78; Susan E. Herman, “First Annual Report, Children to Palestine 1943–44,” Eliot Papers, bms 594, Box 9. In May through November 1942, the Unitarians contributed about $10,000 to the Unitarian Service Committee. Standing By, December 1943, ar 33/44, #337, jdc Archives. 80. “Report, Children to Palestine Emergency Housing Project, June 1 1950,” Eliot Papers, bms 594, Box 10. 81. Henrietta Szold to Mrs. Waitstill Sharp, April 30, 1944, Jerusalem, Eliot Papers, bms 594, Box 10. 82. Field to his mother, December 2, 1942. 83. Noel Field, “Memorandum,” December 17, 1942, Geneva, ar 33/44, #337, jdc Archives. 84. Weill, Le Combat Juste, 229–30. 85. Noel Field, “Report on the Work of the Unitarian Service Committee in Switzerland,” Geneva, bms 16035, uusc Records, ahtl. 86. Weill, Le Combat Juste, 240. 87. “Memorandum by Mr. Field Regarding ‘calpo,’ ” February 13 1945. 88. One of the Unitarian Service Committee’s important contacts was Professor Egidio Reale. Field, “Report on the Work of the Unitarian Service Committee in Switzerland.” 89. Weill, Le Combat Juste, 221–26. 90. Lowrie, Hunted Children, 222–24. 91. Donald Lowrie to Paul Anderson, February 25, 1943 Geneva, Paul B. Anderson Papers, 1909–1988, 15/35/54, Box 1, University of Illinois Archives. 92. Lowrie to Anderson, February 25, 1943. notes to pages 176–182 | 265

93. Lowrie to Anderson, February 25, 1943. 94. Pittet, Passages de frontieres. 95. Donald Lowrie to Friends, confidential, August 3, 1943, Geneva, Lowrie Papers. 96. Petersen, From Hitler’s Doorstep, 546. 97. Allen Dulles to William Donovan, July 3, 1943, Bern, Telegram 217–18, Entry 160, Box 2, and Allen Dulles to William Donovan, Telegram 3942, Box 307, cited in Petersen, From Hitler’s Doorstep, 575, 576. 98. Laqueur and Breitman, Breaking the Silence, 160. 99. Donald Lowrie to Joseph Schwartz and Herbert Katzki, December 20, 1943, Geneva, Lowrie Papers. 100. Wyman, Abandonment of the Jews, 146–56. 101. R. B. Parke to Miss Hodel, March 1, 1944, Reel 15, wrb Papers. 102. Rafael Medoff, “Blowing the Whistle on Genocide: Josiah E. DuBois Jr. and America’s Response to the Holocaust,” Conference Proceedings, Fourth National Conference of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, June 11, 2006, Philadelphia. 103. Josiah E. Dubois, “Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews,” January 13, 1944, Washington dc, Morgenthau Diaries, Book 693, pp. 212–29, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library. 104. David S. Wyman, address, “Blowing the Whistle on Genocide,” June 11, 2006, Philadelphia. 105. Medoff, “Blowing the Whistle on Genocide.” 106. Percival Brundage, “Statement Regarding Relation of Unitarian Service Committee to the War Refugee Board,” May 17, 1944, Boston, bms 16007, Box 26, uusc Records, ahtl. 7. new york, lisbon, paris, and prague, 1944–45 1. Meeting transcript, afternoon session, February 26, 1944, New York, Reel 8, Frame 55–9, wrb Papers. 2. Attending the meeting on February 17, 1944, were William Emerson, Charles Davila (former Romanian ambassador to the United States), Alvarez Del Vayo (former foreign minister of Spain, c/o Free World), Milos Safranek (former Czechoslovak official), Sulvain Cahn Debre (Free World Association), Robert Dexter, William Rosenblatt (brother-in-law to the American ambassador to Turkey, Laurence Steinhardt), Louis Dolivet, Varian Fry, Charles Joy, and Mr. J. Friedman (Pehle mentioned that Friedman attended the meeting). 3. J. B. Friedman, memorandum, February 17, 1944, New York City, Reel 8, Frame 98; John Pehle, memorandum, February 19, 1944, Reel 16, Frame 154–155, wrb Papers. 4. Fry, manuscript, “Surrender on Demand.” 266 | notes to pages 182–188

5. Attending the February 26, 1944, meeting were Charles Joy, Robert Dexter, Charles Davila, Varian Fry, Louis Dolivet, John Pehle, Ansel Luxford (wrb), Lawrence Lesser (wrb), J. B. Friedman (wrb), Josiah Dubois, Alvarez Del Vayo, and a Mr. Gavrilovich. 6. “Memorandum,” February 17, 1944, New York City, Reel 8, Frame 98, wrb Papers. 7. Elisabeth Dexter to Edward Crocker, February 14, 1944, Lisbon, Reel 17, Frame 739, wrb Papers. 8. Fry, “Massacre of the Jews.” 9. Unitarian Refugee Committee, December 21, 1939, Dexter Papers, Box 14, Folder 17. 10. Telegram, Cordell Hull, January 26, 1944, midnight, Reel 25, Frames 736–737, wrb Papers. 11. J. B. Freidman, “Memo,” January 26, 1944, Reel 25, Frames 729–730, wrb Papers. 12. M. Thompson to Charles Joy, March 3, 1944, The White House, Washington dc, bms 16030, Box 1, uusc Records, ahtl. 13. “Statement Regarding Relation of Unitarian Service Committee to the War Refugee Board,” bms 16007, Box 26, uusc Records, ahtl. 14. “The Spanish Underground,” April 19, 1944, bms 16007, Box 26, uusc Records, ahtl. 15. R. A. Parke to Mr. O’Flaherty, March 7, 1944, Reel 15, wrb Papers. They also gave permission to send thirty thousand dollars to René Zimmer for medical aid to refugees. “History of the War Refugee Board,” vol. 1, p. 50, Reel 27, wrb Papers. 16. Charles Joy, “Dr. Zimmer’s Escape,” Joy Papers, bms 347, Box 49. 17. Bénédite, La Filiere Marseilles, 345–46. 18. Secretary of State to American Legation, September 5, 1944, Washington, Reel 19, Frame 798, wrb Papers. 19. “Report of the Federation of Jewish Societies in France, Strictly Confidential,” July 20, 1944, Reel 7, Frame 866–867, wrb Papers. 20. J. W. Pehle, memorandum for Secretary Morgenthau, March 6, 1944, Reel 25, wrb Papers; John Pehle, memorandum, July 20, 1944, Washington, Reel 23, wrb Papers. 21. Meeting transcript, February 26, 1944, p. 62. 22. “Former Skidmore Teacher Writes on Greece, Turkey,” The Saratogian, August 25, 1947, Skidmore College Archives. 23. Standing By, January 1944, ar 44/33, #337, jdc Archives. 24. Meeting transcript, February 26, 1944, p. 79. 25. Meeting transcript, February 26, 1944, p. 80. 26. J. W. Pehle, memorandum for Secretary Morgenthau, March 6, 1944. 27. Charles Joy to John Pehle, April 21, 1944, New York, Reel 14, wrb Papers. notes to pages 188–195 | 267

28. Charles Joy to John Pehle, May 26, 1944, New York, Reel 14, wrb Papers. 29. Varian Fry to S. B. Lesser, April 14, 1944, New York, Reel 16, Frame 186, wrb Papers. 30. Charles Joy to Committee on Special Refugee Problems, May 31, 1944, bms 16007, Box 26, uusc Records, ahtl. 31. Wyman, War Refugee Board: Basic Rescue Operations, v. 32. “Julio Alvarez Del Vayo,” Spartacus Educational, http://www.spartacus .schoolnet.co.uk/2wwvayo.html (accessed January 8, 2007). 33. Severin Hochberg, Historian, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, personal communication, July 1, 2007. 34. Charles Joy to William Emerson, May 29, 1944, bms 16007, Box 26, ahtl. 35. Charles Joy to John Pehle, June 7, 1944, New York, Reel 3, wrb Papers. 36. Lewis, Red Pawn, 132. 37. Koch, Breaking Point. 38. Noel Field to Charles Joy, November 15, 1944, Geneva, bms 16007, Box 9, ahtl. 38. Dulles had a network of agents willing to take risks — “almost without exception Communists and Leftist and Communist groups” — who crossed the border into Germany by way of France and across Alsace. oss Bern to oss Washington, January 3, 1944, Folder 1565, Box 274, Entry 34, oss, nara, College Park. 39. The Marseille surrender was on August 28, 1944. Clarke, European Theatre of Operations. 40. Noel Field to Charles Joy, Geneva, November 15, 1944, bms 16007, Box 9, uusc Records, ahtl. 41. Field, “Report on the Work of the Unitarian Service Committee in Switzerland.” 42. Charles Joy, “The Messengers Who Served the U.S.C,” July 15, 1945, Box 4, Folder 87, uusc Records, ushmm. 43. Herta Tempi to Noel Field, October 23, 1944, Paris, Box 4, Folder 71, uusc Records, ushmm. 44. L. G. Dobos, untitled, undated report, bms 16004, Box 1, uusc Records, ahtl. 45. Herta Tempi Report to Noel Field, November 23, 1944, Paris, Box 4, Folder 71, uusc Records, ushmm. 46. Weill, Le Combat Juste; Robert Dexter, “Memoir 1955,” Box 3, Folder 50, uusc Records, ushmm. 47. Charles Joy, “She Has Known Terror,” Christian Register, April 1946, 169. 48. Charles Joy to Robert Dexter, January 15, 1942, Joy Papers, bms 347, Box 49. 49. Lewis, Red Pawn, 131. 50. Charles Joy, “The Story of Jo,” April 1946, Box 3, Folder 55, uusc Records, ushmm. 268 | notes to pages 195–202

51. Lewis, Red Pawn, 132 52. Lewis, Red Pawn, 132. 53. Lewis, Red Pawn, 166. 54. Herta Tempi to Noel Field, October 23, 1944, Paris, Box 4, Folder 71, uusc Records, ushmm. 55. Field to Joy, November 15, 1944. 56. Noel Field to Charles Joy, Geneva, November 15, 1944, bms 16007, Box 9, uusc Records, ahtl. 57. “Current Projects of the Unitarian Service Committee,” November 5, 1945, Boston, bms 16004, Box 1, uusc Records, ahtl. 58. Noel Field to Charles Joy, Geneva, November 15, 1944, bms 16007, Box 9, uusc Records, ahtl. 59. Fry, “Mr. Fry and Russia.” 60. Unitarian contributions to the Service Committee for the period May 1 to November 9, 1943, was only $3,712.23. Standing By, December 1943, ar 44/33, #337, jdc Archives. 61. R. A. Parke to Mr. O’Flaherty, March 7, 1944, Reel 15, wrb Papers. 62. “History of the War Refugee Board,” vol. 1, Reel 28, wrb Papers. 63. Lewis, Red Pawn, 152. 64. “Individual Case Work in Switzerland, 1944–1945,” Unitarian Service Committee, Geneva, bms 16035, Box 1, uusc Records, ahtl. 65. Weill, Le Combat Juste, 243. 66. Lewis, Red Pawn, 150. 67. Allen Dulles, Telegram 1687 to Paris, November 30, 1944, cited in Petersen, From Hitler’s Doorstep, 403–4. 68. Mauch, Shadow War Against Hitler, 176–77. 69. Allen Dulles to Major Black and Climax, Telegram 4107 to Paris, January 20, 1945, cited in Petersen, From Hitler’s Doorstep, 431, 628. 70. Lewis, Red Pawn, 172–73. 71. Allen Dulles, cable 2518–22, March 20, 1944, cited in Petersen, From Hitler’s Doorstep, 246. 72. John Pehle to Andre Meyers, April 25, 1944, Washington, Reel 19, Frame 892, wrb Papers. 73. P. J. McCormack to Executive Director of wrb, February 19, 1945, Reel 25, wrb Papers. 74. Memorandum, February 22, 1944, American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, ar 44/33, #602, jdc Archives. 75. “Report of Sub-Committee on Relationships between Dr. Dexter and Dr. Joy . . . ” [1944], bms 16024, Box 6, uusc Records, ahtl. 76. Edward Stettinius to Department of State, November 21, 1944, Lisbon, Reel 17, Frame 752, wrb Papers. notes to pages 202–208 | 269

77. John Hughes to Russell Forgan, May 9, 1945, New York, Stack 250, Row 64, Comp. 34, Shelf 3, Entry 217, Box 1, Folder 6, oss, nara, College Park. 78. Mauch, Shadow War Against Hitler, 174–77. 79. From George Pratt to oss, January 4, 1945, Ustravic, London, Stack 250, Row 64, Comp. 21, Shelf 1, Entry 210, Box 536, Folder 18753, oss, nara, College Park. 80. Smith, oss: The Secret History, 116. 81. Russell Forgan to John Hughes, May 22, 1945, London, Stack 190, Row 9, Comp. 6, Shelf 2, Entry 160a, Box 12, Folder 98, oss, nara, College Park. 82. John Hughes to Russell Forgan, May 23, 1945, New York, Stack 250, Row 64, Comp. 34, Shelf 3, Entry 217, Box 1, Folder 6, oss, nara, College Park. 83. Allen Dulles, cable, March 20, 1944, Telegram 2518–22, Doc. 3–57, cited in Peterson, From Hitler’s Doorstep, 246. 84. Varian Fry to Danny Bénédite, March 26, 1945, Fry Papers. 85. Varian Fry to Howard Travers, Chief, Visa Division, Department of State, February 7, 1945, Reel 14, wrb Papers. 86. Waitstill Sharp to Martha Sharp, February 23, 1946, Prague, Sharp Collection, Box 11, Folder 106. 87. Dear and Foot, Oxford Companion to World War II, 486. 88. Martha Sharp to Charles Joy, May 8, 1945, Lisbon, Dexter Papers, Box 17, Folder 13. 89. Martha Sharp to Hastings Sharp, July 22, 1945, Lisbon, Sharp Collection, Box 2, Folder 10. 90. Martha Sharp, “Unitarian Service in the Iberian Peninsula,” Christian Register, January 1946, 24–25. 91. Howard Brooks had spent a half-year in Portugal in 1943, ostensibly to get Spanish Republicans out of the country. By then, however, Brooks was heavily involved in oss work and had been working first in Washington dc going through personnel files for the oss. In Lisbon, he was most likely part of a project to send Spaniards back into Spain to work as agents for the oss. He may also have been trying to encourage Germans to defect from the embassy in Lisbon. Howard Brooks, interview by Helen Fogg, Unitarian Universalist Service Committee Audiovisual Records, bms 16222, Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University. 92. Hull to Norweb, Dexter, and Mann, June 24, 1944, Reel 28, wrb Papers; Robert Dexter to John Pehle, September 14, 1944, Lisbon, Reel 17, Frame 759, wrb Papers. 93. Charles Joy to Martha Sharp, Memorandum, December 11, 1944, Sharp Collection, Box 10, Folder 105. 94. Martha Sharp to Charles Joy, May 8, 1945, Lisbon, Dexter Papers, Box 17, Folder 13. 270 | notes to pages 208–212

95. “Biographical Note about Waitstill H. Sharp,” October 22, 1970, Feuchtwanger Memorial Library. 96. “Education in Review,” newspaper clipping, 1944, newspaper and date unknown, Feuchtwanger Memorial Library. 97. Waitstill Sharp to Martha Sharp, February 23, 1946, Sharp Collection, Box 11, Folder 106. 98. “Biographical Note about Waitstill H. Sharp,” October 22, 1970. 99. Arthur Ringland, “To Whom it May Concern, President’s War Relief Control Board,” July 23, 1945, Sharp Collection, Box 6, Folder 48. 100. Alice Myers, “Unitarian Woman Planning Work in Spain and Portugal,” Christian Science Monitor, January 29, 1945. 101. Jan Masaryk to the Czechoslovak Authorities, June 20, 1944, New York City, Sharp Collection, Box 6, Folder 48. 102. Waitstill Sharp to Abraham Alper, October 8, 1945, London, Sharp Collection, Box 7, Folder 54. 103. Charles Joy to Martha Sharp, October 23, 1945, Frankfurt, Sharp Collection, Box 5, Folder 39. 104. Joy to Sharp, October 23, 1945. 105. M. Sharp to W. Sharp, November 18, 1945, Wellesley ma, Sharp Collection, Box 2, Folder 10. 106. “Children Starving to Death in Czechoslovakia, States Mrs. Sharp in Plea for Help,” The Townsman, Wellesley ma, April 4, 1946. 107. Martha Sharp to Marta Feuchtwanger, Christmas letter, 1945, Feuchtwanger Memorial Library. 108. M. Sharp to W. Sharp, November 18, 1945. 109. M. Sharp to W. Sharp, December 3, 1945, Wellesley Hills ma, Sharp Collection, Box 10, Folder 103. 110. M. Sharp to W. Sharp, November 18, 1945. 111. M. Sharp to W. Sharp, November 18, 1945. 112. W. Sharp to M. Sharp, February 23, 1946. 113. Di Figlia, Roots and Visions, 39. 114. Helen Alpert to Charles Joy, May 16, 1945, Boston, bms 16007, Box 13, uusc Records, ahtl. 115. Harry S. Truman, telegram to the Unitarian Service Committee, White House, Washington dc, February 25, 1947, bms 16030, Box 1 uusc Records, ahtl. conclusion 1. Elisabeth Dexter to Carl and Taffy Subak, November 4, 1955, Belmont ma, in the author’s possession. 2. Elisabeth Dexter, survey comment, ca. 1950, 2 pp., Dexter Papers, Box 19, Folder 13. notes to pages 212–219 | 271

3. James Landfried, Belmont Unitarian Universalist Church, personal communication, January 2007. 4. “The attached was discovered in one of the folders of material on Noel Field which Dr. Dexter was using shortly before his death. At the time of his death, he was at work on a chapter about Noel Field and the attached piece is clearly a start on the writing of that chapter — made, no doubt just before his death.” Frank Z. Glick, “Memorandum for Files,” April 1957, Box 3, Folder 50, uusc Records, ushmm. 5. Glick, “Memorandum for Files,” April 1957. 6. Lisa Cheney, personal communication, March 2006. 7. L. Dexter, “Memoir of Elisabeth Anthony Dexter.” 8. Elisabeth Dexter to Martha Sharp, February 12, 1961, Belmont, Sharp Collection, Box 5, Folder 40. 9. Lewis’s book is a gripping investigation of Field’s life and the reason for his disappearance. The historical lens that she employed, however, was very much that of the Cold War. The realities of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, and Vichy and American policies did not emerge in the story, and the reasons why Noel Field and Varian Fry were working in southern France and having difficulty helping refugees to immigrate to the United States did not come into play. When she did mention anti-Semitism, it is in the context of Stalin’s persecution of Rudolf Slansky and other Jews. 10. Elisabeth Dexter to Helen Lowrie, Dexter Papers, Box 14, Folder 1. 11. David S. Wyman, personal communication, June 21, 2005. 12. “Noel Field, Self-Exiled Former U.S. Aide, Is Dead,” New York Times, September 14, 1970, 39. 13. Noel H. Field, “Hitching Our Wagon to a Star,” Mainstream 14, no. 1 (1961): 3–17. 14. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “The Noel Field Mystery: He ‘Acted Like a Red’ in War Role; Did He Try to Quit Too Late?” New York Post, October 15, 1950. 15. Elsie Field to Dr. Emerson, September 5, 1950, Ithaca ny, bms 16135, Box 3, uusc Records, ahtl. 16. Quoted in Lewis, Red Pawn, 228. 17. Lewis, Red Pawn, 241 18. Lewis, Red Pawn, 175 19. Di Figlia, Roots and Visions, 49 20. Service Committee Record on Noel Field, August 13, 1957, bms 16031, Box 1, uusc Records, ahtl. 21. Vetter, “Charles Rhind Joy.” 22. Marino, Quiet American, 343–44; Norman Thomas to Colonel Phelps, October 12, 1951, Fry Papers. 23. Marino, Quiet American, 348. 272 | notes to pages 219–227

24. Marino, Quiet American, 349. 25. Marino, Quiet American, 347–48. 26. Donald Lowrie to Varian Fry, December 4, 1967, Fry Papers. 27. Varian Fry, “Surrender on Demand,” miscellaneous ms pages 3a. 28. The curators of the exhibit included Susan Morgenstein, Elizabeth Kessin Berman, and Anita Kassof. 29. The memory of Varian Fry is also enhanced by the reputation of his devoted staff. The Americans Mary Jayne Gold, Charlie Fawcett, and Miriam Davenport continued with humanitarian projects after the war and lived to a ripe old age. Among his European staff, Albert Hirschmann, Justus Rosenberg, and Marcel Verzeano had successful academic careers in the United States and lived to an advanced age. 30. Power, Problem from Hell, 367. 31. Sauvage, “Varian Fry in Marseille.” 32. Arthur H. White, “Campaign: Martha Sharp for Congress 1946, a Case Study” (Harvard University, senior honors thesis, 1947), 35–36, cited in Di Figlia, “Soul’s Strength,” 71–72. 33. Helen Bryan to Miss Hodal, May 13, 1944, New York, Reel 14, wrb Papers. 34. “Application for Registration,” Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, March 10, 1942, 840.48, State Department, nara, College Park. 35. North Attleboro Chronicle, October 9, 1946, cited in Di Figlia, “Soul’s Strength.” 36. Di Figlia, “Soul’s Strength,” 94. 37. Monica Sharp to Marta Feuchtwanger, June 1, 1983, Greenfield ma, Feuchtwanger Memorial Library. 38. “Children Starving to Death,” The Townsman, April 4, 1946; Jose Rocha, Acting Consul of Portugal, to Martha Sharp, October 11, 1946, Boston, Sharp Collection, Box 6, Folder 48. 39. Nadine Brozan, “War Refugees Honor Their Deliverer,” New York Times, December 10, 1990. afterword 1. Nor, I might say, did a Unitarian faith guarantee sympathy for the tasks our protagonists undertook, for both Ernest Gruening and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., represented here as obstacles to the rescuers’ objectives, were both themselves Unitarian! 2. Nor should we neglect to remember victims of the Soviet gulag which lasted until at least 1953. 3. Antonio Guterres, “Millions Uprooted: Saving Refugees and the Displaced,” Foreign Affairs 87, no. 5 (September/October 2008): 92. notes to pages 227–234 | 273

4. Approval of asylum applications in the United States, for example, fell from 54 percent in 1999 to 35 percent in 2002, following 9/11. See Bill Frelick, “U.S. Asylum and Refugee Policy: The Culture of ‘No,’ ” in The Future of Human Rights: U.S. Policy for a New Era, ed. William F. Schulz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 215–32. 5. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 3; Convention on the Prevention or Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 4. In Article 2, the Convention defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” 6. Piracy and slavery are still with us, of course, but no nation would try to justify their use and any country that did would be regarded immediately as an outlaw state. Unfortunately, even some global leaders like the United States have not been hesitant to rationalize the use of torture, albeit under the name of “coercive interrogation,” and others like China and Russia have no compunction maintaining friendly and profitable ties with governments like Sudan’s which are responsible for mass murder. 7. Power, Problem from Hell, 508. 8. Ralph J. Mills Jr., Contemporary American Poetry (New York: Random House, 1965), 207.

274 | notes to pages 234–238

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Index Page numbers in italic refer to illustrations Abel, Frederick, 116 Addams, Jane, xxvii, 9 affidavits: for children’s emigration project, 62; Dexters on need for, 28, 95; issued by Hiram Bingham, 93; Margit Subak’s request for, 73; for Meyers, 102; recruitment of Americans to sign, 42; Unitarian Service Committee processing of, 81; for Walter Meyerhof, 77, 78. See also passports Africa, 166, 225, 226. See also North Africa; Sudan Agde, France, xv, 44, 51, 71–72, 81–82 Aix-en-Provence, 69 Alaska, 188 Algeria, 132, 189 Allen, Jay, 79, 80, 91 Allen, Richard, 253n13 Alsace, 87 Alsatians, 156, 194 Ame-Leroy, Madame, 32 American Aid to Czechoslovakia, 215 American Ambulance Corps, 45, 70 American Association of University Women, 117 American Committee for Christian Refugees, 263n35 American Committee for Relief in Czechoslovakia, 14 American Committee for the Care of European Children, 40, 60, 61 American Committee to Save European Children, 120

American Export Lines, 91 American Federation of Labor, 39, 58 American Friends of Czechoslovakia, 42–43 American Friends Service Committee: endorsement of Unitarians’ work, 181; internment camp relief work of, 252n8; on Nimes Committee, 67; and Subaks’ case, xxii; Unitarians’ admiration of, 26; on U.S. entry into war, 96–97; Varian Fry’s association with, 37, 161; and Walter Meyerhof ’s escape, 78. See also Quaker groups American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (the Joint): clients on Nyassa, 128; denial of funds, 164; funding of hicem, 67; funding of medical program, 124, 159, 257n8; on number of refugees rescued, 261n8; overseas staff, 243n30; in Poland, 22; rescue of children, 145, 178; and residence force population, 56; resistance funds from, 141; Varian Fry’s acquaintance with, 37–38; work with War Refugee Board, 195. See also Jewish organizations American Labor Conference on International Affairs, 172–73 American Red Cross, 35, 51, 89, 93, 252n8, 253n13. See also Red Cross organizations American Relief for Czechoslovakia, 213, 248n49 American South, 9, 223

American Unitarian Association: annual budgets, 28, 95; Charles Joy’s early days with, 82; creation of refugee rescue organization, 26–28; “flower service” in, 244n33; institutional history, xii; Martha Sharp’s complaint to, 136; membership, xvii; overseas staff, 243n30; position on relief and rescue, xix–xxi, xxiii–xxiv; relationship with Czech Unitarian Church, 11, 13; representation on War Refugee Board, 187–91; Robert Dexter’s career with, 96; support of Donald Lowrie’s projects in Vichy France, 44; support of Jo Tempi, 200–202; Waitstill Sharp’s early career with, 9. See also Unitarian Service Committee Amnesty International usa, 233–35 Annemasse, 146, 151, 182 Anschluss (1938), xiii, 20 Anthony, Alfred, 96 Anthony Award, 99 Anthony family, 99 Anthony, Susan B., xii anti-Semitism: in Czechoslovakia and Germany, xix–xx, 11, 14, 242n16; Flora Lewis’s book on, 272n9; of Nazi policies in central Europe, 25; as norm, xxiv; Varian Fry on U.S. consulate staff, 132; in Vichy France, 30–31, 44, 59–60, 62, 66, 68. See also Jewish refugees; Jews apatrides. See statelessness Argeles, 51, 252n2 Argentina, 94, 254n36 Article 19. See “surrender on demand” rules artists. See intellectuals and artists Atlan, Andre, 199–200 282 | index

Auschwitz, 141 Australia, 6, 21 Austria, xiv, xix–xxii, 2, 16, 19, 20, 59, 101. See also Vienna Austrian refugees, 200, 201 Azema, Vincent, 74–76, 78 Baden-Baden, 152, 154 Baer, Richard, 141, 143, 155 Baker, Everett, 8 Ball, Leon “Dick,” 45–47, 51, 69, 73, 74, 243n30 Banyuls, 46, 47, 74–76, 78, 90 Barcelona, 43 Basel, 125, 181 Bates College, 99 Bauer, Leo, 148 Beacon Press, 9 Beau Sejour, 180 Belgian passports, 69 Belgium, 14, 29, 34, 201 Belmont ma, xxiii–xxv, 217, 222 Bénédite, Danny: addition to Varian Fry’s staff, 70; arrest of, 192; association with Noel Field, 209; charged with treason, 159; and closure of Centre Americain de Secours, 133; contact with Varian Fry, 116, 130–31; resistance and relief work of, 156; on Swiss border crossings (1942), 161; Unitarians’ work with, 117; in Vagasse, 159–60, 192; in Varian Fry’s book, 172; on Varian Fry’s replacement, 114–15; work with oss, 147–50 Bénédite, Theo, 192 Benes, Eduard, 11, 213 Benjamin, Walter, 75 Bergson Group, 184 Berle, Adolph, 113, 195 Bermuda, 80

Bernhard, Georg “Denson,” 76 Bern, Switzerland, 137, 146, 148, 160 Bertholet, Hannah, 160 Bertholet, René, 138, 160, 209, 262n18 Bingham, Hiram III, 50 Bingham, Hiram IV, 48–50, 63, 89–90, 93–94, 252n8, 254n36 Black Forest, 148 “black train” route, 116 Bohn, Frank, 39, 57, 58, 69, 74, 228 Bordeaux, France, xxviii, 31, 34, 47 Bosnia, 230, 233 Boston: Dexters in, 25; Elisabeth Dexter’s correspondence with office in, 105–6, 108; French consul in, 30; Jan Masaryk at receptions in, 4; Martha Sharp in, 9, 26; Martha Sharp’s postwar contact with office in, 214; Robert Dexter in, 7–8; Unitarian Service Committee staff in, 80–81; Werfels in, 42 Boston Evening Globe, 26, 27 Bowen, Father Ambrose, 231 Bragg, Ray, 138, 164, 177, 224–25 Brandeis, Louis, 19 Bratislava, 1 Brazil, 65 Brecht, Berthold, 48 Breton, André, 70, 91 bribes, 43, 45, 47, 51, 78–79, 90 Brighton, England, 16 British Czech Refugee Committee, 85 British embassy (Lisbon), 55 British Expeditionary Forces, 46 British Law Lords, 234 British Secret Service, 171 British Unitarian Association, xvii, 13 Brno, 13 Broch, Hermann, 262n18 Brooks, Howard: Charles Joy on report of, 113, 256n91; facilitation

of Spanish Republican emigration to Mexico, 176; on Free World Association, 161; on German weaknesses, 194; to Lisbon to help Spanish Republicans, 165; and Louis Dolivet, 196; and oss, 137, 138, 177; on René Zimmer’s resistance work, 157–58; reports to Robert Dexter, 109; representation of Unitarians, 103–7, 243n30; in Varian Fry’s office, 114, 132; work on behalf of Spanish Republican prisoners, 211–12, 270n91 Brown University, 9, 99 Brundage, Percival, 30, 60, 196 Brussels, 14 Buchenwald, 203 Budapest, 223 Buenos Aires, 254n36 Bush, George W., 235 Butler, Nicholas Murray, xxii, 14 Butler Funds, 14 Cairo, 189 Caldas da Rainha, 128, 140, 166 California, 135–36 calpo (National Committee for a Free Germany), 204–6 Cambodia, 233 Cambridge ma, 86, 89 Canada, 6, 40, 112, 129 Capek, Maja, 13 Capek, Rev. Norbert, xxi, 10–13, 12, 22–24, 244n33, 244n36 Capek, Zora, 23 care, 225 Carnegie, Andrew, 208 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 10, 32 Casablanca, 129, 143, 162, 193 Casablanca (film), 162 Castres prison, 174 index | 283

Catholic Church, 12. See also Church Peace Union Catholics, 42–43, 61 Central Bureau for Relief of the Evangelical Churches in Europe, 117 Centre Americain de Secours: Charlie Fawcett with, 70; clients at Vagasse farm, 160; closure of, 133, 137–38, 259n48; continuation of work after German occupation, 160–61; Danny Bénédite’s continuation of work at, 147, 149; exclusion from Nimes Committee, 131, 253n13; naming of, 39; “revolutionary doctrine” found at, 159; size of operation, 91; staff of, xxviii; Varian Fry’s hope for replacement at, 114. See also Emergency Rescue Committee; Fry, Varian Centre de depistage et de prophylaxis, 155 Cerbere, 45, 46, 51, 72–75, 78, 114 Chadwick, Trevor, 17, 18 Chagall, Bella, 89–90 Chagall, Marc, 36, 89–90 Chamonix ski resort, 146 charcoal, 192 Charity Organization Society of Montreal, 134 Charles Rhind Joy archive of correspondence and essays, xxv Charles University, 5 Chase Bank, xiv Chevalley, Madame, 67 Chicago, 99, 231 children: Charles Joy on rescue and relief service for, 84, 252n2; Czech Aid to, 129; deportation from France, 183–84; emigration to Britain, 16–18, 20, 40, 245n52; emigration to United States, 40, 52–53, 60–65, 68, 81, 93, 284 | index

119–20, 144, 181–84; in French concentration camps, 39, 40, 44, 88; hiding of Jewish, 67, 145–46, 152, 155, 156, 179, 184; kindergartens for, 119–21; malnutrition and starvation of, 32–35, 173, 214; to Palestine, 177– 79, 210, 213; recognition of Martha Sharp’s work with, 232; treatment in Swiss dental laboratory, 203; Vichy government’s denial of visas for, 150. See also Jewish Children’s Aid Society (ose) Children’s Section, British Refugee Relief Trust, 18 Children to Palestine, 177–79, 210, 213 Christian Register, 28, 56, 95–96, 118, 135, 152, 202 Christopher, Warren, 230 Church Peace Union, 208, 219 cimade (French Protestant organization), 62, 146, 182. See also Protestants civil rights, 223, 230 Clark University, 99 Clinton, Bill, 235 Clipper, 30, 100, 114, 140 clothing, 174, 200–201, 201 Coca-Cola Company, 226, 227 Cold War, xxvii, 29–21, 223–24, 226–29, 230–32 College Park md, xii Collonge border station, 151 Colonial Women of Affairs (Dexter), 99 Columbia University, xxii, 64, 173 Le Comite Unitarien Pour Le Secours, 39 Committee on Special Refugee Problems, Humanitarian, NonSectarian, International, 188, 190, 193–96. See also War Refugee Board

communication, 80, 81, 108, 132–33, 164, 175–76, 182, 209 communists: of Germans living in Switzerland, 148; Jo Tempi’s ties to, 224; Martha Sharp and, 231; Noel Field’s ties to, 180–81, 197, 202–5, 220–21, 223; in oss operations, 268n38; Robert Dexter and, 171; in underground, 156–57; Unitarians’ ties to, 171, 231, 232; Varian Fry and, 131, 226, 228–29; War Refugee Board’s ties to, 196 concentration camps. See internment camps Congo, 235 Congregationalists, 164 Convention on the Prevention or Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 234 “Coordination Committee for Relief Work in Internment Camps.” See Nimes Committee Cornish, Louis, xxii Croix de Chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur, 227 Crossroads Marseilles (Gold), 70 Cruz Vermelha de Dedicacao, 193 Cuban refugees, 234 currency exchanges, 14–16, 38. See also fund-raising; funds; money licenses Czech Aid, 33, 129 Czech farming community, 157 Czech government-in-exile, 157, 170 Czechoslovakia: anti-Semitism in, xix–xx, 11; ban on travel to, 213– 15; British interest in, 1; Dexters’ desire to start organization in, xiii, xxi–xxiii, 28, 242n16; Jewish refugees in, 2, 5, 19–20, 42–43; Lion Feuchtwanger offered citizenship of, 48; Lowries in,

xxix, 33; Martha Sharp’s speeches about, 26; obtaining passports from, 69; Quakers’ aid to refugees in, xxi–xxii; refugees from to Alaska, 188; Sharps’ and Lowries’ special interest in refugees from, 40–44; Sharps’ departures from, 23, 24; Sharps’ invitation to work in, 10–11; visa quota for, xiv. See also Prague Czech Red Cross, 4. See also Red Cross organizations Czech Refugee Institute, 16, 18 Czech soldiers: in Agde internment camp, 81; boat passage to Britain, 112; “illegality” of assistance to, 228–29; as part of information network, 157; Sharps’ aid to, xv, 43–44, 72, 177, 248n49; surrender at Munich, 33 Czech Unitarian church, xxi, 11–12, 244n33. See also Unitaria Dachau, xx, 23 Danish passports, 69 Dardogne, 191 Darfur, 235–37 Dartmouth College, 131 Davenport, Miriam, 69, 70, 173, 243n30, 273n29 Davila, Charles, 196, 266n2, 267n5 Davis, Malcolm, 10, 32 D day landings, 196–97 “The Deadly Infection of AntiSemitism” (Wilder Foote), xxiii–xxiv Debacle, 151–54 Debre, Sulvain Cahn, 266n2 Del Vayo, Alvarez, 196, 266n2, 267n5 dental clinics and laboratories, 109–10, 203. See also medical aid Deutsch, Hans, 82 index | 285

Deutsch, Karl, 21 The Devil in France (Feuchtwanger), 48, 135 Dexter, Elisabeth Anthony Williams, xxvi, 27; on awareness of refugees, 95; background of, xi–xii, xxv, 99–100; in Boston, 25; and creation of Service Committee, 26–28; on daughter’s pregnancy, 167–68; discretion of, 140, 151, 168; in Eastern Europe, xxi–xxii; heart condition of, 109; on idleness of refugees, 128; leadership of, 233; in Lisbon, 97–98, 105–8, 114, 136–37, 140–41, 149, 166, 176, 193; and Martha Sharp, 98, 254n48; meetings with government officials, 168–70; on Noel Field, 197; oss dropping of, 208–9, 221; oss duties of, 139–41, 164, 171, 177; oss meeting with, 137–38; postwar life, 217–19, 221–22; problems with Charles Joy, 133–34, 175–76; on refugee preferences, 59; representation of Unitarians, xxiv, 243n30; resignation, 208; at Skidmore College, 96; and Spanish Republican prisoners, 211; and Subaks, xiii–xv, xvii–xix; on U.S. entry in war, 96–97; and Varian Fry’s dog, 115; with War Refugee Board, 188 Dexter, Harriet. See Pennington, Harriet Dexter Dexter, Lewis, xi–xiii, 140, 151, 168 Dexter, Robert Cloutman, xvi, 27, 218; attempt to recruit Varian Fry for Unitarian Service Committee, 130–32; attitude toward communism, 232; background of, xxiv–xxv; in Boston, 25; and creation of Service Committee, 286 | index

26–28; descendents of immigrants helped by, 64–65; on emigration casework in France (1941), 109; in France during deportations, 147– 50; on helping refugees, xxiii–xxiv; on Hiram Bingham, 94; on idleness of refugees, 128; independence of, 195; and Jay Allen, 79; on Jo Tempi, 225; in Lisbon, 97–98, 100–107, 114, 136–37, 140–41, 166, 176; and Martha Sharp, 94–95, 98–99; and Meyerhofs, 76–78; on milk project, 35; and Noel Field, 197, 219–20, 223, 272n4; with oss, 137–41, 164, 169–71, 177, 181, 208–9, 221; political background, 95–96; postwar life, 217–18; problems with Charles Joy, 81–82, 133–34, 175–76, 207–8; proposal to help refugees in Czechoslovakia, xiii, xxi–xxiii, 28, 242n16; recruitment of Varian Fry’s staff, xxix; on refugee preferences, 59; and René Zimmer, 157–59, 174; representation of Unitarians, 243n30; on rescue efforts in North Africa, 162; resignation, 208; and restrictions on rescue efforts in Lisbon, 163; on separation from ose, 155; on Sharps in Prague, 7–8; on ship passage problems, 92; and Spanish Republican prisoners, 211, 212; and Subaks, xi–xv, xvii–xix; on support for medical program, 124, 257n8; support staff of, 81; trip to Britain, 108–9; on U.S. entry in war, 96–97; Virginia Wastcoat’s letter to, 17; with War Refugee Board, xxviii, 187–90, 192, 207, 266n2, 267n5 Diamant, Amelie, Eveline, and Marianne, 61

Diamant, Rudolf, 61 dietary supplements, 125 Di Figlia, Ghanda, 248n49 dispensaries, 110, 121, 144–45, 154– 55, 174, 198. See also medical aid doctors, 155, 180. See also medical aid Dolbeare, Frederick, 176 Dolivet, Louis, 103, 161, 188, 196, 202–3, 256n91, 262n18, 266n2, 267n5 Dominican Republic, 165 Donovan, William, 105, 137, 138, 183, 194, 208, 256n91 Dorian, Reine, 90 Dos Passos, John, 36 Dr. Joy’s Committee. See Committee on Special Refugee Problems, Humanitarian, Non-Sectarian, International Dubois, Dorothy, 185 Dubois, Josiah, 185–87, 194, 267n5 Duchamp, Marcel, 133 Dulles, Allen: archival records of, xii; association with Unitarians, xxviii; on Bertholets’s information, 160; coordination of program of, 168; on dropping of Dexters, 208, 209, 221; funding of French communist groups, 181; meeting with Dexters, 137–39, 148; reaction to deportations, 183; on René Zimmer’s fund request, 174; sabotage strategy, 205–6; support of resistance in southern France, 197, 268n38 du Porzic, Maurice, 114 Ecuador, 165–66 Einsatzgruppen, 107 Eliot, Charles, 29 Eliot, Frederick May, 13, 26, 28–29, 94, 136, 164, 177, 231

Eliot, Samuel Atkins, 11, 29, 42, 178 Eliot, T. S., 29 Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, 184 Emergency Rescue Committee: absence from Nimes Committee, 68; Charles Joy on methods of, 71, 79; clients on Nyassa, 128; dissolution of tie with French organization, 159; emigration successes of, 116–17; and evacuation of British soldiers, 228; Mary Jayne Gold’s donation to, 115; organizational problems of, 80; overseas staff, 243n30; Paul Hagen’s role in, 169; quality of work done by, 56–59; replacement of Varian Fry, 79, 80, 90–91; representation in Lisbon, 117, 132–33; route between Marseille and Lisbon, 83; Varian Fry’s contact with after departure, 130–31; Varian Fry’s representation of, 36–39. See also Centre Americain de Secours; Fry, Varian; International Rescue and Relief Committee (irrc) Emerson, William, 26, 35, 136, 164, 177, 190, 266n2 “enemy aliens,” 21, 30 Ericeira, 166 Ernst, Max, 36, 70, 91 espionage, xxvii, xxix, 101, 107, 113, 165, 171, 207, 256n93. See also Office of Strategic Services (oss) “Eva” (Bertholets’s friend in New York), 160, 170, 262n18 Evangelical Churches of America Fund, 83 Fawcett, Charlie, 45–46, 69, 70, 243n30, 273n29 fbi, 131, 224 index | 287

Feigl, Eva, 61 Feuchtwanger, Lion, 49; connection to anti-fascist organization, 231; correspondence with Sharps, 135; escape of, 46, 48, 50–52, 54, 57, 74, 83, 170; Hiram Bingham’s assistance to, 93; statelessness of, 2; visa for, 41 Feuchtwanger, Marta, 49; escape of, 46, 50–52, 54, 57, 74, 83, 170; meeting of Martha Sharp, 248n49; relationship with Sharps, 135, 232 Field, Elsie, 223–24 Field, Hermann, 21, 85, 219 Field, Herta, 85, 127; behind Iron Curtain, xxv, 219, 221; collaboration with Joseph Weill in Switzerland, 179–81; direction of refugees to Switzerland, 146; emigration work of, 148–49; to Geneva, 151–53; and Howard Brooks’s mission, 113; and Jo Tempi, 203; and kindergarten program, 88, 119, 120; language skills of, 85, 88; loss of contacts in occupied France, 154; meeting of Martha Sharp, 214; responsibility of, 86 Field, Marshall III, 62 Field, Noel, 85, 127; background of, xxv–xxvii, 84–86; behind Iron Curtain, xxv, 219, 223; caseload in Marseille, 88, 252n12; collaboration with Joseph Weill in Switzerland, 179–82; collaboration with ose in Switzerland, 203; on dental clinic, 110; direction of refugees to Switzerland, 146; emigration work of, 109, 111, 148–49; encouragement of German subversion in Switzerland, 157; Flora Lewis’s 288 | index

book on, 222, 272n9; to Geneva, 151–53; hiring as director of camp relief in France, 84; hiring of personnel for Marseille clinic, 87–88; hospital opened by, 121–22; and Howard Brooks’s mission, 113; illness, 181; independence of, 195; and Jo Tempi, 202, 225; and kindergarten program, 88, 119; loss of contacts in occupied France, 154; on Martha Sharp’s postwar work, 214, 215; on Nimes Committee membership, 131; with oss, 148, 164, 177, 181, 204–6, 209, 220; political loyalties of, 153, 209, 219–20, 232; postwar life, 216, 223–24; and René Zimmer’s funds, 158, 174; report on medical relief program of, 103; representation of Unitarians, 243n30; Robert Dexter’s regrets about working with, 219–20, 272n4; role in Unitarian Service Committee, xxiv; and “starvation study,” 129; and transfer of resistance funds, 141; travel to France after Allies’ landing, 197–98; and U.S. consulates in France, 125–26; and Varian Fry, 89 Figuera prison, 74 La Filiere Marseillaise (Bénédite), 147 First Church (Belmont ma), 219 Fisera, Joseph, 44 fishing boats, 44–45, 228, 248n49. See also ship passage Fittko, Hans, 74–78, 93, 115 Fittko, Lisa, 74–78, 93, 115 flaming chalice symbol, 82, 226 Fleischmann, Wolfgang, 61 food relief projects: at Czech Salvation Army, 16, 32; at internment camps, 86, 88, 124–25, 252n8;

Lotta Hitschmanova’s work on, 129; postwar, 214; Unitarians’ disagreement about, 97; War Refugee Board funding of, 191 food supply, 39, 154 Foreign Policy Association, 36 Forgan, Russell, 208–9 Fort Vénissieux, 145 Forty Days of Musa Dogh (Werfel), 42 France: agreement to Munich Pact, 11; American ambassador’s appeal for Walter Meyerhof in, 77; Americans in after surrender, xxviii; anti-Nazi propaganda and sabotage by Germans in, 205; Charles Joy’s accomplishments in, xxv; Czech soldiers in, 43–44; decline of situation for refugees in (1941), 66; deportations from, 141, 143–50, 155, 182–84; Donald Lowrie in, xxix; economic privation in (1940), 32; Emergency Rescue Committee correspondence in, 80; emigration of children from, 119–21; emigration successes in, 116–17; exit visas from, 44–46; Fields’ accomplishments in, xxv–xxvii; German occupation of (November 1942), 151–54; hiring of camp relief director in, 84; Jewish citizenship in, 90; the Joint in northern, 38; Jo Tempi’s return to after exposure of affair, 224; Jo Tempi’s settling in, 202–3; money licenses sent to, 164; Noel Field’s relief work in after Allies’ landing, 197–98; number of War Refugee Board rescues from, 207; refugees from northern, 30–31; relatives clause in, 101; safe houses in, xii; Subaks stuck in, 71; Unitarian

Service Committee aid to refugees in, xxiv; Varian Fry honored in, 227; Varian Fry’s evacuation of British soldiers from, 116, 227, 228, 256n93. See also Marseille; Paris; southern France; Vichy France Franco, Francisco, 170 Frank, Hans, 61 Free French, 132, 198, 205 Free World Association (fwa), 103, 161, 196, 256n91. See also Dolivet, Louis Freier, Bill, 69 French armies, 33, 46–47, 150, 162 French communists, 181 French Foreign Legion, 162 French identity cards (carte d’identité), 69, 72 French Red Cross, 174, 232. See also Red Cross organizations French resistance groups: Allen Dulles’s support of, 197; Bertholets’ work with, 160; British and U.S. agreement about, 139; of Danny Bénédite, 147, 192; delivery of messages between Switzerland and France, 199–200; doctors with, 155; fund-raising for, 103; Howard Brooks’s work with, 103–5, 137; Jean Gemahling’s ties to, 70; René Zimmer’s work with, 148, 156–59, 173–74, 181, 209; Robert Dexter’s work with, 138–39, 141; Unitarian dispensary as first-aid station for, 198; Varian Fry’s ties to, 131–32, 227; and War Refugee Board, 190– 91. See also Maquis (armed French resistance); Office of Strategic Services (oss); resistance Fried, Arthur, 166 Friedman, J. B., 187, 266n2, 267n5 index | 289

Fritchman, Stephen, 50 F-route, 75–76, 90, 93 Fry, Eileen, 91, 113, 115, 226, 227, 229 Fry, Varian, 37; accomplishments of, xii, xxiv; with American Labor Conference on International Affairs, 172; on Anna Gruss, 160–61; arrest and expulsion from France, xxv, 113–17, 228, 256n93; arrival in Lisbon, 54, 55; clients of stranded in Portugal, 166, 176, 259n48; collaboration with Waitstill Sharp, 47, 50, 53; contact with former staff, 209–10; correspondence referring to “Eva,” 262n18; denial of passport renewal, 113–14; and Dick Ball’s disappearance, 46; emigration successes of, 116; Howard Brooks’s portrayal of, 105; on joining Unitarian Service Committee, 130–32; and Lotta Hitschmanova, 112; and Marc Chagall, 89–90; Margit Subak’s knowledge of, 72; and Max Hoffman, 170; Nazi propaganda sent to, 118; need for guide and routes, 74–76; and oss, 138, 173; and passports for stateless Czechs, 43; postwar life, 216, 226–30; problems with U.S. consulates, 57, 59, 113–14, 116, 126, 132, 149–50, 228, 230; in psychoanalysis, 173; as pundit, 132, 172; relationship with Charles Joy, 56–60, 79, 82, 90–91, 114–15, 131–32; relationship with hicem, 68; replacement by Jay Allen, 79, 91; representation of Emergency Rescue Committee, 36–39, 169, 243n30; on Robert Dexter as replacement, 102–3; Robert Dexter’s defense of, 137–38; 290 | index

shunning of, 68–69, 89, 253n13; staff of, xxviii–xxix, 130–31, 156, 159, 273n29; U.S. government’s disapproval of, 57–60; on U.S. rescue of Jews, 150–51; at Villa AirBel, 70, 71; volume of clients of, 88; and Walter Meyerhof, 77; and War Refugee Board, xxix, 187–90, 194, 195, 266n2, 267n5. See also Centre Americain de Secours; Emergency Rescue Committee Fullerton, Hugh, 57, 62, 68, 104, 112–14, 126–28 fund-raising: by Charles Joy, 175; for Children to Palestine, 178; Dexters on urgency of, 27, 28; by Emergency Rescue Committee in New York, 80; by Free World Association, 103; by Martha Sharp, 210; for René Zimmer’s underground work, 158–59; by Robert Dexter, 25, 95, 130; by Unitarians in United States, xxix. See also currency exchanges; money licenses funds: for “Aryanized” identities, 145; for Czech refugees, 6, 14, 17, 43; for Danny Bénédite’s spying mission, 149–50, 160; from Emergency Rescue Committee, 79–80; in European banks, 22; for Feuchtwangers’ travel, 51; of French refugees, 31; to French resistance, 138–39, 141, 156, 174, 175; from Jo Tempi, 200; Margit Subak’s for border crossing, 72; for medical program, 122–24; for milk project, 32–33; of Nimes Committee, 66; for refugees to Britain, 20; for rescue efforts in Lisbon, 83, 163–64; State Department restrictions on for

relief work, 105; for Toulouse hospital, 121; to Unitarian Service Committee (1942), 163–65; use of Unitarian Service Committee, 81–82; from Varian Fry’s staff, 161; for Walter Meyerhof, 77–79; from War Refugee Board, 204. See also currency exchanges; money licenses Gano, Seth, xxiv, 149, 164, 175–77, 207, 254n48 Garai, Pierre, 61 Garcia route, 93 Garden of the Righteous at Yad Vashem, 232 Garel, Georges, 145 Garel network, 145–46, 156, 179 Gaulle, Charles de, 103, 112, 132, 139, 168, 256n91 Gdynia, 20 Gemahling, Jean, 70, 117 Geneva: Andre Atlan’s message delivery from, 199; Czech refugees to, 14; Fields in, 86, 151–53, 179; Howard Brooks in, 104; movement of funds through, 158; Robert Dexter in, 149; Waitstill Sharp’s visit to, 22; World ymca in, 39, 182. See also Switzerland genocide, 185, 187–88, 210, 233–35 Gerlier, Cardinal Pierre-Marie, 67, 145 German communists, 148, 156–57, 181, 202–3, 205 German consulates, 107 German Jews, xxiii–xxiv German refugees, 200, 203, 204 German troops, 1, 3, 23–24, 156, 157 Germany: agents and communists in, 169, 204–6; Americans interned in, 152; appropriation of French

agricultural output, 32; attack of Soviet Union, 223; blitzkrieg in Poland, 25; Dexters’ visit with propagandists in, 134; effect of relief work on, 97, 103, 105, 253n13; expulsion of Jews from, 19; Jewish refugees from, 2; in northern Italy, 181; possibility of Lisbon invasion by, 40; Quakers’ aid to refugees in, xxii; refugee quota in, xiv, xxi, 59; refugees from in Prague, 16; relatives clause in, 101, 102; in Sudetenland, 11, 71; surrender, 211; Unitarians’ association with Christians in, xvii. See also Nazis Gestapo. See Nazis Gibraltar, 228 Gide, Andre, 114 Girls Clubs, 81 Glaser, Erika, 153, 204–5, 219 Goering, Hermann, 107 Goldberg, Arthur, 169, 170 “Gold Fund,” 115 Gold, Mary Jayne, 69–71, 115, 116, 172–73, 227, 243n30, 273n29 Goldschmied, Albin, 14 Goldstajn, Jugoslov, 105–6 Gordes, 89–90 Great Britain: agreement to Munich Pact, 11; blockade of, 32; censorship of Emergency Rescue Committee correspondence, 80; citizens in Czechoslovakia, 5; Czech soldiers to, 43, 72, 112, 248n49; Danny Bénédite’s funds from, 160; dossiers to Home Office in, 6; on human rights violations, 234–35; intelligence agreement with United States, 139; Jewish Unitaria congregants to, 13; priorities regarding refugees, 19–21; index | 291

Great Britain (cont.) refugee emigration to, 5–6, 16–18, 40, 245n52; relief workers from in Prague, 19; Robert Dexter’s love of, 220; Robert Dexter’s trip to (1941), 108–9; U.S. help with refugees in, 95–96; Varian Fry’s rescue of soldiers from, 116, 227, 228, 256n93; visas from, 6, 16, 21 The Great Change (Bohn), 58 Greene, Justin, 139 “Green Frontier,” 75–76 Greenwich Village, 161, 187 Green, William, 39 Gruening, Ernest, 188, 273n1 Gruss, Anna, 147, 156, 160–61 Gudenov, Boris. See Meyerhof, Walter ss Guine, 129 Gurs camp, 40, 84, 125 Hadassah, 177–79, 210, 213 Hagen, Paul (alias Karl Frank), 169 Haifa, refugees to, 15, 178 Haitian refugees, 234 Harper’s Topical Concordance (Joy), 56 Harris, Pippa, 105–7 Harvard Club, 172, 187, 266n2 Harvard University, 10, 29, 36, 37, 57, 89, 99 Hayes, Carlton, 192–93 Hebrew Immigrant and Sheltering Society, 215 Hebrew Immigration Aid Society (hias). See hias (Hebrew Immigration Aid Society) Heller, Frank and Anna, 16 Heller, Martha, 16 Herald Tribune, 63 Hermann, Vivette, 120 Herriot, Edouard, 249n2 Heydrich, Reinhard, 23, 107 hias (Hebrew Immigration Aid 292 | index

Society), 93, 107, 215. See also Jewish organizations hicem, 5, 67, 68, 86, 116–17, 129–30. See also Jewish organizations Himmelstern, Hedwig, 141, 143 Hirschfeld, Herbert, 76 Hirschmann, Otto (Albert Herman) (“Beamish”), 69, 74, 173, 273n29 Hiss, Donald, 185 Hitler, Adolf, xvii, xix, 6, 8, 23, 107, 141, 170, 183–85 Hitschmanova, Lotta, 111–12, 129, 233 Hoare, Sir Samuel, 256n93 Hoffman, Max, 106, 160, 170 Holbeck, Helga, 142, 252n8 Holland, 34 Home Service Committee of the Unitarian Service Committee, 135 hospitals, 121–22, 174 Hotel Alacron, 19 Hotel Atlantic (Prague), 1, 19 Hotel Bompard, 109, 124 Hotel Commodore, 168 Hotel Imperator, 67 Hotel Metropole, 31–32, 54, 82 Hotel Pariz, 19 Hotel Splendide, 47 Hotel Terminus, 39 House Committee on Un-American Activities, 224, 231. See also U.S. Congress Howlett, Duncan, 21–24 Hruby, Blahoslav, 170–71 Huebsch, Benjamin, 48 Hughes, John, 138, 163, 164, 168, 173, 176, 208–9, 221, 262n18 Hull, Cordell, xxiii, 41, 57, 58, 68, 94, 137–38, 189 Hull House, 9 human rights, 234–36 Hungarian communists, 204

Hungary, 219, 223, 224 The Hunted Children (Lowrie), 33–34, 227 Hurley, John, 47, 57, 126 Hus, Jan, 12 Huxley, Aldous, 48 Hyde, Lloyd, 164 Iberian Peninsula, xxvii identity and ration cards, 69, 72, 145, 146, 156, 161, 174, 179, 191 Immigration Law of 1924, xxiii, 92, 242n23 Industrial Workers of the World, 58 Ingham, Elizabeth Whelan, 9 Ingham, James, 9 intellectuals and artists, xxviii, 36, 38, 39, 60, 64–65, 69, 89, 116 International Brigadiers, 231 international buses, 72–73 International Criminal Court (icc), 235 International Labor Organization, 228. See also labor groups International Migration Service, 67, 112, 117 International Red Cross, 110, 125, 158– 59. See also Red Cross organizations International Relations Club, 8 International Relief Association, 117 International Rescue and Relief Committee (irrc), 130–31, 165, 168, 171, 190, 192, 227, 259n48, 262n18. See also Emergency Rescue Committee internment camps: in Britain, 21; Charles Joy’s interest in, 175; Charlie Fawcett’s rescue of women in, 70; clothing for survivors of, 200; conditions at French, 39–40, 252n2; Czech soldiers in, 44; dental care for survivors of, 203; deportations from French, 182–83;

Dexters on fate of occupants, 134; diet in, 124–25; difficulty boarding ships from, 92; illness in, 111, 122, 124–25; Jo Tempi’s work in, 203; kindergartens at, 119–21; Lion Feuchtwanger in, 48, 135; Martha Sharp’s visits to, 51; medical aid in, 109, 154, 155; in North Africa, 161–63; relief work in, 66–67, 86, 88, 97, 105, 252n8; rescue of children from (1942), 145–46; in Switzerland, 179, 180; and U.S. consulate closings, 107; windows at, 84, 252n2 Iraq, 233 irrc. See International Rescue and Relief Committee (irrc) Isle of Man, 21 Israel, xii, 179, 231, 232 Italian refugees, 181 Italian zone safe houses, 156 Italy, 11, 181, 207 Jacobs, Max, 36 Jardel, Jean, 143–44 Jerusalem, 230, 232 Jewish Children’s Aid Society (ose): collaboration with Unitarian Service Committee, 86, 257n8; deportation of staff, 183; food relief project, 125; and kindergarten program, 119–21; in Marseille clinic, 110, 198; methods of, 88; separation from Unitarian medical program, 148, 155; in Switzerland, 179, 203. See also children Jewish organizations, xxviii, 67, 88, 192, 207, 208. See also American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (the Joint); hias (Hebrew Immigration Aid Society); hicem index | 293

Jewish orphans, 177–79 Jewish refugees: in Czechoslovakia, 2, 5, 19–20, 42–43; Fields’ aid to, 88, 204; hiding of, 62, 67, 191; and immigration laws, xxiii; Jo Tempi’s work with, 200; program for transport to Palestine, 177–79; in Sudetenland, xxii; in Switzerland, 181–82; U.S. attitude toward, 194. See also anti-Semitism; Jews Jews: American Federation of Labor rescue of, 39; American Unitarian Association position on helping, xix–xx; citizenship rights in France, 90; deportation from France, 143–44, 149, 155–56, 183–84; Emergency Rescue Committee’s association with, 91; in French concentration camps, 39, 61; funds from American, 67; hiding in France, 145–46, 152, 155, 156, 184, 190–91; Hitler’s intention to kill, 107, 141, 183–85; at Hull House, 9; law describing, 66; Nazi propaganda on, 118; to Palestine, 177–79, 215; Portuguese denial of visas to, 31; representation in Unitarian symbol, 82; at Unitaria, 13–14; Varian Fry on extermination of, 150–51; Varian Fry’s protection of, 114; War Refugee Board information program on, 194. See also anti-Semitism; Jewish refugees the Joint. See American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (the Joint) Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, 134, 231 Jouhaux, Leon, 104, 138, 141 Joy, Rev. Charles, 85; arrival in Lisbon, 52, 54; attempt to renew passport, 112–13; background 294 | index

of, xxv; on children’s emigration project, 64–65; and creation of Service Committee, 26; denial of entry in Czechoslovakia, 213; on deportations, 146–47; in Ecuador, 165–66; Elisabeth Dexter’s criticism of, 108; on Emergency Rescue Committee’s clients, 79–80, 83, 132–33; espionage involvement, 177; and Feuchtwangers, 52; and food relief project, 129; on free ports in United States and territories, 188, 193; at French internment camps, 84; on F-route, 75–76; on Harriet Dexter’s pregnancy, 167; hiring of Noel Field, 84–86; honoring of, 215, 216; on Howard Brook’s mission, 113, 256n91; on internment camp relief, 252n8, 253n13; on Jo Tempi, 201–2, 222; on Louis Dolivet, 103; and Martha Sharp, 211, 212, 214–15; on mission of Unitarian Service Committee, 97; and North Africa, 129–30, 161–63, 165; permission to stay in Europe, 229; possible indiscretion of, 207, 209; postwar life, 224–26; problems with Robert Dexter, 81–82, 133–34, 175–76, 207–8; on procedures at Spanish customhouse, 74; relationship with American government, 116, 126–28; relationship with hicem, 68; relationship with Varian Fry, 56–60, 79, 82, 90–91, 114–15, 131–32; on René Zimmer’s work, 158; representation of Unitarians, 243n30; return to Lisbon, 117–18; role in Unitarian Service Committee, xxiv; on ship passage problems, 92; and

Spanish Republican prisoners, 211; support staff of, 80–81; transfer to Boston, 97–98, 100; and Unitarian Service Committee symbol, 82, 226; on U.S. visa policies, 139, 141–43; in Varian Fry’s book, 172; Varian Fry’s staff on, 70, 71; and Walter Meyerhof, 78–79; and War Refugee Board, 186, 187, 189, 190, 194–96, 266n2, 267n5; on windows at internment camps, 84, 252n2. See also Committee on Special Refugee Problems, Humanitarian, Non-Sectarian, International Jüd Süss (Feuchtwanger), 48, 105 Jura Alps, 182 Kalma Refugee Camp, 236–37 Katowice, 21, 23 Katzki, Herbert, 243n30 Kemeny, Mr. and Mrs. Zoltan, 141 kindergartens, 88, 119–21, 120 Kingdon, Frank, 36, 130, 168 Kopecky, Vaclav, 224 Krakow, 21, 23, 85, 144 Kristallnacht, xxiii, 20 Kurds, 233 labor groups, 169, 170, 172–73, 228 Lang, Madame, 88, 155 Languedoc, 50 Latin America, 65, 117, 176, 211 Laval, Pierre, 138, 144, 150, 182, 259n48 Lawrence ma, 237 League of Nations, 84–86 Leahy, Ambassador, 126 Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, xi, 61, 229 Lee, Rosalind, 17 Les Milles camp, 48, 107, 109 Lesser, Lawrence, 267n5 Levinski, Eva, 262n18

Levy, Jacqueline, 121 Lewis, Flora, 148, 202, 204, 222, 272n9 Linnell, Irving, 7 Lipschitz, Jacques, 226 Lisbon: behavior of U.S. consuls in, 59; Bertholets’ information network in, 160; “black train” route to, 116; Charles Joy in, 52, 54, 71, 78, 82–84, 117–18, 126, 175; children’s emigration through, 64, 178; communication problems in, 81; Czech soldiers’ escape through, 43, 44; direct mail route to, 164; Dr. Karp’s escape to, 155; Elisabeth Dexter in charge in, 193; Emergency Rescue Committee clients in, 83, 132–33; emigration successes in, 117, 128–29; end of Unitarians’ representation in, 208; Feuchtwangers in, 52; flights to from Morocco, 162; food relief project at, 88; F-route to, 76; funds for medical aid in, 165; Heinrich Müller in, 90; hicem in, 67; Hiram Bingham sent to, 93; Howard Brooks’s work in, 165, 270n91; information network to Geneva through, 182; intellectual refugees in, 50; Mary Jayne Gold in, 115; Meyerhofs in, 48; oss activities in, 170, 270n91; proof of ability to proceed from, 249n4; refugees at train station in, 83; René Zimmer’s communication to, 158; restrictions on rescue efforts in, 163–64; Robert Dexter in, 97–98, 100–107, 114, 136–37, 140–41, 166, 176; Sharps in, 30–43, 210–12; ship passage out of, 40, 52, 91–92, 128–29, 253n24; index | 295

Lisbon (cont.) Stefan Zweig in, 65; Subak refugees in, xv, 73; Unitarians’ relationship with consulate in, 116; Varian Fry’s organization in, 36–38, 54, 55, 79–80, 114; War Refugee Board on bottleneck in, 189. See also Portugal; U.S. consulate (Lisbon) “Lister route.” See F-route Lithuanian consul, 69 Lloyds Bank, 18 Loewenstein, Dyno, 173, 262n18 London: child refugee project in, 18; denial of refugee workers’ visas in, 23; governments-in-exile in, 157, 169, 170, 190; Hans Subak in, 25; hicem in, 67; problems with Charles Joy’s trip to (1942), 207; refugee “helping” group in, 16; Robert Dexter in, 171; Sharps in, 1, 6, 10; Sudetenland refugees to, 11 Long, Breckinridge, 92, 94, 101, 105, 113, 163–64, 189, 196 Lord Mayor’s Fund, 6, 17 Lourdes, 41–42 Lowrie, Donald, 142; accomplishments of, xxiv; background of, xxix; cables sent to and from, 81; child emigration projects of, 150, 156, 179, 181–82; collaboration with Martha Sharp, 53, 60; contact with Nimes Committee in occupied France, 154; and Czech soldiers, 72, 157, 177, 228–29; on deportations, 141, 143–44, 183–84; escape from France, 152; in Geneva office, 153; Howard Brooks’s portrayal of, 105; and internment camps, 39–40, 51, 86, 88, 93, 252n8, 253n13; and milk project, 34–35; on Nimes Committee membership, 131; and 296 | index

Noel Field, 84, 181; organization of Nimes Committee, 66–68, 203; with oss, 183; in Paris, 33–34, 214; representation of World ymca, 243n30; as source of Czech passports, 69; special interest in Czechs, 40, 42–44; Varian Fry’s correspondence with, 227–28; on Vichy contacts, 61 Lowrie, Helen: cables sent to and from, 81; as candidate for director of camp relief in France, 84; and children’s emigration project, 62–64; collaboration with Martha Sharp, 53, 60; and Czech soldiers, 157; Elisabeth Dexter’s postwar communication with, 222; escape from France, 152; in Geneva, 153, 182; and milk project, 34–35; and Noel Field, 181; in Paris, 33–34, 214; special interest in Czechs, 40 Luxford, Ansel, 267n5 Lyon, 138, 145, 198, 215 Macchu Picchu, 50 MacClelland, Ross, 181 Madrid, 43, 74, 76, 228, 256n93 Mahler, Gustav, 41, 54 mail service. See communication Malraux, Andre, 227 ss Manhattan, 28 Mann, Erika, 54 Mann, Golo, 41, 54 Mann, Heinrich, 2, 41, 54, 231 Mann, Nelly, 54 Mann, Thomas, 2, 41, 48, 89 Mann family, 50, 54, 74, 83, 93 Maquis (armed French resistance), 146, 174, 192, 197. See also French resistance groups Marin-Chancerelle, Mlle., 162 Maritime Commission, 92

Marseille: anti-Nazi propaganda and sabotage by Germans in, 205, 206; Chagalls in, 90; Charles Joy as Varian Fry’s replacement in, 90–91; Charles Joy’s meeting of Jo Tempi in, 202; commemoration of Varian Fry in, 230; communication problems in, 81; communist operatives in, 181; Czech refugees in, 42–44; Danny Bénédite’s operation in, 159, 160; Dick Ball and Charlie Fawcett in, 45; Donald Lowrie’s organization in, 43; Emergency Rescue Committee underground railway in, 83, 91; focus on relief work in, 128; hicem in, 67–68; Hiram Bingham’s departure from, 93–94; Howard Brooks in, 104, 105; Joint in, 38; Lotta Hitschmanova in, 112; Martha Sharp in, 60, 61, 64; medical aid in, 86–88, 103, 109–10, 119–21, 124–25, 129, 198; Meyerhofs in, 47; oss staff member in, 139; Polish consul in, 69; postwar relief in, 215; raids in (1942), 144–45; records on refugee cases in, 252n12; René Zimmer’s relationship with administration in, 154–55, 173–74; Robert Dexter as Varian Fry’s replacement in, 102–3; Robert Dexter in during deportations, 147–49; Sharps in, 33–36, 136; Subak sisters in, 72; Varian Fry’s book about time in, 172, 226–28; Varian Fry’s organization in, xxviii–xxix, 39, 54, 57, 58, 79, 80; Walter Meyerhof in, 78. See also France; U.S. consulate (Marseille) Martha’s Vineyard, 81 Martin, Joe, 230–31

Martinique route, 91, 93 Marygold Lodge, 69 Masaryk, Alice, 4, 14–16 Masaryk, Charlotte Garrigue, xxii, 4 Masaryk, Jan, 4, 213 Masaryk, Tomas, 13 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 8, 26, 64 Matisse, Henri, 114 Maurienne Valley, 197 Mauthausen camp, 200 Mayflower Society, 9–10 Meadville pa, 10 medical aid: continuation in occupied France, 153–58, 173–74; for Czech children liberated from camps, 129; effect on Germany, 97, 103; expansion of program in Marseille and Toulouse, 121–25; focus on in Marseille, 128; funds for in Lisbon, 165; hope to resume after Allies’ landing, 198; Joint’s support of, 159, 257n8; Jo Tempi’s contribution to, 200; procedures of Unitarian team, 109–12; proposal in Czechoslovakia, 242n16; René Zimmer’s practice in Marseille, 87; request for report on in Marseille, 103; separation from Jewish Children’s Aid Society, 148, 155; in Swiss refugee camps, 179, 180; Unitarians’ disagreement about, 97, 134; as Unitarian Service Committee priority, 84, 86; War Refugee Board funding of, 191. See also dental clinics and laboratories; dispensaries; relief service Mendes, Aristides de Sousa, 31, 43 Mexican embassy (Marseille), 174 Mexico, 9, 65, 143, 176, 211, 212 Meyer, Gerald, 168 Meyer, Herbert and Dorothea, 101–2 index | 297

Meyerhof, Hedwig, 41, 46–48, 76–78, 83 Meyerhof, Otto, 41, 46–48, 65, 76–78, 83 Meyerhof, Walter, 46–47, 76–79, 77 Meyers, Herbert, 102 Middle East, 212–13, 215 milk project, 32–35, 38, 40, 58, 60, 81 Minac, Matej, 245n52 Minor, Zina, 87–88, 155 Miranda prison camp, 74, 93 money licenses, 164, 184–85. See also currency exchanges; fund-raising; funds Montclair State College, 64 Montpellier, 38 Montpellier University, 87 Montreal, 168 Moravia, xiii Morgenstern, Josef, 143 Morgenthau, Henry, 185 Morocco, 93, 112, 130, 162 Mr. Clovis (dog), 69, 115 Müller, Heinrich, 90, 106–7 Munich, 215 Munich Pact, 1–2, 6, 11, 19 Museum of Modern Art, 36 Mussolini, Benito, 181 “Nansen passport.” See passports; visas Nation, 59, 132, 172 National Archives, xii National Committee for a Free Germany (calpo), 204–6 National Council of Churches, 96 nationalism, xxii, 66, 242n16 National Komittee Freies Deutschland für der Western, 204–6 National Security Resources Board, 231 National Socialist Party, 21. See also Nazis 298 | index

National War Fund, 165, 263n35 Nazis: anti-Semitism of, xx, 2, 14, 25; arrest of Danny Bénédite, 192; arrest of refugee workers, 18–19; communists against, 181, 205; Czech Unitarian church on, 11, 22–23; and Eduard Theis, 62; Elisabeth Dexter’s meeting with, 106; Lion Feuchtwanger as priority of, 50, 52; location of Jews in group homes, 156; morale of, 157, 169, 193–94; most-wanted list of, 90; occupation of France in November 1942, 151–54; in Paris, 29–31, 71; passports for opponents of, 100; in Prague, 4–6; propaganda of, 118, 134, 194; protection of funds from, 14–15; receipt of Warsaw refugees, 21; and René Zimmer, 87, 191; Robert Dexter’s report on, xxi; Sharps’ attitude toward, 8, 16; support for in Argentina, 254n36; Varian Fry’s protection of opposers of, 114; on withdrawal of U.S. consular staff, 107. See also Germany Nestlé Company, 32 Newark nj, 11 New England Journal of Medicine, 129 New England Unitarians, xvii, 26 New Leader, 132, 172 New Republic, 132, 150, 172, 188 newspapers, clandestine, 157 New York City: arrival of children in, 81; as base of Emergency Rescue Committee, xxix, 36, 55–58, 79, 80, 132–33, 159, 160, 228; Charles Joy in, 161; clothing collection in, 200; Dexters’ meeting with oss in, 137–38; Elisabeth Dexter’s meetings with government officials in, 168–69; Feuchtwangers in, 52,

74; Hans Subak in, 25; hicem in, 67; Louis Dolivet in, 103; Martha Sharp’s departure for, 24; Meyers’s search for help in, 102; number of refugees taken to, 178; Robert Dexter’s fund-raising for medical program in, 124; ship passage to, 91–92; Varian Fry in, 171–72; Varian Fry’s dog to, 115 Nice, 183 Nicholas Winton: The Power of Good (film), 245n52 Niles, Marion, 8, 81, 84, 108, 136 Nimes Committee: child emigration projects, 150, 181–82; on deportations, 143; Hiram Bingham’s support of, 93; on internment camp relief, 86, 88, 252n8, 253n13; Jewish organizations in, 67–68; and kindergarten program, 119; operation by French citizens, 152, 154, 155; organization of, 66–67; shunning of Jo Tempi, 203; shunning of Varian Fry, 89, 131, 253n13. See also relief service; rescue missions nongovernmental organizations (ngos), 234 Normandy, 196–97 North Africa: Charles Joy’s helping of refugees in, 129–30; Czech soldiers to, 248n49; Elisabeth Dexter’s knowledge of, 151, 168; funds for work in, 165; hardships of Jews in, 215; information on German morale in, 157; number of refugees escaped to (1943), 261n8; rescue efforts in, 161–63, 165, 193; ship passage to, 92, 166; U.S. and Allied troops in, 150, 151, 159, 182. See also Africa Nuremberg Laws, xx ss Nyassa, 128–29, 178

Oberlin College, xvii Office of Strategic Services (oss): archival records of, xii; benefits of Unitarians’ association with, 164, 184; Charles Joy’s appeals to for North African assignment, 162–63; Danny Bénédite with, 147–50, 160; Dexters’ meetings with in New York City, 137, 138, 168–70; Dexters’ mission with, 139–41, 171, 222; dropping of Dexters, 208–9, 221; “Eva” reporting to, 262n18; Howard Brooks’s work with, 270n91; Labor Section activities, 169, 208; on Noel Field, 181, 197; propaganda campaign in France, 194; “psychological warfare” rubric, 157; reaction to deportations, 183; refusal to hire Varian Fry, 173; Seth Gano’s involvement with, 175–76; Stalin on Noel Field’s work with, 220; support of calpo, 204–6; support of resistance and espionage network, xxix; Unitarians with, xxviii, 177; winding down of, 208–9. See also espionage; French resistance groups Office of War Information, 168, 194 The Oppermanns (Feuchtwanger), 48 Oram, Harold, 91 “Oriental University,” 244n36 ose. See Jewish Children’s Aid Society (ose) oss. See Office of Strategic Services (oss) Ostrava, 20 Oxford, England, xvii Palacio da Bacalhoa, 32 Palestine, xxiv, 15, 177–79, 207, 210, 213, 215 Pan American World Airways, 30, 55 Paper Walls (Wyman), 222 index | 299

Paris: British soldiers in hospital in, 45; Czech refugees to, 14; Danny Bénédite’s contacts in, 147; Elisabeth Dexter’s meeting with Gestapo in, 106; fall to Nazis, 29–31; Lowries in, 33–34; Margit Subak in, 71; Martha Sharp on staff in, 213–14; Mary Jayne Gold in, 69; Meyerhofs’ escape from, 47; oss office in, 205, 206, 209, 224–25; refugee “helping” group in, 16; relief service in, 198–201, 203; Sharps in, 10, 28, 29; Varian Fry in hospital in, 227; Werfels in, 42. See also France Parker, Dorothy, 36 passports, 28, 43, 69, 74, 112–13. See also affidavits; visas Pau, 34, 35, 112 Pehle, John: on bottleneck in Portugal, 189; on Charles Joy’s desire for position, 195; on Josiah Dubois’s report, 185; on refugees in Switzerland, 206; on War Refugee Board acting executive director, 186; on War Refugee Board information program, 194; at War Refugee Board meetings, 187, 266n2, 267n5; on War Refugee Board representative in Spain, 192–93; on War Refugee Board’s association with communism, 196 Pembroke College, 9, 99 Pennington, Harriet Dexter, xii–xiii, xvii–xix, xviii, 98–100, 166–68, 167, 217, 218 Peron regime, 254n36 Perpignon, 38 Peru, 50 Petain, Marshal, 55, 143–44, 150 Petrópolis, Brazil, 65 300 | index

Philadelphia, xxii, 48, 76 Philby, Kim, 171 Picart, Pierre, 180 Pinochet, Augusto, 234–35 piracy, 235, 274n6 Pittet, Genevieve, 146, 182 Place de Valois, 200 Place Varian Fry, 230 Plzen, 13 Poetting Palace, 13. See also Unitaria Poland, 20–25, 141, 149 Polish consul (Marseille), 69 Polish Secret Police, 224 political prisoners, 174 political refugees, 19–21, 39, 59, 137–38, 204, 229, 234 Port Bou, 45, 46, 51, 73, 75, 76, 78 Portugal: acceptance of Czech refugees, 43; American rescue workers in, xxviii; on children’s dossiers, 62; economic normalcy in (1940), 32; Fields’ aid to refugees in, 128; funds for work in, 165; Howard Brooks’s work in, 270n91; information on German morale in, 157; limits on refugees, 56, 249n4; number of War Refugee Board rescues from, 207; oss staff in, 140–41; safety of, 40–41; Unitarian Service Committee aid to refugees in, xxiv, xxix; visas to, 31; Walter Meyerhof ’s lack of visa for, 78; War Refugee Board in, 188, 189. See also Lisbon Portuguese boat lines, 91, 92, 128–29, 178 Portuguese Hotel, 211 Portuguese International Police, 55, 106, 212 Portuguese railway lines, 32–33 Portuguese Red Cross, 193, 232. See also Red Cross organizations

Power (Feuchtwanger), 48, 105 Power, Samantha, 235, 236 Prague: Dexters’ trip to (1937), xvii; documentary on children’s transports from, 245n52; housing of refugees in, 1; Lowries in, 33; Martha Sharp’s accomplishments in, xxvii; postwar relief in, 215; Sharps’ report on conditions in, 25; Sharps’ return to (1945), 213– 15; Sharps’ trip to (1939), 1–8, 10–24, 38; Subak refugees from, xv, 71. See also Czechoslovakia Pratt, George, 208 Prestataires Volontaires, 46–47 Price Waterhouse, 30 Prisoners of Hope (Brooks), 104–5, 157–58 A Problem from Hell (Power), 235 “Project Number One,” 44 Protestant Huguenots, 62 Protestants, 88, 147, 170–71. See also Church Peace Union; cimade (French Protestant organization) Providence ri, 9, 98, 100 Pyrenees, xii, 34, 43, 45, 71, 112, 115 Quaker groups: connection to anti-fascist organization, 231; in Czechoslovakia, 13, 18; departure from occupied France, 154; food relief project, 125; Jo Tempi’s falling out with, 203; knowledge of Nazi brutality, 134; presence in Europe, xi, xiii, xxix; on refugee requirements, xxi–xxii; relief work in internment camps, 86; work with refugees in France, 143. See also American Friends Service Committee rms Queen Mary, 24 Quito, 166

Radcliffe College, 10, 99 Ramos, Aurora, 105 Random House, 172 Rassemblement Universal de la Paix, 196, 202–3 Rathbone, Eleanor, 6, 17 Reale, Egidio, 265n88 Recebedou camp, 40, 61 Red Cross organizations, 67, 110. See also American Red Cross; Czech Red Cross; French Red Cross; International Red Cross; Portuguese Red Cross Red Pawn (Lewis), 222 Refugee Relief Trustees, 263n35 refugees: average number through Lisbon (1941), 83; awareness of in United States, xxix, 95–96; deportations from France, 143–47; destinations of Czech, 15; dossiers of, 6, 41; Fields’ aid to in Portugal, 128; Fields’ interviewing of, 88; funds for in Britain, 20; German restrictions on, 19; group emigration of, 103; Hiram Bingham’s aid to, 93; medical aid for, 109–11, 179, 180; number worldwide, 233–34; paperwork for, 80–81; recruitment for oss, 170–71; Sharps’ focus on emigration of, 5–6, 13–16, 35; as source of information on German morale, 157, 169; Unitarian Service Committee focus on, 84; Unitarians’ perspectives on helping, 96–97, 134, 139; United States quota, xx–xxi, xxiii, 6–7, 17, 41, 59, 189; U.S. diplomatic protection of, 80; Varian Fry’s criticism of policy on, 131; Varian Fry’s location of safe houses for, 114; Virginia Wastcoat on quotas for, 17. See also children; index | 301

refugees (cont.) passports; rescue missions; visas; War Refugee Board Reiser, Marianne, 41–42 relatives clause, xiv, 101, 102, 112, 143 relief service: Charles Joy on U.S. policies regarding, 139; Charles Joy’s commitment to, 175, 225–26; collaborations on, 53; focus on in southern France, 128, 133; food distribution by, 125; in France after Allies’ landing, 197; by French citizens, 152, 156; gratitude for in Lisbon, 193; Hiram Bingham’s contribution to, 93; Howard Brooks’s report on, 103, 105; in internment camps, 66–67, 86, 88, 97, 105, 252n8; and kindergarten program, 119; by Noel Field in Switzerland, 204; in Paris, 198–200; postwar, 215–16; Unitarian Service Committee involvement in, 35–36, 84–85; Varian Fry on, 38–39. See also medical aid; Nimes Committee rescue missions: Charles Joy on priority of, 59, 175, 225–26; collaborations on, 53; focus on in Lisbon, 128; by French citizens, 152, 156; Noel Field’s emphasis on, 109, 148–49; from North Africa, 162; president’s honor of Unitarians’, 216; with relief program, 38–39; restrictions on in Lisbon, 163–64; roles of victim and rescuer in, 238; underground operation of, 182; by Varian Fry’s staff, 161. See also Nimes Committee; refugees; War Refugee Board residence force, 41, 55, 128, 140, 166 resistance, xxix, 140, 169. See also French resistance groups 302 | index

rest/vacation home, 180, 203 Riegner, Gerhard, 183 Riegner cable, 141 Riga, Latvia, xiii, 25 Rivesaltes camp, 88, 119–21, 120, 127, 142, 145 Rockefeller Center, 137, 163, 168 Rockefeller Foundation, 77, 139 Romania, 196 Romanian Jews, 184 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 36–37, 41, 50, 80, 89, 113, 150, 184, 190 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, xxviii, 37, 86, 182, 184–87, 195 Rosenberg, Justus, 273n29 Rosenblatt, William, 266n2 Rousses, 182 Rowntree, Tessa, 18 “The Royal Game” (Schachnovelle) (Zweig), 65 Russian children, 34 Russian visa quota, 189 Rwanda, 230, 233, 234 Sabat-Muntane, Jose, 116 Sacher, Christian and Bernard, 61 Safranek, Milos, 266n2 Saint Bernadette grotto, 42 Saint-Claude, 182 Saint Exupéry, Antoine de, 91 Saint Exupéry, Consuela de, 114 “Saint Judas” (Wright), 238 Salvation Army canteens, 15–16, 32 Samuel Eliot Village, 178 Sanary, 42, 48, 51 San Diego, 136 Save the Children Federation, 225 Scerbac, Aba, 141 Schachnovelle (“The Royal Game”) (Zweig), 65 Scharf, Poldi, 21 Schindler, Oskar, xi, 229

Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 205, 206, 223, 273n1 Schmierer, Paul, 147, 149, 156, 159–61 Schmolka, Marie, 5 Schoenberger, Otto, 246n74 Schulte, Eduard, 141, 183 Schwartz, Joseph, 37–38, 124, 195, 243n30, 257n8 Schweitzer, Albert, xxvii, 97, 225 scientists, 65. See also intellectuals and artists Scoville, Orlena, 32 Secours Suisse, 125 Sender, Toni, 168–69, 262n18 Serge, Victor, 70, 91 ss Serpo Pinto, 210 Sette, 44 Sharp, Hastings, 8, 29, 210, 211 Sharp, Martha, 2; in Agde, xv; assignment to Paris, 28–29; background of, xxvii, 9–10, 99; child emigration projects, 17–18, 40, 52–53, 60–65, 68, 119–20, 177–79; complaints about, 64; correspondence with husband, 22, 52, 63; and Czech refugees, 42–44, 157, 248n49; departure from Wilson Station, 24; desire to return to Europe, 134–37; and Dick Ball’s disappearance, 46; on directorship in France, 84; Elisabeth Dexter’s postwar communication with, 221–22; exclusion from espionage work, 177; and Feuchtwangers, 50, 52, 54, 170; on Hiram Bingham, 93–94; leadership of, 22, 233; in Lisbon, 30–32, 41, 55, 210–12; and Marion Niles, 81; in Marseille, 33–36, 39; Meyerhofs’ letter to, 76; on mission of Unitarian Service Committee, 97; postwar

life, 230–32; problems with U.S. consulates, 126; relationship with Dexters, 98–99, 254n48; representation of Unitarians, xxiv, 243n30; resignation, 215; return to Prague (1945), 213–15; return to United States (1939), 25; on ship passage problems, 92; speaking engagements of, 26, 94–95, 98, 134–35, 177–78, 210, 214, 237; trip to Prague (1939), 1–8, 10–24, 38; with War Refugee Board, 188 Sharp, Martha Content (daughter), 8, 29, 63, 81, 210, 211 Sharp, Rev. Waitstill Hastings, 2; in Agde, xv; assignment to Paris, 28–29; availability to return to Europe, 135–36; background of, xxvii, 9–10; business cards of, 38, 58; and Czech refugees, 43; and Czech soldiers, 157; on Donald Lowries dealings with Vichy officials, 66–67; and Feuchtwangers, 50–52, 54, 57, 170; on leaving ministry, 212–13; in Lisbon, 30–32, 36–38, 40–43, 55; and Marion Niles, 81; to Marseille, 33–36; and Meyerhofs, 47, 76; on mission of Unitarian Service Committee, 97; Otto Schoenberger’s repayment to, 246n74; postwar life, 230–32; representation of Unitarians, xxiv, 53, 243n30; return to Prague (1945), 213–15; return to United States (1939), 25; speaking engagements of, 94; trip to Prague (1939), 1–8, 10–24, 38; with United Nations, 210, 212–13; in Varian Fry’s book, 172 Shelburne, Nova Scotia, 95 Shepardson, Whitney (“Jackpot”), 171 index | 303

ship passage: from Banyuls, 90; Lotta Hitschmanova’s attempt with Czech soldiers, 112; Margit Subak’s hope for from Agde, 72; to Martinique, 91, 93; wait for in Lisbon, 40, 52, 91–92, 128–29, 253n24. See also fishing boats ss Siboney, 91–92 Silesian border, 24 Sinclair, Upton, 36 Singer Company, 141, 175 Skidmore College, xxv, 96, 99, 134 Slansky, Rudolf, 272n9 slavery, 235, 274n6 Slovakia, xv, 1 Snowsko-Borowski, 203 Social Adjustment (Dexter), xxiii social democrats, 3, 11, 19, 21, 36, 157, 205 socialist politics, 58, 74, 153, 160 Sommerfeld, Herta. See Tempi, Herta “Jo” The Song of Bernadette, 42 South America, 118, 143, 165 South Duxbury ma, 25 southern France: concentration on relief work in, 133; concerns about in Geneva (1943), 182; deportations from, xxix, 141; escapes from (1942), 146; German occupation of, 62; German political refugees in, 204; knowledge of espionage work in, 158; Martha Sharp’s accomplishments in, xxvii; Nimes Committee in, 68; Noel Field’s relief work in after Allies’ landing, 197–98; rescues in by Varian Fry’s staff, 161; Varian Fry sent to, 36. See also France; Marseille southwest Europe (map of), 29 Soviet Union, 107, 172, 180, 223, 232 304 | index

Spain: acceptance of Czech refugees, 43; American ambassador’s appeal for Walter Meyerhof in, 77; arrest of refugees without French exit visas, 93; on children’s dossiers, 62; Donald Lowrie on escape routes through, 228; funds for work in, 165; German political refugees’ escape to, 204; Heinrich Müller in, 90; information on German morale in, 157; Martha Sharp’s work for, 210–12; milk shipment in, 38; Noel Field in, 84; number of refugees crossing into (1943), 261n8; number of War Refugee Board rescues from, 207; oss in, 140–41, 170–71; refugees at customhouse in, 45, 47, 54–55, 72–75; refugees without exit visas in, 71; René Zimmer’s help with border crossings in, 156; safe houses in, 116; tightening of border, 52, 115–16; Varian Fry on “underground railway” in, 227; Varian Fry’s crossing into, 114; visas to, 31; War Refugee Board’s attempt to place representative in, 192–93 Spanish boats, 92 Spanish Civil War, 51, 74–75 Spanish Communists, 171 Spanish railway lines, 32–33 Spanish refugees, 51, 88, 143, 160, 174, 193, 196 Spanish Republican Army, 84 Spanish Republicans, 134, 165, 170–71, 176, 180, 196, 211–12, 231, 270n91 Stalin, Josef, 196, 220, 223, 272n9 Standing By, 107, 158 Standish, Myles, 48 starvation, 125, 129, 173

statelessness, 2, 6, 43, 50, 189 Staten Island, 103 Statut des Juif, 66, 90 Stebbins, Edna and Livingston, 8, 9, 10, 29 Stein, Margot, 109, 124 Steinhardt, Laurence, 266n2 St. Nicholas camp, 48 Storer College, xxv, 99 Strasbourg, 87 Strasser, Josef and Alexander, 40, 61 Strasser, Paul, 40 Strong, Tracy, 243n30 Subak, Ernest, xiii–xiv, xx, 134 Subak, Erwin, xv Subak, Frank, xv, 71, 72, 73 Subak, Gerda, xv, 71, 72, 73 Subak, Hans (Karl), 167; affidavit for, xi–xiii; arrival in New York City, 25; Dexters’ visit to in Czechoslovakia, xx; Elisabeth Dexter’s correspondence with, 149; Quakers’ knowledge of, xxii; relationship with Harriet Dexter, xvii–xix; visit to Dexters, 217–18 Subak, Ilse, 167 Subak, John, xv, 71, 72, 73 Subak, Margit, 71–74, 91 Subak, Marianne, xiii–xiv, xx, 134 Subak, Susan Elisabeth, 233 submarines, 129, 228 Sudan, 233, 235, 236. See also Africa Sudetenland, xxi, xxii, 1–2, 11, 19, 71 Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, 198 Surrender on Demand (Fry), 38, 172, 187–88, 227–29 “surrender on demand” rules, 30–31, 90 Sweden, 18, 21 Switzerland: Bertholets’ information network in, 160; collection of

teeth in, 110; dietary supplements from, 125; Donald Lowrie’s cables from, 141; emigrations to from Marseille, 128; escapes to arranged by Varian Fry’s staff, 161; Fields’ accomplishments in, xxv, 203; food relief project in, 88; French resistance groups in, 138; funding of efforts in, 165, 181, 184–85; German communists in, 157; German political refugees’ escape to, 204; hiding of refugees in, 147; information on German morale in, 157; international buses in, 72–73; Jewish refugees’ escape through, 62, 181–82; medical aid in camps in, 179, 180; Noel Field’s meeting of Jo Tempi in, 202; number of refugees crossing into (1943), 261n8; number of War Refugee Board successes in, 207; oss in, 137, 140–41, 197; Richard Baer’s escape to, 143, 155; Robert Dexter’s meetings with informants in, 148–49; transport of Jewish children to, 145; Unitarian Service Committee aid to refugees in, xxix; Waitstill Sharp in, 22, 23; War Refugee Board’s desire for underground channels in, 206; World Jewish Congress in, 183. See also Geneva Szold, Henrietta, 178–79, 213 Tallon, Ninon, 55, 74 Tempi, Herta “Jo,” 198–203, 199, 205, 209, 214, 224–25, 233 Theis, Eduard, 62 Theis, Mildred, 62 Thomas, Norman, 36 Thomas Cook office, 51 Thompson, Dorothy, 113 index | 305

Toulon, 150 Toulouse, 252n8 Toulouse medical clinic, 121–22, 122, 123, 154 trans-Saharan railway, 130 Travers, Howard, 189, 209–10 Trieste, refugees to, 15 Trocme, Magda, 62 Truman, Harry, 215–16, 231 Tuck, “Pinkney,” 150 Uganda, 235 ultra, 249n5 Union of French Jews (ugif), 155–56 Unitaria, 11–14, 22, 24, 82, 244n36. See also Czech Unitarian Church Unitarian Service Committee: and Bernhards, 76; budget, 204, 269n60; clients on Nyassa, 128; on Clipper, 30; collaboration with ose, 86, 257n8; collaboration with Varian Fry’s organization, 38, 79–80, 259n48; communication problems of, 81; creation of, 26–28, 95; Dexters’ resignations from, 208; emigration successes in Lisbon, 83, 117; fbi interest in, 224; in France after surrender, xxviii; funding sources, 163–65, 184, 191, 204; Gerda Subak’s contact with in Lisbon, 73; Howard Brooks’s influence on, 103; and Jay Allen, 79; kindergarten program headed by, 88; leadership of, xxiv–xxix; Lotta Hitschmanova with, 112; Martha Sharp’s resignation from, 215; and milk project, 35–36, 58; mission of, 60, 64–65, 96–97; Nazi propaganda on, 117–18; on Nimes Committee, 67, 68; on Noel Field in France after Allies’ landing, 197; number in espionage activity, 306 | index

177; office in Hotel Bompard, 109; office in Paris, 198–200; personnel in Prague, 8; postwar activities of, 215–16, 223, 229–30; presence in Europe, xxix; presence in North Africa, 162; raid of Marseille office, 144–45; records on Dexters’ work with, xii; refugee preference of, 59; rehabilitation homes of, 214–15; and reopening of medical clinic in Marseille, 198; representation of other organizations in Lisbon, 117, 132–33; safety of Lisbon office staff, 106–7; Sharps’ role in setting direction of, 53; on ship passage problems, 92; subcommittee on Dexter-Joy relationship, 207–8; support staff of, 80–81; symbol of, 82; ties to communists, 171, 231, 232; treatment by U.S. government, 225; use of funds, 81–82, 84; Varian Fry’s staff on, 70; Varian Fry’s visit to, 37. See also American Unitarian Association Unitarian Service Squads, 135 Unitarian Universalism symbol, 82, 226 Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, 229–30, 237 United Nations, 208, 230, 234, 236 United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (unrra), 210, 212–13 United States: appeals to from Swiss rescuers, 147; armed forces to North Africa, 150, 151; on asylum applications, 234, 274n4; attempt to slow immigration in, 101; awareness of deportations, 141; awareness of extermination of Jews, 150–51, 184–87; cables to and from, 55, 81; closure of German consulates in, 107; descendents of intellectual

immigrants in, 64–65; emigration of children to, 40, 52–53, 60–65, 68, 81, 93, 119–20, 144, 181–84; entry in war, 96–97; food-sharing program with Czechoslovakia, 214; free ports and havens in territories of, 188, 193; fund-raising problems in, 130; intelligence agreement with Great Britain, 139; isolationism in, xxiv; on Jewish refugees, 194; Martinique route to, 91; Meyerhofs’ emigration to, 76–79; Poldi Scharf ’s emigration to, 21; propaganda program, 168, 205; refugee quota, xx–xxi, xxiii, 6–7, 17, 41, 59, 189; Unitaria members to, 13–14; on “universal jurisdiction,” 235, 236; worry about refugees’ employment in, 95 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 234, 274n5 University of Chicago, xiii University of Geneva, 153, 204 University of Newark, 36 University of Pennsylvania, 48, 77 U.S. Army, 139, 173 U.S. Congress, 120, 184, 185–86, 225, 230–32. See also House Committee on Un-American Activities U.S. consulate (Lisbon): and resistance activities, 140; Unitarian Service Committee dealings with, 55; Varian Fry’s accusation of anti-Semitism in, 132; on visa expirations, 92; on visa for Margit Subak, 73–74; and War Refugee Board, 207. See also Lisbon; U.S. consulates U.S. consulate (Marseille): and Charles Joy, 112, 117, 256n91; on children’s emigration project, 62; on Czech passports, 69; denial of Lotta Hitschmanova’s visa, 112; and Feuchtwangers, 48, 50; Howard

Brooks’s meeting with, 104; interest in helping refugees, 47; and Noel Field, 126–28; refugees’ travel arrangements with, 109; and Varian Fry, 59, 113–14, 116, 149–50. See also Marseille; U.S. consulates U.S. consulate (Prague), 7 U.S. consulates: on children’s emigration project, 68; closure in Europe, 107; and emergency visas, 41; on health of refugees, 111; on internment camp relief, 252n8; Noel Field’s popularity with in France, 125–26; Robert Dexter’s success with, 100–103; Varian Fry’s difficulties with in France and Lisbon, 57, 59, 113–14, 116, 126, 132, 149–50, 228, 230; Waitstill Sharp’s intervention with for Czechs, 41. See also U.S. consulate (Lisbon); U.S. consulate (Marseille); U.S. consulate (Prague); U.S. State Department U.S. dollar exchange rate, 14–15. See also currency exchanges U.S. embassies, 192, 212 U.S. Foreign Service, 93, 189 U.S. government: attitude toward refugees, 57–60; awareness of extermination of Jews, 184–88, 222, 225; concerns about foreign spies, 107; funding of Unitarians’ work, 204; refugees under protection of, 16–17; reputation of Unitarian Service Committee in, 215–16; and shunning of Varian Fry, 89; treatment of rescue and relief workers, xxvii, 225; urging of nationals to leave France, 34; withdrawal of Robert Dexter’s security clearance, 220. See also U.S. State Department index | 307

U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 230 U.S. Secret Service, 221 U.S. State Department: apology to Varian Fry, 230; attitude toward War Refugee Board, 189, 195; Charles Joy’s appeals to for North African assignment, 163; on Charles Joy’s “espionage,” 112–13; on children’s emigration project, 150; on Danny Bénédite’s arrest, 192; disapproval of Varian Fry, 57, 58, 130, 131; Eleanor Roosevelt’s intervention with, 80; on extermination of Jews, 184–85, 187; Howard Brooks’s meeting at, 105; Nazi propaganda on, 118; and Noel Field, 84, 224; policy on visas and civilian shipping, xxvii, 39, 41–42, 100–101, 131, 132, 139, 141–43, 163–64, 222, 229; praise of Hiram Bingham to, 93–94; record on Erwin Subak, xv; relatives clause, xiv, 101, 102, 143; renewal of Sharps’ passports, 30; on René Zimmer’s request for “serum,” 264n65; rivalry with oss, 141; on ship passage problems, 92; and Spanish Republicans, 212; Varian Fry letters to regarding staffs’ deaths, 209–10; on Varian Fry’s passport, 36. See also U.S. consulate (Lisbon); U.S. consulate (Marseille); U.S. consulate (Prague); U.S. consulates; U.S. government; visas (U.S.) U.S. Treasury Department, 164, 184–85, 187 U.S. War Department, 194 Vagasse, 159–60, 192 Vakar, Anna, 61, 64 Vakar, Catherine, 61 308 | index

Vancouver, 136 Varian Fry Committee. See Centre Americain de Secours, Emergency Rescue Committee ve day (Victory in Europe), 211 Vega, Jose Rodriguez, 190–91 Vence, Czech farming community in, 157 Venezuela, 211 Verzeano, Marcel, 75, 115, 173, 273n29 Vichy France: anti-Semitic policies of, 30–31, 44, 59–60, 62, 66, 68; Charles Joy’s defiance of, 117; child rescue project in, 40, 53, 60–61; closure of Centre Americain de Secours, 133; currency exchange in, 38, 141, 175; Donald Lowrie’s dealings with officials in, 66–67; on French exit visas, 44–45; impounding of boats, 93; on medical program, 125–26; oss interest in loyalists of, 150; prevention of Americans from leaving, 151; problems with Varian Fry’s organization, 57; puppet government of France in, 33; raids and deportations in, 145; removal of Vincent Azema as mayor, 78; Spanish Republicans in, 134; on U.S. consulate closings, 107; Varian Fry on U.S. accommodation of, 132, 228, 229; Varian Fry’s clients from, xxviii; on Varian Fry’s passport denial, 113; on Walter Meyerhof ’s exit visa, 77. See also France Vienna, xiii, xiv, xx, 61, 134, 215. See also Austria Viking Press, 48 Villa Air-Bel, 70–71, 91, 159, 172, 230 visas: alternatives to obtaining in Poland, 20; applications for refugees in North Africa, 162;

denial based on illness, 110–11; denial of Meyerhofs’, 47; difficulty obtaining after German occupation of France, 31; from Ecuador, 165–66; German denial to British refugee officials, 23; negotiation of visitor, 39; transit for children’s project, 62, 63; transit in Spain, 52, 76–78, 116; visitor for Chagalls, 89–90; wait for in Lisbon, 40, 71. See also passports; refugees visas (Cuban), 115, 143 visas (Czech), 213 visas (French exit), 44–46, 74, 75, 77, 91, 93 visas (Mexican), 143. See also Mexico visas (Portuguese transit), 56, 249n4 visas (U.S.): alternatives to, 65; book on policy on, 222; Charles Joy on policies on, 139, 141–43; for children, 181–84; for Czech refugees in Lisbon, 41–44; difficulties obtaining (1941), 100–102, 107; hope for in Marseille, 33; Ninon Tallon’s wait for, 55; and ship passage problems, 92; for stateless refugees, 189; of Subaks, xiii–xv, xix, 73; temporary for Spanish Republicans, 212; Unitarian Service Committee processing of, 81; Unitarians on U.S. policy on, xxvii; Varian Fry’s criticism of policy on, 131, 195, 209–10; Varian Fry’s requests for, 59, 75–76; War Refugee Board on procurement, 188; withholding from Varian Fry’s organization, 130. See also relatives clause; United States, refugee quota; U.S. State Department Vltava, bridge over, 3 Vochoc, Vladimir, 43, 44, 69

Voelkischer Beobachter, 117–18 von Hildebrand, Franz, 249n1 Wallenberg, Raoul, xi, 229 War Crimes Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia, 234 War Refugee Board: Allen Dulles’s lack of sympathy for, 206; barred from Spain, 192–93; Dexters’ resignations from, 208; establishment of, 185–86; funding of Unitarians’ work, 204; information program of, 194; meetings of, 187–88; number of rescues by, 206–7; report on genocide, 210; representation abroad, 188–91; Robert Dexter’s appointment to, xxviii; and Spanish Republicans, 212; Varian Fry’s letters in files of, 209; Varian Fry’s work with, xxix, 187–90, 194, 195, 266n2, 267n5. See also Committee on Special Refugee Problems, Humanitarian, NonSectarian, International; refugees; rescue missions Warsaw, 21, 215 Washington dc, 101, 102 ss Washington, 34 Wasserman, Eva, 262n18 Wastcoat, Virginia, 17 Weill, Joseph, 86, 88, 119, 145, 179–81, 201, 203, 204 Wellesley Hills ma, 1, 8, 10, 81, 210 Welles, Orson, 196 Welles, Sumner, 92, 100, 150 Wellington, Beatrice, 18 Werfel, Alma Mahler, 41–42, 46, 48, 50, 54–55, 57, 74, 83 Werfel, Franz, 2, 41–42, 46, 48, 50, 54–55, 57, 74, 83 Wheaton College, 64 index | 309

Whitaker, John, 100 Wilder Foote, Henry, xxiii–xxiv Williams, Roger, xxv, xxvii Winton, Nicholas, 17–18 Wise, Rabbi Stephen, 183 Witte, Edward, xxiv women, 39, 44, 70, 75, 233, 237 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 99 Wood, Richard, xxii World Alliance for Friendship through the Churches, 117 World Council of Churches, 96 World Jewish Congress, 183–85 World War I, xxi–xxii, 39 World ymca: child rescue projects of, 156, 182; Donald Lowrie with, xxix, 33, 34, 43, 66; in France after surrender, xxviii; and milk project, 35; office in Geneva, 153; office in Marseille, 39, 60; overseas staff, 243n30; relief work in internment camps, 86; in Rivesaltes, 142; transcript of meeting on deportations to, 143; transfer of money to René Zimmer, 158; Varian Fry on, 229 Wright, James, 238 writers, 36, 39, 116. See also intellectuals and artists Wyman, David, 222

310 | index

Yad Vashem Righteous Among the Nations award, xii, 230 Yale University, 37 Yarnall, Robert, xxii ymca. See World ymca Youth Aliyah, 177, 179 Zerner, Theo, xiv Zimmer, Fanny, 105, 111, 158, 191 Zimmer, René, 87; background of, 87; continuation of medical program in occupied France, 153–55; on craft projects of refugees, 161; and first-aid for resistance fighters, 198; funds to, 164, 175; in hiding, 191; Howard Brooks’s portrayal of, 105; independence of, 195; operations of, 109–12; participation in oss propaganda campaign, 194; and reopening of Marseille clinic, 198; report on medical relief program of, 103; request for “serum,” 264n65; on starvation, 125; underground work of, 148, 156–59, 173–74, 181, 209; War Refugee Board funds to, 191, 267n15 Zurich, 86 Zweig, Elisabeth, 65–66 Zweig, Friderike, 65 Zweig, Stefan, 65–66