When Marseille welcomed refugees fleeing Nazism | EUROtoday

On Mar 23, 2025

Get real time updates directly on you device, subscribe now.

L’German Uwe Wittstock has a weak spot for nice artists and writers. Especially if, confronted with the filthy beast of Nazism, they needed to escape the stitches of his internet. Two years in the past, he orchestrated their varied methods in Berlin after Hitler’s takeover in 1933. This time, he reopens the file seven years later in Marseille*, after the debacle of France-where he finds a few of his characters from the earlier quantity. The goal is not to go away Germany, however Europe, route the United States.

During the exodus, Bordeaux had swelled by one million individuals thrown on the roads. But in the summertime of 1940, in Marseille, a southern cease from France, it was additionally a prodigious chaos. A caravanserai of refugees from the Benelux and the North, of English troopers who had missed the reset to Dunkirk, Russians fleeing Stalin, of Italians allergic to Mussolini, colonial troops, legionaries and demobilized troopers.

Exiles, lastly, socialists, communists, Jews, out of the French internment camps. They had solely an obsession: to spin with out asking their relaxation and, for that, to discover a visa, ideally American, and to win a transit for Spain and Portugal, as a result of it’s from Lisbon that we may tackle. It is estimated that in a number of months greater than 500,000 individuals settled in Marseille, in a metropolis the place the administration of Pétain was itself very stingy with visas leaving French territory.

Marseille, crossroads of all refugees

Varian Fry, American journalist, arrives by prepare in August, mandated by the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC), to convey out a listing of German intellectuals recognized as precedence. Money isn’t sufficient, you must go there, confront the hassles of the French administration and the unhappy actuality of those illustrious spirits swallowed on the situation of panicked migrants who already really feel the hostile breath of gents in Gabardine on their neck.
Read too The man who saved the geniuses of Europe

Fry got here for a 15 -day mission. He will keep nearly a 12 months previous, constituting, over the water, a small staff of lovers, hard-to-cook, risk-all. Among them, two girls: a rich American, Mary Jayne Gold, who will replenish the customarily empty packing containers of the ERC, and a pupil separated from her lover Yugoslav, Miriam Davenport. As properly as some resourceful younger Jews, equivalent to Albert Hirschman and Justus Rosenberg (who informed his epic in The artwork of resistancenot too long ago translated at Divergences), able to lose the whole lot to avoid wasting co -religionists.

The first passages to Spain

On September 11, 1940, Fry arrange its first main operation: passing the Spanish border to a small group of individuals, together with three of the most important German language authors, exhausted by their wanderings within the south of France or their detention in internment camps. It is Heinrich Mann and his spouse, the author Franz Werfel and his spouse, Alma Mahler, widow of the composer Lion Fechtwanger, the creator of Jew Süssin addition to Golo Mann, son of Thomas Mann.

At the final second, the Feuchtwanger, stateless, are exfiltrated from the group that begins Cahin-Caha on contraband paths. The papers are in good standing, the cash or the cigarettes to deprave the Spanish sentries should not missing. It is successful.

But, in Marseille, Fry collides with the American consul in workplace, Fullerton, trustworthy to the impartial coverage of his nation, who sees this compatriot with a really dangerous eye taking part in the great Samaritan by braving the legal guidelines of Nazi France and Germany. On the opposite hand, he receives the help of the assistant consuls, Bingham and Standish. Disguised as an previous girl, the primary went to go away Fechtwanger from the Saint-Nicolas camp, close to Nîmes.

Varian Fry, a chilly and reserved savior

In the Marseille metropolis, a metropolis of all visitors, there was additionally this trafficking in papers which aimed to avoid wasting lives. Hannah Arendt, arrival of Montauban together with her husband, Walter Benjamin, repatriated from Lourdes, Marc Chagall, hidden in Gordes, to whom Fry transmits an invite from the Museum of Modern Art and which he’ll launch after a roundup in Marseille in April 1941.

There can also be the surrealist André Breton, very frowned upon by Vichy and the Germans, who finds refuge along with his courtyard – Victor Brauner, Benjamin Péret – within the Villa Air Bel, luxurious asylum organized by Fry and funded by Gertrude Stein. When Anna Seghers, among the many main authors of Germany within the Thirties, has an interview with Fry, he can not, due to his frenzied communism, that directing him in direction of one other nation; It can be Mexico.

Another author, Hertha Pauli, described properly in The tear of time (translated in 2024 at Liana Levi), the impression that Fry had left him: a chilly, reserved man, targeting his papers and his inquiries to ask. Not actually the Savior’s robotic portrait. But Fry lives in a state of everlasting rigidity, pressured to maneuver his workplaces typically, from the Splendid lodge to rue Grignan then at Boulevard Garibaldi, pressured to maintain the spinning of the French police like his consul or his father or mother firm in New York. A state which he generally frees himself by going for a stroll with the younger Stéphane Hessel in a southern hinterland whose American fell in love. It fires any wooden.

Breton, Seghers, Lévi-Strauss on the final boat

On Fry lists are names equivalent to André Gide, Henri Matisse and André Malraux, refugees on the French Riviera. They refuse his assist. On December 13, 1940, on the event of the go to of Marshal Pétain in Marseille, Fry and a very good a part of his staff had been secure and locked up for a number of days on a ship. Four months later, in March 1941, the journalist accomplished his final mission: to put 40 refugees on the Captain-Paul-Lemerlea ship that should scath in direction of Martinique. Take place André Breton, Anna Seghers, Victor Serge, the anti-Stalinist author Alfred Kantorowicz, theorist of the 2 our bodies of the king, and a younger ethnologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss… Adrien Bosc wrote a very good e book on this crossing, Captain (Stock).

In the Sixties, Fry (which had been fired by the New York ERC in 1941 for private initiatives) tried, with the assistance of the artists he had helped, to represent a portfolio of unique lithographs whose sale can be donated to an affiliation for refugees. Only Jacques Lififfz replied.

To uncover

The kangaroo of the day

Answer

* “Marseille, 1940” by Uwe Wittstock. Translated from German by Olivier Mannoni. Ed. Grasset.

https://www.lepoint.fr/histoire/quand-marseille-accueillait-les-refugies-fuyant-le-nazisme-22-03-2025-2585405_1615.php