Assignment Rescue

The narration, spoken by celebrated actress Meryl Streep, provides the historical context for this compelling but little known tale of a young American who helped save several thousand political and intellectual refugees in the early years of World War II. Fry died in 1967, an unknown American Schindler, his courage largely unrecognized. Only recently has the United States begun to honor this authentic American hero. In 1996 Varian Fry became the only American to be honored as one of the “Righteous Among the Nations” at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. In the words of former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, “We owe Varian Fry our deepest gratitude, but we also owe him a promise – a promise never to forget the horrors that he struggled against so heroically, a promise to do whatever is necessary to ensure that such horrors never happen again.”