The Lisbon Route

by Ronald Weber

  *

  In the wake of the Lion Feuchtwanger affair and Walter Benjamin’s suicide, Fry learned that the Vichy government had complained about his work to the U.S. State Department, which in turn had done nothing to defend him. The chilly advice of the American consulate in Marseille was that Fry should leave France before he was arrested or expelled. The ERC in New York, yielding to pressure from the State Department, said he should come home—which he agreed to do, with the delaying caveat that he would leave the moment his replacement arrived in Marseille.

  A more immediate concern for Fry was news that Gestapo agents were now on the frontier and that Spain had closed the border. In fact the border would open and close erratically, but the escape route through the country could not be relied on as before. At the same time Portugal tightened its transit visa requirements by having all requests handled in Lisbon and acting only with documentary proof of an overseas visa and a paid ticket for ship or plane transport to the destination. The Portuguese action was understandable; Fry knew, as he wrote, that “their country was already jammed to the gunwales with stranded refugees.” But when shortly afterward the Spanish followed suit with visa restrictions, he was deeply troubled. His refugees, with no wish to stay in Spain, had always moved through the country as quickly as possible; the only explanation seemed to be that the Gestapo was intent on keeping refugees bottled up in France. Fry had also learned that the Kundt Commission—a group of Gestapo agents and German officials, under the leadership of a Dr. Kundt, whom Fry had heard about but had not been certain existed—was combing French concentration camps for names of those to force back to Germany under the armistice terms.

  The new developments meant reorganizing the CAS’s work. If refugees were to be held in France, the main effort had to shift from arranging their escapes to keeping them out of concentration camps and providing for their needs while in hiding. When Frank Bohn took the repeated advice of the American consulate that he and Fry should get out of France, Fry added Bohn’s list of labor and socialist leaders to his own and began turning the center into an actual relief agency. New staff members were added, most of them French and with professional aid experience. One of them, Danny Bénédite, became Fry’s chief associate and close friend. And since refugees kept coming and many had no money, the center began handing out weekly living allowances from ERC funds. To those held in camps it sent regular food parcels.

  The dramatic shift in work was accompanied by one in living arrangements. The first time he saw the Villa Air-Bel, as Fry recalled,

  it was closed as tight as a fortress, the walks and gardens were overrun with weeds, and the hedges hadn’t been trimmed for years. But the view across the valley to the Mediterranean was enchanting and I was impressed by the terrace with its enormous plane trees and the double flight of steps which led down, right and left, to a formal garden and a fish pond.

  The three-story, eighteen-room tumbledown château was located on eighty-five acres about a half-hour drive from Marseille. The distance was part of its appeal; Fry wanted a place where he was free of around-the-clock availability to the refugees, and free of confinement in the Splendide. Leasing the Villa Air-Bel also made financial sense. The monthly rent was little more than his hotel, and the many bedrooms could be filled with staff members, including Danny Bénédite and his wife Theo, Miriam Davenport, and Davenport’s friend Mary Jayne Gold.

  Blonde, beautiful, and an heiress from the Midwest, Gold seemed to have stepped from the pages of an F. Scott Fitzgerald story. She had been educated in Europe, then stayed on and from Paris led the life, by her own account, of an expatriate playgirl, which included owning her own airplane and flying off for Swiss skiing and Riviera sun. When war came she had donated the plane to the French air force, joined the refugee exodus from Paris, and met Miriam Davenport in Toulouse, from where the pair gravitated to Marseille and Fry’s staff at the CES. The women, along with Danny Bénédite’s wife, had found Villa Air-Bel, and Danny, as a French citizen, had signed the lease while the “made-to-order charmer”—as Fry thought of her—Mary Jayne Gold paid the rent.

  Two of Fry’s clients, the Russian novelist Victor Serge and the French poet and leading light of the surrealist movement André Breton, also took rooms in the villa. And there were visitors: the German surrealist artist Max Ernst; the American expatriate writer Kay Boyle; and the estranged wife of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who appeared one night and stayed on for weeks. When Mary Jayne Gold left for Lisbon (carrying with her smuggled information in condoms inserted into squeezed-out toothpaste and face cream tubes), her room was taken by the heiress and collector of modern art Peggy Guggenheim. Not certain at first about the nature of Fry’s work, Guggenheim went to the American consul in Marseilles for advice—and was told to steer clear of it. She paid no attention, and Fry had with her, as he had had with Gold, a generous donor to his operation.

  Victor Serge nicknamed the château Espèrvisa, Hopevisa, since many staying or passing through were waiting for visas to be issued, or purchased for a price. (“A fine trade this,” Serge remarked, “selling lifebelts on a shipwrecked continent!”) There was no escaping the long hours and tense work going on in Marseille, but Villa Air-Bel provided periods of needed release and communal gaiety in Fry’s life. Others found time to get in some literary work, Victor Serge turning out pages of a novel and André Breton writing poetry in the château’s greenhouse. The house had no central heating, food was in short supply, but wine was always plentiful. A cook and a maid were on hand, and a refugee Spanish barber came every morning to shave the men. When warm weather arrived a vegetable garden was started, and workers removed muck from an irrigation basin and turned it into a swimming pool. On Sunday afternoon surrealists flocked to the house to auction their pictures on the terrace, and afterward stayed for tea or cognac.

  *

  Toward the end of January 1941, a sudden and unexplained shift in Vichy policy allowed many refugees to get exit visas from France. Fry assumed it meant the Gestapo was finished grabbing those it wanted from the country. Whatever the reason, his center became a travel bureau as well as relief operation and functioned legally in moving refugees on their way to Lisbon. While there was still the endless need of cajoling authorities for transit visas for Spain and Portugal as well as overseas visas, important figures—historians, literary critics, poets and novelists, physicists and mathematicians, film and theater producers—passed through Fry’s hands in this period. Two especially notable artists were also among them, Jacques Lipchitz and Marc Chagall.

  When Fry had first contacted him, Chagall was working in his studio in Gordes and, as a naturalized French citizen, saw no reason to leave the country. With the proclamation of anti-Jewish laws he changed his mind, and in Marseille Harry Bingham provided Chagall and his wife with American visas. While they waited in a hotel before journeying to Lisbon, police swept through and arrested everyone they took to be Jewish. When Fry learned of the action he phoned a police official and informed him that Chagall was one of the world’s great artists. The official was unimpressed, so Fry added that unless Chagall was released in a half-hour he would call the New York Times correspondent in Vichy, Gaston Archambault, with the news of the artist’s arrest. Chagall was quickly released.

  For Marc and Bella Chagall, refugee flight was anything but difficult. Fry provided train tickets that took them across the Spanish border and on to Portugal. They reached Lisbon on May 11, 1941, and while waiting for a crate of Chagall’s paintings that had been left behind and were coming by train—Chagall’s daughter and her husband eventually brought them to Lisbon and then to New York—the artist dropped a note to one of his wealthy patrons, Solomon R. Guggenheim, letting him know he would soon be in America. When the ship bearing the Chagalls reached New York in late June, Pierre Matisse, a New York art dealer and son of Henri Matisse, met them at the dock. Guggenheim subsequently treated the couple to an introductory boat tour around Manhattan.

  Jacques Lipchitz kne
w he was in danger as a Jew but still was reluctant to leave France. He spoke no English, and starting his career over in America was a daunting prospect. Fry kept writing to him at his studio in Toulouse—“What can we do for you? We are ready to do whatever we can”—and arranged to have the sculptor and his wife pick up visas at the Marseille consulate. But even with the visas in hand Lipchitz was unwilling to move until friends convinced him the Nazis would soon occupy all of France, leaving him trapped. Fry gave the couple money and train tickets to Barcelona and Lisbon, where they waited for weeks while living on a room allowance and eating meals at a Jewish relief center. Lipchitz later said of Fry, “In some ways I owe him my life… . I did not want to go away from France. It was his severe and clairvoyant letters which helped me finally to do so… . And of what help he was once I decided to go to America!”

  Other celebrated names on Fry’s list to be saved refused to leave for any reason. When he tracked down André Gide in his mountain hideaway beyond Cannes, the author said the Germans were trying hard to entice him into collaboration; he would not agree, but neither would he abandon France. Henri Matisse turned down help as well despite Fry’s argument that even if the Germans left him alone in his studio at Niceff, he might starve to death. Both Gide and Matisse were willing, though, to have their names used to bolster the CES’s image as a proper relief agency by becoming members of its Committee of Patrons.

  Along with the easing of exit visas, another new development was the possibility of bypassing Spain and Portugal and sending refugees by ship directly from Marseille to Martinique, the French colonial possession in the Caribbean, on a meandering course through the Mediterranean and down the African coast. Although the French colonies were under Vichy control, Martinique was a long reach for the Gestapo in pulling a refugee back to Europe; and from the island there was passage to Cuba, Florida, and South America. When Fry learned that space was available on a converted French cargo vessel called the Winnipeg, he immediately began buying passenger tickets for those of his clients with exit visas. The route was slow to develop, with nine refugees leaving in mid-February, then forty more by the end of March. By May there were regular sailings every four or five days on Vichy ships with navicerts, or shipping passports, allowing passage through the British blockade.

  Compared to days of sending groups of two or three to the Fittkos in Banyuls, the opening of the Martinique route was the busiest and most fruitful period of Fry’s operation in Marseille. The CAS staff grew to more than twenty to handle the new workload of getting clients prepared with paperwork and money while also attending to last-minute panic attacks about the long and tedious journey. Among those taking the new sea route was Walter Mehring, who promptly cast his journey—aboard the Wyoming, as surprisingly named as the Winnipeg—in verse in “Love Song a la Martinique”:

  In uneventful faring over sea, with battle freight

  And negro soldier lads, the staunch “Wyoming” bore

  Us through the oceanic muck… .

  Victor Serge and André Breton got out with three hundred other refugees on the Capitaine Paul Lemerle, and after reaching Martinique went on to the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and at last Mexico. But not all of Fry’s clients could get French exit permits, and there was still a list of forbidden names. So for those without the permits but able to get Spanish and Portuguese transit visas and overseas visas, the Pyrenees crossing routes to Lisbon were again in operation. Some others were smuggled through Spain to North Africa, then taken by fishing boats to Lisbon.

  When Britain suddenly seized one of the Martinique-bound ships and sailed her to Trinidad as a prize of war, Vichy canceled future sailings and ordered two vessels already at sea to land at Casablanca, with all passengers interned. It took Fry’s committee long labor to get them released and sent on through Spain to Lisbon. In at least one instance, another relief group, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), also came to the rescue of the stranded refugees.

  Richard Berczeller, an Austrian Jew and a medical doctor, had reached Marseille with his wife and son only to learn that American visas would be available to them if they could produce tickets for a ship leaving France. When he contacted Fry’s committee, Berczeller was informed about ships going to Martinique and told to keep in touch. The family was granted exit permits but waited some four weeks before learning of available space on the Wyoming.

  Once at sea they began to feel safe, especially as the freighter made its sluggish passage through the Straits of Gibraltar and put up at the port of Casablanca. But there the vessel sat in boiling heat and with meager food supplies supplemented by stringing baskets from the deck for merchants below to sell them bread and fruit. On the fifth day of waiting, the passengers were told the ship would not leave Casablanca, and under orders from Vichy they could choose to return to France or go to an internment camp. Everyone aboard selected the camp, and guarded trucks took them to an old Foreign Legion base sixty miles from the city.

  Some six hundred people were wedged in barracks with primitive sanitation; soon another three hundred ship passengers were added to the number, increasing the rampant sickness in the unceasing heat. Abruptly one morning the camp commandant informed Berczeller, with no explanation, that he and his family had tickets on a ship to America. An aged bus took them to Casablanca, where they learned that HIAS had chartered a liner in Lisbon, the Nyassa, which was about to weigh anchor on a voyage that would eventually get them to New York.

  *

  About the same time the Martinique route closed down, Harry Bingham was assigned to Lisbon as vice consul (and shortly thereafter moved again, this time to Buenos Aires for the duration of the war), leaving Fry without a source of information or support at the American consulate in Marseille and the ministry in Vichy. It also became apparent that the police were taking more interest in the CAS’s work. Danny Bénédite was arrested on the serious charge of trading gold bullion on the black market, though he was finally let off. Fry’s telephone was tapped, and one day detectives searched the committee’s office for false documents and the means of turning them out—finding nothing since the staff was careful enough to keep both elsewhere. Two days later police searched the Villa Bel-Air for a nonexistent radio transmitter. Shortly thereafter they were back at the CAS office and then the villa, ransacking both places for money Fry had recently been given by a Frenchwoman leaving for New York, again finding nothing.

  Danny Bénédite believed the searches were part of a calculated campaign to scare Fry out of France, since as an American citizen Vichy was unable to dispel him without proof of illegal actions. Fry was determined not to be frightened away, but he knew the inescapable weak link in his continuing work was lack of support from the American authorities in France, and behind them the State Department in Washington. In January he had gone to the Marseille consulate to have his passport renewed and was told updating would be only for immediate return to the United States, with the passport held by the consulate until he was ready to leave. In May he tried again and learned the same thing.

  Then on July 10 a motorcyclist brought to the committee office a summons for Fry to appear the following morning before the district chief of police. The American consul had warned him that the Gestapo was pressuring the French to arrest him, and the police official told him directly that unless he left France he would be confined in a small town outside Marseille, where he could do no harm. Fry appealed for time by saying he needed to prepare his committee to continue work after he left; he would need at least until August 15, and the official agreed. “Tell me, frankly, why are you so much opposed to me?” Fry asked before he left. “Because you have protected Jews and anti-Nazis,” the official replied.

  A day or so later the American consul returned Fry’s passport for travel within the next thirty days, with a French exit visa and Spanish and Portuguese transit visas already stamped within. For Fry’s work in Marseille it was the beginning of the end. Danny Bénédite still thought the French police were bluffing
about the arrest, and Fry took a vacation on the French Riviera and in Monaco that included meeting again with Matisse and Gide. By the time he returned to Marseille his passport and visas had expired.

  On his desk was a cable from the ERC in New York informing him his successor had been named and was preparing to leave for France (though in fact none ever arrived). Two weeks or so went by before the police returned and told him he was being expelled from the country as an undesirable alien. He was given a little time to clear out his belongings from the office and the villa before he was taken to a train by a police inspector, who would be with him the rest of the journey. Staff members gathered at the Marseille station to say goodbye, and Danny Bénédite arrived back from a hurried trip to Vichy to say that nothing could be done about the expulsion. It had been ordered by the Ministry of the Interior and approved by the American legation.

  There was delay at the border at Cerbère while the American consulate in Marseille renewed Fry’s passport and got the new visas on it. When all the paperwork was in order, CAS workers gathered at the Cerbère rail station for another farewell. The police inspector accompanied Fry across the border to Port-Bou, and he helped open his bags for inspection and then repack them. When it was time to take the train to Barcelona, he shook Fry’s hand and said, “I hope you will not think ill of France.” “Of France, never,” Fry said. “Of certain Frenchmen, yes.” The policeman indicated he understood.