As Martha continued preparations for distributing the shipment of milk, Waitstill made two stops on his way back to Lisbon, meeting with US and British military attachés in Barcelona and Madrid to share some ideas that he and Don Lowrie had worked out with Vohoc for rescuing the Czech troops at Agde. The soldiers had been slipping out in small groups on French fishing boats to Spain, from where they had to find their way to Portugal and then Britain. Some had escaped by foot over the Pyrenees. To exfiltrate them in greater numbers, Lowrie had proposed two plans. The first would be to commission about a dozen French fishing boats that would each take twenty men to meet up with a British destroyer. The second, more ambitious plan would put six hundred soldiers on a Yugoslav ship, then in the harbor at Marseille, for transport to North Africa. Because Yugoslavia was neutral at that time, the Czechs could reasonably expect that the inspection of a ship from a neutral country would be perfunctory. The harbor inspectors agreed to the deal provided Lowrie could get authorization from Vichy. After weeks of negotiation, he was able to get authorization, but within hours of the ship’s planned departure, the Petain government changed the rules. Henceforth, ships leaving Mediterranean ports would have to be inspected by French, German, and Italian officials.
While the trickle of escapes continued—about four hundred of the soldiers eventually made their way out—a significant number of the rest melted into the surrounding countryside to work abandoned farms. Some of them trained members of the French resistance in the use of firearms.1 It is not known how many survived the war.
As he retraced the milk shipment’s route from Lisbon, Waitstill discovered that the two railroad cars had been halted at the Portuguese-Spanish border because the shipment Madame Amé-LeRoy had facilitated lacked a full and detailed manifest, as the law demanded. Back in Lisbon, when (with not a small amount of annoyance) he gave the news to the embarrassed woman, she immediately set about correcting that oversight.
It was time to set up the Unitarian Service Committee refugee office, and after three weeks away, Waitstill found a mountain of cable traffic awaiting his attention. A selection of the messages from individuals and organizations such as the USC, AmRelCzech, and the Joint Distribution Committee suggests the breadth of problems and issues that the would-be émigrés faced and aid workers such as Waitstill tried to solve:
KINDLY LOOK FOR LOTTE BRAUN WITH SON EIGHT YEAR.
UNITARIAN SERVICE COMMITTEE REQUEST DELIVERY FIFTY DOLLARS GEORGE POPPER PALAIS DU FOIRE LYON OR AMERICAN CONSUL LYON AND ARRANGE TRANSIT LISBON AFFIDAVITS SECURED QUOTA NUMBER UP.
WATCH FOR OTTO BOSTROM SWEDISH PASSPORT FURTHER INFORMATION FOLLOWS DEXTER.
To help with the ever-increasing paperwork, Waitstill hired Ninon Tallon, an actress and a refugee from the south of France. She was the niece of Édouard Herriot, leader of France’s Radical Party, who served three terms as France’s prime minister. Waitstill found her efficient and intelligent.
In the pile of correspondence was a wire from Marion Niles, their friend and a member of the church in Wellesley Hills who was writing to inform them that Martha Content had developed a bad strep infection. Dr. Lyman Richards, the family physician, recommended that Martha Content’s tonsils be removed at once. Waitstill cabled back authorization for Richards to immediately perform the procedure and sent a copy of the correspondence on to Martha. In truth, their daughter also had contracted pneumonia and was in far more serious condition than Waitstill knew. What he did know, however, was that her condition was further indication that a potential war zone was no place for a couple with responsibility for young children. As he later wrote to Frederick May Eliot, only childless people should be considered for future overseas work.
There was, as well, a note from Frank Kingdon, president of the University of Newark. It would profoundly impact Waitstill’s work. Kingdon was executive director of the newly organized Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC). Formed at a June 1940 meeting in New York City’s Commodore Hotel just after the French capitulated to Germany, the ERC proposed to rescue anti-Nazi artists, writers, and political and labor leaders who were trapped in unoccupied France. Erika Mann, daughter of novelist Thomas Mann and wife of poet W. H. Auden, was a founding member. ERC’s sponsors included distinguished public figures such as journalist Dorothy Thompson, writer Elmer Davis, Commonweal editor George Shuster, and three college presidents besides Kingdon.
The committee’s first steps were to solicit names of the imperiled in southern France and then compile dossiers that included identifying information, such as occupation, place of origin, and, most important, the individual’s last known address in France. This effort had the strong support of Eleanor Roosevelt, Interior Secretary Ickes, and others in the Roosevelt administration.
Unfortunately, all visa applications for potential rescues required approval of the anti-Semitic, xenophobic Breckinridge Long, an assistant secretary of state whose self-appointed task was to keep Jews and anyone who might, because of nationality, be a Nazi spy or sympathizer, out of the United States.
Kingdon, with whom Martha and Waitstill were acquainted, informed Waitstill that the ERC’s new representative, thirty-two-year-old Varian Fry, would arrive in Lisbon from the United States on August 6 and that the ERC would appreciate any assistance Waitstill could extend him since Fry had no experience in relief work.
Fresh off the Pan Am Clipper from New York, with a list of two hundred people who, Breckinridge Long notwithstanding, had been given emergency visitors’ visas, Fry was much in need of mentoring by seasoned veterans of the work, which would have included members of the Joint Distribution Committee, the Quakers, and HICEM, a Jewish refugee aid organization.
As Waitstill explained in a letter, “For three days I tried to teach Fry the fundamentals of finding people in hiding without exposing them, and how important it was for a refugee worker to keep a low profile. I tried to help Fry work out a plan to find and help each of his intellectuals to escape. I also gave him introductions to Richard Allen, Hugh Fullerton and Don Lowrie.”
Waitstill told Fry of the milk shipment for the children of Pau.
“Sharp asked me to follow it up, and I agreed,” Fry later wrote. “He gave me letters to the shipping and forwarding agents all along the line and a card making me a delegate pro tem of the Unitarian Service Committee. I was glad to get those credentials: they promised to be useful camouflage to my real activities, more useful by far than my other letters.”2
In addition, Waitstill taught Fry about Spanish and French money regulations and the intricacies of moving cash across international borders. In Spain, Fry would have to declare every cent of foreign exchange that he took into the country and account for it all when he left. It would all be written down in his passport. If he left the country with more foreign exchange than when he had entered, he’d be arrested at the frontier.
The French, Waitstill advised, would confiscate Fry’s money at the border, then reimburse him several weeks later with francs pegged artificially high at forty-three and a half to the dollar. The only solution was to ask the French chargé d’affaires in Lisbon for special permission to take his money into France for relief work.
“I sat up all night that night writing my last reports to New York and making a list of harmless pseudonyms for every one of the refugees on my long list,” Fry wrote. “I left one copy under Sharp’s door and mailed another to New York. The third I folded in a tight wad and put in the little front pocket under the belt of my trousers. Now I could safely cable from France without letting the Gestapo know I was trying to save the men and women it was looking for.”3
On August 20, 1940, five days after he first arrived in Marseille from Lisbon, Fry sent Waitstill a note on Hotel Splendide stationery. The hand-delivered message arrived five days later back in Lisbon. “Dear Sharp,” it read, “I followed the milk through, and am glad to be able to tell you that it crossed the French frontier last week and ought by this time to have reached its destination. I telegraphed Mrs. Lowrie as soon as I was sure both wagons were over the border.”
The rest of the typewritten letter reflects how quickly the two men had come to trust and rely upon one another. “We have had no news from you so far,” Fry continued,
and so we have no information about developments in Lisbon. I have asked Mr. Aisenberg, who brings this letter, to speak to you about this. We are naturally all very eager to have news of our friends, for living in France today is rather like living on the moon.
I am also asking my people in New York to authorize you to give out relief funds to anyone on our lists who is in need there. Persons of Hebraic origin may of course be referred to HICEM and it is better that they should be, for our funds are very limited. But I am counting on you to take care of the others. I hope you will also keep New York informed by frequent letters, such as I wrote before I left Lisbon. I am also asking New York to get a man to Lisbon as quickly as possible; so that there will be someone to replace you when you have to leave.
Good luck. Give my warmest regards to the Riesers, and tell them that I hope their relatives will soon be with them. Yours most warmly, Varian Fry.
By the time Fry left Lisbon, his list of people to be rescued had swelled to perhaps as many as three thousand. With Waitstill—and then with the Rev. Charles Joy, who replaced the Sharps in August as his liaison in Lisbon—Fry would spend thirteen months directing a bold, high-risk, and much-celebrated refugee-smuggling operation in the south of France that included an all-star cast of Kulturträgers, among them artists Marc Chagall and Max Ernst, writer André Breton, and philosopher Hannah Arendt.
In early August, Waitstill also heard once more from Robert Dexter, who telegrammed that Ernest Swift, a US Red Cross official, had complained to him by letter that with the milk shipment the Unitarians were wandering onto Red Cross turf. “It seems to me and to Mr. Gano, with whom I talked after receiving this letter,” Dexter went on, “that we must not tangle things up by going into relief, and particularly the sending of goods. You ought to be able to arrange to use Red Cross supplies or any others that are available, but we will get both you and ourselves in trouble if we attempt to ship goods.... I am sure that it was only because you saw the urgent need that you went into the relief business, but hope you can straighten things out with the Red Cross, and that we won’t have to do it again. Also, I do not see any way by which we could ship much in the way of supplies without crippling our other work.”
Waitstill wrote back in exasperation, reminding Dexter, “Martha and I came over on this commission with the clear understanding that we held a roving commission. Over and over it was said, ‘We will back you in whatever you decide is the best course of action on the spot.’ The general idea is that we began where the Red Cross left off, with services of a personal nature AND with the material relief which the Red Cross was unable to administer. AND THAT IS PRECISELY JUST WHAT WE HAVE DONE, if both you and Swift will let up on the anvil chorus long enough to learn the facts.”