Netflix
Gillian Jacobs as Mary Jayne Gold, Cory Michael Smith as Varian Fry, and Amit Rahav as Thomas Lovegrove in “Transatlantic”
In June 1940, after France fell to the Nazis, a peace agreement permitted the southern part of the country to remain nominally self-governing under a regime based in Vichy, while northern France, including Paris, was directly controlled by the German occupiers who were expecting to invade Britain. For the moment, the port of Marseille was open and governed by the French, though they were expected to cooperate with the Gestapo in turning in undesirables.
Soon, thousands of refugees were streaming into Marseille. They included scores of Europe’s leading artists and writers, as well as anti-Nazi political leaders and ordinary people desperate to find a way out of Europe. President Roosevelt, meanwhile, was working to sell rearmament to a still-isolationist American public.
FDR’s immediate need was to get through the 1940 election without lending credence to Republican charges that he was violating U.S. neutrality and planning to join another European war. Admitting large numbers of refugees in these circumstances would not be helpful. The U.S. State Department was particularly averse to admitting Jewish ones.
In 1939, the ocean liner St. Louis, carrying 937 passengers, mostly German Jewish refugees, reached American waters. It was not permitted to dock and had to sail back to Europe, where 254 of its passengers are known to have been murdered in the Holocaust. Such events quickly led to the formation of several committees to help refugees and change U.S. policy.
On June 25, 1940, just three days after the French-German armistice, whose Article 19 required the Vichy government to surrender to the Nazis “on demand” any German refugee, a 32-year-old journalist named Varian Fry, who had been a young correspondent in Berlin witnessing atrocities against Jews, attended a fundraising lunch in New York aimed at organizing an Emergency Rescue Committee specifically to help get refugees out of Marseille.
The committee was quietly helped by Eleanor Roosevelt; other fundraisers included theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Thomas Mann, already safely in New York, contributed a list of noted intellectuals hiding in Marseille, including his son Golo. The Museum of Modern Art provided names of prominent artists at risk of arrest. Fry was deputized to be the committee’s liaison in Marseille.
In August, with $3,000 strapped to his leg, a tourist visa, and a list of priority refugees to be rescued, Fry sailed to Lisbon and took a train to Marseille. There, he was greeted by Albert Hirschman, later a world-renowned economist, and a Chicago heiress named Mary Jayne Gold, who helped fund the operation.
Fry found a villa outside Marseille to hide refugees. Hirschman, fluent in French, adopted the nom de guerre Albert Hermant, and became expert at buying documents on the black market. A vice consul at the U.S. consulate named Hiram Bingham IV, in direct violation of State Department orders, provided hundreds of exit visas.
Fry and his comrades located exit routes over the Pyrenees into nominally neutral but pro-Nazi Spain. From there, refugees could make their way to nominally neutral but pro-ally Portugal and eventually to the United States. Before the port of Marseille was closed, a few escaped as stowaways on ships.
The series is not just another of World War II’s recurring lessons in history, human courage, and human sadism. It has terrible resonances in our own time.
In the 16 months before Fry returned to New York with the Gestapo on his trail, the committee got more than 2,000 refugees out of Marseille to safety. The committee’s work stands in heroic and humane contrast to the official neglect of the U.S. government.
The list of people saved by Fry and his committee could have been the faculty of a world-class university, with work that could fill a world-class museum. They included Hannah Arendt, André Breton, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Arthur Koestler, Wanda Landowska, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lipchitz, Golo Mann, Max Ophuls, and scores of others whose names would consume several paragraphs.
Needless to say, the story of Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee has long been a movie waiting to be made, a real-life counterpart to the fictional Casablanca. And now Netflix has made it. More precisely, Netflix has released a seven-installment series called Transatlantic, which premiered on April 7. The events in Marseille between June 1940 and 1941 are partly fictionalized, but true to the essence of what occurred. You should definitely see it.
On first viewing, I found some of the inventions annoying. For instance, in the opening installment, a group of refugees is depicted walking out of Marseille to an escape route over the Spanish frontier through the Pyrenees. But it’s 400 kilometers from Marseille to the border town of Portbou. In fact, the refugees took trains or buses, and only then walked through the mountains to evade border guards.
The series also depicts a bacchanalian birthday party at the hidden villa for the artist Max Ernst, done with appropriate surrealist panache. That never happened; it would have been far too risky. The producer and co-creator Anna Winger (who also made Unorthodox) explains, in a superb eighth installment with the cast on how the series was made, that she was striving for some of the madcap spirit of ’40s cinema (think Chaplin in The Great Dictator), and that even in dire circumstances humor leaks in and nurtures survival. For the most part, she succeeds.
The series depicts other improbable events that I found far-fetched, including an expedition by Mary Jayne Gold, with the help of British intelligence, to spring some British POWs from a French prison. But as I looked up the actual history, these and other unlikely episodes did in fact occur.
Most importantly, Transatlantic is absolutely true to the moral meaning of what occurred, and on several human levels. Fry is a reluctant hero, pushed to great heroism by circumstances, and his mission requires awful choices. At one point, as a long line of refugees is pleading for visas, he asks each one, per instructions of the committee in New York, Are you a well-known artist, published academic, or political leader? Most of the desperate stateless people are none of these, with tales of losing entire families.
At various points in the first few installments, a young woman of no particular reputation named Hannah implores Fry to find a way to get her a visa. I’m sorry, my hands are tied, Fry keeps saying. But he finds himself moved by her. In installment five, we see him meeting with Vice Consul Bingham. I need a special favor, Fry says, I need one more visa. “Name?” asks Bingham. “Hannah Arendt,” Fry replies.
In another touching moment, Hirschman, who was born and educated in Berlin, is chatting in German with Hannah. It feels good to be speaking German, he says. The Nazis have only stolen the country, she replies. They haven’t stolen the language. For the most part, the screenwriting is excellent and avoids the temptation of facile moralizing.
Lucas Englander and Gillian Jacobs in “Transatlantic” on Netflix
Transatlantic also faithfully creates the atmosphere of ordinary people thrown together by bizarre circumstances, where “the usual rules don’t apply,” as one character tells Fry. As in the actual events, they get to know and trust one another, speaking a blend of French, German, and English.
The cast and production are superb. Many of the actual events occurred at the Hotel Splendide, one of Marseille’s finest in 1940. The production company tracked down the building, long abandoned as a hotel, and persuaded the owner to allow the company to recreate every detail of the grand ballroom.
Marseille itself is a powerful character in the series. Its creators vividly use the city’s backstreets, cafés, seascapes, and vistas to suggest the poignancy of what it had to be like to live in a lovely place, subject to arrest at any moment, with the bustling port promising a transatlantic escape to a safety that eluded too many.
One of the standouts is an Austrian actor named Lucas Englander, who was largely unknown until he was cast, based entirely on a Zoom audition, as the young Albert Hirschman. Englander, with piercing blue eyes, captures Hirschman’s ingenuity and charm.
In the course of shooting the series, Englander, who had never heard of Hirschman, revisited his own family history. He had a Jewish grandfather; and like Hirschman, his extended family went through some harrowing escapes in order to survive. Englander has now joined the International Rescue Committee, the successor to Fry’s wartime Emergency Rescue Committee, working in Paris to ease the transition of refugees.
The series is not just another of World War II’s recurring lessons in history, human courage, and human sadism. It has terrible resonances in our own time.
Today’s large-scale humanitarian refugee crisis rivals that of World War II, and Europe’s current leaders are displaying all the cowardice of their predecessors in the late 1930s. Admission of large numbers of refugees is politically fraught. The scenes of boats being turned away from Greece and Italy rival that of the St. Louis in 1939, though today’s inconvenient Others are not Jews but Black Africans, Afghanis, and Syrians.
President Biden, facing the same sort of election-year challenge in 2024 as FDR did in 1940, is taking few risks to help Mexican refugees. And there are individual heroes today who break inhumane laws just as Varian Fry and Albert Hirschman did in 1940.
After Marseille, Fry returned to journalism, went to work for The Nation magazine, and wrote two books about what had occurred. After his death in 1967, the French awarded Fry the Legion of Honor and renamed the square facing the American consulate Place Varian Fry.
Hirschman, at 25, was one of the last refugees out of Marseille. He was given a fellowship at Berkeley, then worked at the Federal Reserve and for the Marshall Plan, until he was denied a security clearance in 1950, presumably because of his liaisons with undesirables in Marseille. He went on to be among the most humanist of economists.
