TIME: 12:00 PM PT / 3:00 PM EST | PLATFORM: Zoom | REGISTER: bit.ly/2NUpGRT

Join the Holocaust Center for Humanity for event two out of three in their America and the Holocaust series!

“I saw one [Jewish] man,” wrote American journalist, Varian Fry in a 1935 New York Times article, “brutally kicked and spat upon as he lay on the sidewalk, a woman bleeding, a man whose head was covered with blood, hysterical women crying…Nowhere did the police seem to make any effort whatever to save the victims from this brutality.”

Fry’s experiences as a journalist covering Germany under Hitler’s rule provoked him into action, creating the Emergency Rescue Committee, a private America relief organization, with the goal of rescuing endangered intellectuals in France. Author Sheila Isenberg uses Fry’s own words and the testimony of refugees and compatriots to vividly paint the tense atmosphere of wartime Marseille, where desperate refugees found precarious asylum.

Isenberg describes the inventive measures Fry took to save more than 2,000 people, far more than the 200 intellectuals, scientists, writers, and artists he had originally been assigned to aid. Convening a network of people to assist him, Fry was able to arrange escapes from internment camps, forge documents, and bribe officials to spirit away to safety people threatened by the Nazis. In 1994, his efforts were recognized as he became the first American to be honored by Yad Vashem as "Righteous Among the Nations."

Isenberg is the author of several books including A Hero of Our Own: How one American in Marseille saved Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Andre Breton, Hannah Arendt, and a thousand others from the Nazis – The Story of Varian Fry; Muriel’s War: An American Heiress in the Nazi Resistance; and Women Who Love Men Who Kill.