The first full story of the most remarkable private American rescue effort of World War II is based on personal papers, letters, and interviews with many of those involved with Varian Fry.
"Fry was the American Schindler...with desperate exiles, menacing Nazis, forged documents and midnight escapes...[think] Casablanca."

--New York Times

Varian Fry, the only American honored at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, was a young New Yorker who rescued more than 1,500 Europeans from the Nazi's including Mar Chagall, Max Ernst, Hannah Arendt, and other intellectuals, political activists, and "degenerative" artists, many of them Jews. This moving Holocaust rescue story is set against the backdrop of American isolationism and anti-Semitism.

"The drama here is in the thrill of rescue, the realistic portrait of a complex leader, and the decidedly nonheroic truths about WWII at home."

--American Library Association

"One of the BEST BOOKS of 2001"

--St. Louis Post-Dispatch