A character fit for a novel
Thanks to Steven Spielberg’s 1993 Oscar-winning film “Schindler’s List,” many know the story of Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who saved hundreds of Polish Jews during World War II by employing them in his factories. Thanks to the work of Radcliffe Fellow Julie Orringer, many readers will soon be familiar with a lesser-known, somewhat unlikely wartime hero. Varian Fry was an American journalist and Harvard graduate who saved more than 2,000 artists and anti-Nazi activists by way of a risky rescue network in occupied France. For 13 months from 1940 to 1941, Fry, based in Marseille, forged papers and planned rescue routes for a list of people that reads like a Who’s Who of Europe’s cultural and political elite. It includes Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, and Max Ernst. “It surprised me all the more reading that list that I had never heard of Fry,” said Orringer on a recent rainy morning in her...