Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3 by Blanche Wiesen Cook

Author:Blanche Wiesen Cook
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-10-14T15:02:43+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

“Isolationism Is Impossible”: The Politics of Rescue

Varian Fry arrived in Marseilles on 15 August 1940, carrying a short list of two hundred notable artists, writers, musicians, “immediately endangered political refugees” and prominent antifascist activists whom he was determined to rescue. Within days he expanded his initial goal: he would now work to save everyone stranded in the crowded seaport city of southern France, including the hundreds of thousands of foreign-born, now stateless Jews. From his suite in the Hotel Splendide, with the support of the ERC in New York, his indefatigable efforts ultimately produced significant results.

But Fry’s heroic determination to save lives contradicted State Department policies as well as FDR’s diplomatic priorities. Ever since ER’s “interference” regarding the passengers on the SS Quanza, Breckinridge Long had been firmly in charge of refugee issues and consular decisions. Although FDR had agreed to grant visitors’ visas to the most endangered and noteworthy refugees who were trapped in unoccupied France, Long’s policy of “delay and delay” ruled the moment. On 30 August, Karl Frank wrote to ER that her friendly interest had resulted in “many hundreds” of visitors’ visas, but “the problem of exit permits from France” endured, so that, of the 576 people whose names the President’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees had presented to the State Department for visas, the vast majority remained trapped. Actually fewer than fifty had the papers they needed. On 6 September, outraged by the many bureaucratic hurdles, ER wrote Sumner Welles, “Is there no way of getting our Consul in Marseilles to help . . . a few more of these poor people out?”

After a month of earnest activity in Marseilles and Lisbon, ERC chairman Frank Kingdon told ER that the situation remained dreadful. The Lisbon consul “is holding up many people who have taken the first great step in escaping from France, and whose departure from Lisbon should be expedited.” Kingdon hoped she would find something to be done about “this unnecessary stoppage,” which merely added “to the overcrowding of Lisbon and the suffering of the refugees.”

Moved by the agony of so many people stranded in peril, ER acted upon every request made of her. She was particularly emphatic regarding writers like Lion Feuchtwanger, whose works she had read and admired.

She had enjoyed Feuchtwanger’s company during his November 1932–January 1933 U.S. lecture tour. On 19 March 1933, only a week after FDR’s inauguration, ER’s friend Helen Rogers Reid had published Feuchtwanger’s article “Hitler’s War on Culture” in the Sunday New York Herald Tribune Magazine—the first alert to U.S. audiences of the bitter and dangerous reality that had so quickly and completely distorted the Germany of Lessing and Goethe into a land of brutality and fear, violence and hatred. After leaving Washington, the author had joined his wife, famed German gymnast and athlete Marta Loffler Feuchtwanger, in Austria, where she had been on a skiing holiday. Within months Hitler revoked the citizenship of those “disloyal to the Reich,” and Feuchtwanger, now stateless, had joined the German exile community in the south of France.

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