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As I return in my mind to Varian Fry and to the Marseilles days from July to December 1940 when I worked for him, I am struck by how sharply he and those faraway events stand out in my memory. One reason is, of course, the story itself, so vividly told here. Written down in its essentials as soon as Fry returned from France to the United States in 1941, it retains the flavor of immediate reporting. To the readers of this book it will be obvious that there was nothing routine about being associated with Fry and his Centre Américain de Secours. The work was extraordinarily absorbing and often dangerous — and being in danger is always exciting as well as highly memorable.

Moreover, when the story is viewed in its historical context, it looks wholly improbable. It starts in June 1940, when the German Army overran France and thus came to rule most of the European continent, from Poland to the Pyrénées. The newly installed French government under Marshal Pétain had signed an abject armistice with Hitler. Article 19 of that document committed the French government to deliver to the Germans any non-French citizen living on French soil who the Germans happened to request. Even before the Holocaust, the Nazis, once in power, were intent on systematically capturing and murdering their most prominent and hated opponents, Jews and non-Jews. Now they had trapped large numbers of these opponents, who had earlier escaped from Germany, in France. Was it conceivable that a lone American citizen, newly arrived from the United States, with just a list of names in his pocket, would be able to keep Article 19 from being carried out with the utmost vigor and dispatch? The playing field was so uneven as to make the prospect of success seem laughable. Yet, we now know that Fry and his Committee actually saved the lives of some two to three thousand people. So, The Fry story almost brings to mind the successful fight of David against Goliath.

Albert O. Hirschman