Huguenots like the Dupuys, with whom they vacationed in Aubi-sur-mer, the Cabouats knew something of persecution. It was, after all, the Huguenots who had founded Hirschmann’s Collège in Berlin as a haven for religious refugees. In France, they enjoyed a discreet reputation for tolerance and an ethical commitment to provide shelter for others. The Cabouats did what they could to shelter Hirschmann, sealing his lifelong admiration for the Huguenot spirit. They landed him a job at the local natural history museum, run by a friend of the Cabouats, during which time he plunged into a textbook on paleontology he found on the museum’s shelves. Finding this boring and knowing that he could not hide in Nîmes without endangering himself and others, the issue became how to get out. There was also some lingering “feeling that I should comply with some rules.” He wanted discharge papers lest he be accused of desertion by Vichy authorities. So, he ventured to the nearest military camp and managed to get his formal discharge. He still did not have a civilian identification that would stand up to any scrutiny. The Cabouats arranged for Hirschmann to get a carte d’identité, a much-prized artifact for any refugee wanting to escape the Nazi dragnet. Madame Cabouat testified and signed the carnet issued by the Nîmes Commissaire on July 6, 1940. Hereafter, Otto Albert Hirschmann was officially Albert Hermant, an interpreter by profession, a Frenchman born in Philadelphia; this last twist was devised just in case an overzealous inspector wanted to check a French birth register.30
The pause in Nîmes allowed Hirschmann—hereafter known as Albert, the name he adopted permanently, relegating Otto to the initial O—to take stock and prepare his next steps. Somehow, he received word from another German fugitive from Paris, his old mentor from their militancy days in Berlin, Heinrich Ehrmann, who told Hirschmann that he was on his way to Marseilles to escape France. So, Albert thanked the Cabouats for their risk-taking generosity and made for the port. When he arrived, the city was teeming with refugees, not just French, but German, Austrian, Italian, Dutch, and not a few stragglers from the ill-fated British Expeditionary Force. Ever since mid-June, the number of refugees had been backing up at the Spanish border. Some wound up ensnared in the French detention camps; many found their way back to Marseilles to find another way out. The cafes and bars teemed with them. Albert walked past the clusters of frantic refugees and checked into the Hotel Luxe on the Gran Via Canebière, facing the Old Port. Then he went to locate Ehrmann, who was about to leave for the United States, having just secured a visa. He also caught up with the grieving Rein family, sans Mark, who were also about to leave. The reunion was at once profoundly sad and relieving; having lost his son, Rafael did not want to lose one of his closest friends.
Between Ehrmann and the Reins, and their contact with American socialists of the Jewish Labor Committee and the Neu Beginnen activist, Karl Frank, who had relocated to New York, Hermant learned that an American was due to arrive from Spain at the Gare St. Charles on August 14. His name was Varian Fry. Fry was supposed to arrive with visas. When he stepped onto the platform of the Marseilles train station, Fry was greeted by a smiling young, French translator who volunteered to escort him to the Hotel Splendide. They settled into Fry’s room and swapped their stories. Fry liked Albert Hermant instantly. Multilingual and impressed by the story of the false papers, Fry noted his knowledge of the German Social Democrats. He found himself taken by Hermant’s irrepressible smile and charm—and soon nicknamed him Beamish, after the impish grin. Beamish could be useful. For the next five months, Fry and Beamish worked hand in glove in a remarkable effort to get stateless refugees out of France.31
Fry, a thirty-one-year-old Harvard-educated classicist, had been working as an editor in New York when the war broke out. Having been to Germany some years earlier as a foreign correspondent, he had seen the persecution of Jews firsthand. It left him horrified. When stories about the bottlenecks of eminent writers and artists unable to escape France began to circulate, Fry enjoined a coalition of socialists, Jews, Quaker charities, and New York dignitaries, as well as some trade unions, to donate $3,000 to fund the exodus of a short list of worthies facing arrest in southern France, especially the better-known intellectuals and artists who were known to be in danger. The organization was called the Emergency Rescue Committee. When he got to Marseilles, Fry encountered a vastly more complex challenge. There was far more than a handful of refugees. The recent news of the German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s death while escaping from France had cast a pall over the city. The Portuguese and Spanish governments were demanding visas for anyone trying to cross the Pyrenees. Marseilles was choking up. What Fry did not lack was nerve; neither did Hermant. Fry also had the cover of being American, still a neutral power, and Hermant was French, but he also spoke impeccable German, and fluent Italian and English to boot. They could both prove Hamlet wrong.
“I was just one grade below Varian Fry in terms of being slightly too confident and imprudent, perhaps,” Hirschman recalled. Imprudent, perhaps, reckless even. But their risk-taking saved many, many lives.32
Together, Varian Fry and Albert Hermant spent the summer, fall, and bitterly cold winter of 1940 laying the foundations for an escape operation for fascism’s enemies. The list of the saved reads like a who’s who: Hannah Arendt, André Breton, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Siegfried Kracauer, Wifredo Lam, Jacques Lipchitz, Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel (the serial wife of composer Gustav Mahler, architect Walter Gropius, and novelist Franz Werfel), Heinrich Mann, Walter Mehring … it goes on. In all, over 2,000 refugees got out of France through the Emergency Rescue Committee’s network. Hermant’s smile and can-do approach to even the thorniest problem earned him the nickname Beamish among everyone involved in the rescue operation. Fry became very attached to his right-hand man. The only irritant was Beamish’s habit of drifting off. “I had only one fault with him,” according to Fry, “and that was his absentmindedness. When you spoke to him, it was sometimes five or ten seconds before he would show any sign of having heard you. As he said himself, he was un peu dans la lune—a little in the clouds. To an impatient person like myself, it was sometimes rather annoying.” But otherwise, he depended on the friendly but mysterious young translator for his underground experiences, facility with money, command of languages, and affection for breaking and bending rules. “He came carefully prepackaged, wrapped in false papers in which he was inordinately proud,” remembered one of his fellow rescuers.33 Beamish used to laugh to Fry that he had too many false papers to be really plausible. Along with his fraudulent identity from Nîmes, there was a membership card for the French Youth Hostels, another for the Club des Sans Club (a tourists’ association), and a half-dozen other miscellaneous backups—all of which he loved because they were so elegantly false. “There’s such a thing as being too en règle,” Beamish told Fry. “It’s like a criminal who has too many alibis.”34
The problems for the escapees were many: transit visas to get through Spain and Portugal, entry visas to third countries, and exit permits from France were all hard to get. The first could be arranged, conditional on the second. The third was impossible given Vichy’s armistice commitment to turn over refugees “on demand.” So, the trick was to get out of France illegally, slipping past the French Gardes Mobiles, who grew more vigilant as the Nazis squeezed the Vichy government for more captives, and then brandish third-country visas at the Spanish border to gain permission to “transit.” What Fry offered was a mechanism to get a visa to the United States, which made the other permissions easier to secure, except for those from the Vichy controllers, who were determined to round up quotas for the Nazis. What Fry needed was a secret route out of France, a method for printing false documents and visas, and a way to change money on the black market to pay the forgers and stipends for the refugees. Beamish came up with an initial escape plan based on his own crossing at Cerbère after leaving Spain in 1936; his penciled map on a scrap of paper “was to become a crucial document in the cultural history of our times,” according to Donald Carroll, whose a
rticle on Fry in American Heritage magazine would bring belated recognition of the underground operation.35
When Pétain’s Gardes Mobiles choked off the Cerbère route, another one had to be found. Fry and Beamish scouted the border zone to find a path where the French and Spanish stations were sufficiently far apart so that guards at the latter could not see if crossers made it through French controls. Such a route was like a needle in a haystack. Eventually, Beamish found Lisa and Hans Fittko in one of his prowls through Marseilles’s cafes. Berlin socialists who were slightly older than Hirschmann but of the same Neu Beginnen vintage, the Fittkos already had experience at the art of escape, having assisted a number of people cross the Pyrenees with the help of the socialist mayor of the fishing hamlet of Banyuls, Vincent Azéma, who safeguarded the escape and smuggling route as “la route Lister,” named after the Spanish Republican general who used it during the struggle against Franco. Beamish arranged a meeting of Fry with the Fittkos in Banyuls. It did not go well; Fry had some difficulty following the discussion in German. At one point, he offered to pay the Fittkos for their services, to which Hans responded icily: “Do you understand the word Überzeugung, convictions?” Beamish, who knew precisely what this meant but also knew Fry, resolved the misunderstanding; the committee would help support the Fittkos in return for their services in getting refugees over the secret pass. The crossing became known as the F Line.36
The initial misunderstanding with the Fittkos reflected more than just a linguistic gap; Fry could be naïve and at times flippant, unaware of the dangers of clandestine work. He had a habit of speaking indiscreetly in cafes and restaurants, which made Beamish squirm. He also knew little about “the real political nuances of the German immigration.”37 Fry seems to have been aware that he was out of his depth on this score and thus left the job of “interviewing” the swarms of people who gathered outside the Hotel Splendide, sifting peoples’ backgrounds, and screening out imposters trying to penetrate the clandestine network, to others. Fry relied upon Beamish to screen, in particular, the left-wing refugees, notably the Neu Beginnen militants who’d straggled to Marseilles after being driven from Germany, Vienna, Prague, and now Paris. It was a group that Beamish knew well, so he could help sift the interlopers from the genuine cases. A photo of Beamish taken by Fry in the fall of 1940 has him hovered over a lamp-lit desk with a refugee poring over papers. This kind of one-by-one labor was time-consuming but was necessary for the safety of the operation and the refugees alike.
Room 307 of the Splendide posted two stations, a small writing table and Fry’s flat-topped dressing table. Fry and Beamish were soon joined by Franz “Franzi” von Hildebrand, a conservative Austrian Catholic, who screened the nonleftist refugees. Their operation ran from 8:00 a.m. until midnight. Then, at the end of each marathon day, they would meet and compare notes. When they got paranoid about police bugs in the room, Beamish, recalling that the Polish ambassador in Berlin used to hold his staff meetings in one of the embassy bathrooms, suggested they talk there so the noise of the running bath could drown out any microphones. From those meetings would emerge a list of applicants for US visas, which had to be cabled to New York, where the Rescue Commission began to expedite the applications for the vice-consul to receive in Marseilles. This was a man named Hiram Bingham IV, who appreciated Fry’s efforts and became disenchanted with the State Department’s anti-Semitic say-little and do-less response; his issuing of thousands of visas, legal and illegal, would win him the enduring enmity of the American government that otherwise wanted to restrict entry.
Beamish with unknown refugee preparing to escape France, Marseilles, 1940.
When the operation got too big for a room in the Splendide and the hotel management started to get itchy about the numbers of refugees converging on their establishment, Fry and Beamish relocated to an old leather goods store owned by a Jewish retailer and called it the Centre américain de secours. They enlisted a few more volunteers. One was Lena Fishman, who had Beamish’s language skills and so became Fry’s secretary and took over some of Beamish’s job screening refugees at the desk. More screeners were necessary, so two American women joined the little crew—the beautiful and very wealthy Mary Jayne Gold (la riche américaine) and the spirited Miriam Davenport, with whom Beamish had a flirtatious on-again, off-again attraction. Gold recalled her first meeting with Fry and Beamish: Fry did all the talking while the other, “a handsome fellow with rather soulful eyes, had been standing there taking everything in, his head cocked slightly to one side. One of those German intellectuals, I thought, always trying to figure everything out.”38
Expanding the operation meant, increasingly, that Beamish’s work was in the streets, bars, and brothels of Marseilles, expanding the illegal tentacles of the operation. If the operation had a fixer, it was Beamish. It was a role he relished. “Beamish soon became my specialist on illegal questions,” wrote Fry at the end of the war. Beamish had three basic tasks: finding sources of bogus passports, keeping up a supply of credible identity cards, and contriving ways to funnel large sums of money into France to fund the scheme without the authorities finding out. He cannot have imagined that his study of Italian exchange controls would have prepared him for this. At first, the Czech passports were doing the trick, but as the number of refugees brought under the program grew, Beamish worried that the whole operation would get revealed. So, he sweet-talked the Polish consul into issuing some passports; the Lithuanian honorary consul agreed to do the same. Lithuanian documents were especially coveted because—still at that point—the little Baltic state was neutral; Beamish got himself one of these, thereby becoming a Lithuanian citizen called Otto Albert Hirschmann, since his carte did not qualify him automatically for a French passport. Just in case; beside, Beamish prized his multiplying identities.
This was all a bit of a cat-and-mouse game in which Beamish had to stay a step ahead of Portuguese and Spanish authorities who would stop giving transit visas on suspicious passports; when Lisbon suspended visas on Chinese and Belgian Congo passports, the Emergency Rescue Committee turned to Dutch and Panamanian documents. For those who could not get passports, Beamish contrived a system in which the committee would buy demobilization papers from French soldiers for 200 francs, which gave the holder free passage to Casablanca—which itself became a holding center for refugees aiming to get to Lisbon. All the refugee had to do was memorize the details of the soldier’s identity and military experience and get some cast-away uniform on the black market (which Beamish arranged). This system worked well until the officer with whom Beamish was dealing was caught and court-martialled in October.
The solution to the money problem was an ingenious deal with Marseilles’s notorious mob. “Hermant, that demon of ingenuity with the puckish smile,” Mary Jayne Gold tells us, “had already made good contact on the black market money exchange.”39 Like most big ports, there was no shortage of gangsters in Marseilles, but getting to them was a challenge. One way was through women. And “Beamish liked women—there was no getting away from that,” recalled Fry. He found his way into the good graces of the bleached-blonde mistress of the American consul, and she introduced Beamish to a friend—a Corsican businessman named Malandri, who despised police of all stripes and was thus especially inclined to dislike the Vichy regime and its allies. Malandri had connections. One was “Jacques”—the owner of a restaurant called Les Septs Petits Pêcheurs, the biggest mobster in Marseilles, and a very rich man—and this led to a short Russian refugee from 1917 who was equally well connected, “Dimitru.” Beamish, Jacques, and Dimitru concocted a deal in which Dimitru would introduce Beamish to interested clients. Beamish would take their francs and pay dollars to the committee’s agents in New York; Dimitru and Jacques took a commission for each client. For months the system worked brilliantly, fueled by New York monies as well as clandestine transfers from the British government, which needed Fry to get their trapped soldiers out of Marseilles (in return for which, the committee skimmed some of t
he funds to cover their political refugees).40
Beamish’s colleagues marveled at his skill; for all his youth he was a font of devious ingenuity and seasoned wisdom. Mary Jayne Gold, after watching Beamish return from one of his expeditions, asked him how the Nazis confiscated Jewish property. Beamish explained that first they would hang a sign outside the establishment announcing “Jewish Enterprise.” Then they would take bribes to allow the proprietor to stay open. Then they simply seized the business when it went broke. Gold thanked Beamish for his tutorial in “applied anti-Semitism,” and explained that this was like the gangsters she knew “back home” in Chicago. Beamish smiled knowingly and added that in Germany “the gangsters and the government are the same people.” Little insights like these amazed the American ingénue.41
Meanwhile, the clock was ticking on the operation. Through October, the group would huddle over their radio and listen to the news of the Luftwaffe pounding English cities. The Sûreté nationale was getting stricter, and Franco would periodically shut down the border altogether. Beamish, for one, knew that the conditions could only worsen—despite Fry’s brilliant diplomacy. He grew more anxious to get as many out as quickly as possible. One group of refugees that Beamish was entrusted to screen and help get out were the socialists from Austria and Germany, in particular, the veterans of from the Neu Beginnen movement, many of whom were holed up in the port. They were not easy to assist: they were not as famous as the artists and writers and were often penniless. Many were also Jews and militant antifascists. All this elevated them to the top of the Gestapo list of refugees who were supposed to be surrendered to the Sûreté nationale “on demand.” And some were already being held in camps and thus poised to be turned over. Their champion in the United States was Karl Frank, alias Paul Hagen, who worked closely with the Jewish Labor Committee to help it usher out socialists and labor leaders. One day, Beamish called a meeting with Miriam Davenport and Mary Jayne Gold at Basso’s, Beamish’s favorite bar. When he entered Basso’s, he ordered three cognacs, apologized that there was no more scotch on the market, and explained that Pétain was about to come down hard on anyone sheltering the unwanted. There were four Neu Beginnen members—Franz Boegler, Siegfried Pfeffer, Hans Tittle, Fritz Lamm—who could not pick up their American visas because they were imprisoned in the Le Vernet camp and were about to be “surrendered.” Hagen had cabled Marseilles to plead for their rescue. Beamish went into unusually indiscreet detail about their cases and the situation at Le Vernet. When Gold asked him why he was telling her all this, he replied, “Because we want you to go up to Le Vernet and persuade the commandant to allow them to come to Marseilles.” The idea was that once in the port they could slip their guards and fetch their US visas and escape to Spain. What Beamish wanted her to do was go to the camp and explain that she was a friend of their wives and that they merely wanted an overnight together. Mary Jayne Gold protested, “Why me?” Beamish leaned forward and looked her straight in the eye, “Because with that face anybody will believe anything you tell them.… Mary Jayne, you have the most innocent face I have ever seen. Anybody will believe anything you tell them.” Still, she protested. “You’re our best bet,” Beamish insisted. “Ils jouent leurs têtes (their heads are at stake).” “Well, okay, Hermant. I’ll try.”42
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