Varian Fry, known as the “American Schindler,” ran a rescue network in Vichy France during World War II that helped approximately 2,000 to 4,000 anti-Nazi and Jewish refugees to escape from Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.



SURRENDER ON DEMAND
Johnson Books, October 1997 (reissue)
Genre: Current Events & Politics
Agent: Faith Hamlin

Foreign Sales
France: Editions Agone
Germany: Fischer Verlag
Italy: Voland Edizioni
Netherlands: Mouria

“A novelist would hardly dare pack a novel with so many hair-breadth escapes.”
—Lewis Gannett, New York Herald Tribune, 1945

“Surrender on Demand is by turns wildly exciting, horrifying and exalting … an astonishingly good book.”
—The New York Times Book Review, April 25, 1945

In 1940, Varian Fry, a young American magazine editor, traveled to France to work as a representative of the Emergency Rescue Committee, a group that offered aid to political refugees in France who were in danger of being extradited to Germany. With the aid of the French government, the Germans were then in the process of creating what Fry calls “the most gigantic man-trap in history.” Over the course of 13 months, he connected himself with people who could get things done, including a few double agents and gangsters, out of necessity. Fry managed to win the freedom of some 1,500 men and women, among them painters Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, and Max Ernst; dissidents Andre Breton and Victor Serge; writer Franz Werfel; musician Wanda Landowska; and other intellectuals and artists.

Fry’s memoir Surrender on Demand was originally published by Random House in 1945, but Varian Fry’s story has stood the test of time. Daniel Melnick is producing a feature film on Fry, and in 1997 and 1998 he was featured in The Holocaust Museum in New York. He was inducted into Yad Vashem, the first American to be so honored.