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Fry (1907-1967) was a journalist who became acquainted with Mrs. Roosevelt; she provided him with access to sympathetic State Department officials in the U.S. and France such as Hiram Bingham IV, US Vice Consul in France, (1903-1988), who issued visas for those in his care, while Fry and his comrades created escape routes, through Portugal and Spain, the refugees escaping on foot through remote border checkpoints. In May, 2006, the U.S. Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp of him. America's International Rescue Committee, formed in 1933, and spearheaded by Albert Einstein, gave Fry's rescue operation an operative and financial platform.

THE EXILES (1989)

Richard Kaplan, director

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Exile is a curious word, for it holds the possibility, at least, of return, as Tom Ambrose aptly wrote in Hitler's Loss: What Britain and America Gained from Europe's Cultural Exiles (2001: Peter Owen Publishers). Yet, of the thousands of Jewish scholars, intellectuals, and artists who fled what became Hitler, Mussolini and Franco's Europe, few had any reason to return when World War II had ended. "The world had seen nothing in modern times like this exodus of intellectuals as Nobel Prize winners were reduced to writing job applications to the USA and eminent artists took posts as domestic servants in London. But these, after all, were the lucky ones; they had the intellectual, artistic and scientific talent that was to prove an international currency in the free world unlike their less gifted fellow Jews who found it far more difficult to start a new career in exile (Ambrose: 10).

The Exiles records the living testimonies of a handful of these then-elderly survivors of Europe's twentieth century genocide, many of whom have died since the film was made, including the suicide of Psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim (in 1990). They came chiefly to America and Britain in two waves: either during the years between World Wars I and II, or, in the second-and last-wave-until the early 1940s, when the Nazis and their sympathizers sealed the gates off the routes of escape forever to so many more.

The interviews freeze fleeting moments with some of the souls saved. These moments provide us, and future generations, with an eyewitness opportunity to connect their human faces, and the voices of their experiences, and suffering, with the political state ideology that pan-German Nazism specifically, and pan-European fascism and totalitarianism generally, sought systematically to destroy. Indeed, Europe's loss was our gain, many of those in the interviews comment.

The collective influence of those listed at the end of this review, both Jewish and non-Jewish (and those whose names were omitted) is inestimable. A fuller account of their contributions may, for instance, be gained by reading Claus-Dieter Krohn's Intellectuals in Exile: Refugee Scholars and the New School for Social Research (NSSR) (1993, University of Massachusetts Press), or University in Exile, as NSSR was known; or Lewis A. Coser's Refugee Scholars in America: Their Impact and Their Experiences (1984, Yale University Press).

By 1940, although some eight thousand European intellectuals had found refuge in America, thousands more were still trapped. The anti-immigrant, and anti- Jewish sentiment of the time is captured well in newsreel clippings: the red, contorted face of nativist demagogue Gerald L. K. Smith delivering an anti-foreigner speech. (Smith, The Exiles points out, was a protege of Louisiana's political boss Huey Long, himself the subject of a current film re-make.) Political cartoons of the time shown are interesting documents. One famous cartoon shows Native Americans being confronted by two Pilgrims, with the caption, "You can't come in. The quota for 1620 is full."

America's collective memory will be jarred by this film, as it is made clear the U.S. government's position towards the exiles is similarly riddled with nativist sentiment. Eleanor Roosevelt is only given a cursory mention; however, her efforts on behalf of Varian Fry, credited for saving at least 1,500 of the exiles, trapped in Vichy, France, is recounted through the words of Mary Jane Gold, identified only as an "American volunteer" in Fry's underground rescue group: "You felt it was the end of the world, and yet, it couldn't have been. You had to hope for the best." Fry (1907-1967) was a journalist who became acquainted with Mrs. Roosevelt; she provided him with access to sympathetic State Department officials in the U.S. and France such as Hiram Bingham IV, US Vice Consul in France, (1903-1988), who issued visas for those in his care, while Fry and his comrades created escape routes, through Portugal and Spain, the refugees escaping on foot through remote border checkpoints. Until Fry was arrested and forcibly deported from France, he continued to assist famous and not-so-famous exiles, for which he was posthumously awarded Yad Vashem's Righteous Among the Nations, at Israel's National Holocaust Memorial. (Bingham's career, sadly, came to an abrupt halt in 1945, when he was forced into retirement by the State Department. In May, 2006, the U.S. Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp of him.)

America's International Rescue Committee, formed in 1933, and spearheaded by Albert Einstein, gave Fry's rescue operation an operative and financial platform. In Fry's autobiography, Assignment: Rescue (1945, 1968: published jointly by Scholastic and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum), he recounts: "A group of men and women in New York, shocked by the news of this (Vichy-German) armistice, got together and formed the Emergency Rescue Committee. Its purpose: to get the artists, writers, musicians, scientists, professors, political figures-men and women whose works and words had made them enemies of the third Reich-out of France before they were seized by the Gestapo."

One of The Exiles interviewees, Poet Hans Sahl, remembers being notified that he was on Fry's "list": "I called the Hotel Splendide, and asked for Monsieur Fry. I knocked on the door, and he said to me, "We have been waiting for you." He gave me a suit, money, and a whiskey. I cried. I just cried. I couldn't take it any longer. Because it was a fairy tale."

In her interview, Gold stresses Fry's operation saved "People who worked in trade unions, minor journalists. We tried to save everyone the Germans were after, even though they were not on the original list. Since, in the black market, the value of a dollar was five times that of its value on the white market, we called it the 'Gold Eist' . I was very glad to be able to do that," she said, meaning, helping to bankroll the lists.

Culture shock that the exiles underwent in America took a heavy toll, even among the famous, which the documentary took pains to expose. In one of the film's unexpected lighter moments, Austrianborn conductor Erich Leinsdorf (1912-1993) remembers of his early days in New York City: "One day, I decided to see the play, The Far Off Hills. I was absolutely shattered. I hadn't understood a single word. Weeks later, someone asked me, 'Have you seen any shows?' I told him about my experience, and he said the players were from Dublin, and don't do plays in English, but in Gaelic. Well, I felt better!"

Another exile, the publisher Helen Wolff, painfully shares the culture shock in a more serious vein: "It was a loss of identity. People who were known were asked how to spell their name. You lost your identity and your language, and a certain way of expressing your personality. My husband only spoke German to our son," she says.

After World War II ended, members of this group had renewed reason for alarm, with the rise of McCarthyism. (For a fuller account, see Michael Paul Rogin's The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter 1967, the M.I.T. Press.) Social Scientist Konrad Kellen recounts: "Bertolt Brecht was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. It was crazy. He wasn't a Communist. Well, after that, he left the United States and went to Berlin. And he didn't even like Berlin."

Collectively, these interviewees express great concern for the future of civil society in America. Economist Adolf Loewe tells the camera: "In my old age, I have written a book. It is no scientific book; it has no footnotes. It is a book for the educated, common man. The preliminary title is, 'The Outlook for Freedom'. My conclusion is the outlook as we have known it, domestically, is very dim." One overarching question arises: In what condition is our freedom in America, in a continuous State of Emergency since the events of September 11, 2001? And, how would this question have been answered by Third Reich ideologue Carl Schmitt, if he had lived today? Another is: What is, and will be, the fate of those facing similar persecution?

In the film's opening, as in the closing, there is a dramatic reading of Sahls work, "We Are the Last Ones": We are the last ones. Question us. We are authentic."