Varian fry biography examples

Often compared to Oskar Schindler, Varian Fry helped over a thousand refugees escape Nazi-occupied France during World War II.

Mary Jayne Gold is the heiress who funded and assisted his efforts. Their incredible tale of heroism is the subject of the new television drama Transatlantic, which is now streaming on Netflix.

The seven-episode limited series—which stars Cory Michael Smith as Fry and Gillian Jacobs as Gold—tells the story of the pair’s involvement with the Emergency Rescue Committee, a private American relief group formed in 1940 to rescue European artists, writers, and intellectuals pursued by the Nazis.

The ERC’s efforts helped save a number of prominent figures, including artists Marc Chagall and Max Ernst, philosopher Hannah Arendt, and Nobel Prize–winning physiology researcher Otto Meyerhof.

Here’s how the real Fry and Gold got involved in the effort and what happened after