Fall 2007 Exhibit: The Rescuers
Artist’s Statement: Jodilyn Gingold
Varian Fry
If you save one life, you save the world. Varian Fry saved not just one life, but approximately 4000 lives, including Jews, trade unionists and British soldiers. He was eventually known as the “American Schindler.” Fry had personally witnessed Nazi savagery again Jews while he was a foreign correspondent for an American Journal, “The Living Age,” in 1935. By 1940 he knew more hand to be done and he returned to Europe then on a secret mission to rescue prominent artists and intellectuals who were trapped in Nazi-occupied Europe. He posted as a relief worker by day and as an underground railroader at night, procuring fake passports and visas, and even personally escorting people across the Pyrenees into Spain. He continued to work despite great personal danger and adversity until he was expelled from France in 1941. Amongst the people he helped to save were painters Marc Chagall and Max Ernst; sculptor Jacques Lipchitz; writers Franz Werfel, Hannah Arendt, Lion Feuchtwanger, Heinrich Mann; musicians Wanda Landowska, Andre Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Hans Sahl, Wilfredo Lam, Alma Mahler; scientists Peter Pringshein, Emil Gumbel, Nobel Prize winner Otto Meyerhof; and other mathematicians, Hebraic scholars and more.
When he returned to the United States, he tried to sound the warning bells of the Holocaust he saw coming but was unable to get any attention. He died having received no recognition of the work that he did. Eventually after investigation by Yad Vashem Memorial Museum in Israel, he was named posthumously as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, a tribute never before given to any American.
I am inspired by the life of a genuine American Hero whose courage and strength significantly changed and improved American culture. My painting depicts these elements – mathematics, literature, art, music and scholars.