Bill frieder biography

On August 4, 1940, eager passengers waited in line to board Pan American Airways’ Boeing 314 Dixie Clipper at New York’s La Guardia airport for the flight to Marseille, France. On board that summer day was an ordinary-looking man of 32, a Harvard intellectual, a loner who shunned the limelight and carried $3,000 strapped to his belt.

Along with the money, Varian Fry carried a list of 200 of the brightest names in the fields of art, science, literature and medicine who were trapped in Nazi-occupied France. Fry was about to embark on one of the most dangerous yet least known rescue missions of World War II.

At the time of his flight, Fry was an editor with the Foreign Policy Association’s Headline Books and a member of the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC), which had been established to rescue the most important intellectuals stranded in France, many of whom were just one knock on the door away from being sent to prison camps by the Germans.

He was multilingual, sp