Marc Chagall was a Belarusian, Russian and French artist. An early modernist, he was associated with the École de Paris as well as several major artistic styles and created works in a wide range of artistic formats, including painting, drawings, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramics, tapestries and fine art prints.
Franz Viktor Werfel was an Austrian-Bohemian novelist, playwright, and poet whose career spanned World War I, the Interwar period, and World War II. He is primarily known as the author of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, a novel based on events that took place during the Armenian genocide of 1915, and The Song of Bernadette (1941), a novel about the life and visions of the French Catholic saint Bernadette Soubirous, which was made into a Hollywood film of the same name.
Alma Mahler-Werfel was an Austrian composer, author, editor, and socialite. Musically active from her early years, she was the composer of nearly fifty songs for voice and piano, and works in other genres as well. 17 songs are known to have survived. At 15, she was mentored by Max Burckhard.
Varian Mackey Fry was an American journalist. Fry ran a rescue network in Vichy France from August 1940 to September 1941 that helped 2,000 anti-Nazi and Jewish refugees, mostly artists and intellectuals, escape from persecution by Nazi Germany during World War II.
Lion Feuchtwanger was a German Jewish novelist and playwright. A prominent figure in the literary world of Weimar Germany, he influenced contemporaries including playwright Bertolt Brecht.
Hiram "Harry" Bingham IV was an American diplomat. He served as a Vice Consul in Marseilles, France, during World War II, and, along with several humanitarian organizations, helped more than 2,500 refugees, mostly Jews, to escape after the country was defeated by Nazi Germany in June 1940.
Mary Jayne Gold was an American heiress who played an important role helping European Jews and intellectuals escape from Nazi-occupied France in 1940–41, during World War II. Many had fled there in preceding years from Germany, where oppression had mounted.
Miriam Davenport or Miriam Davenport Ebel was an American painter and sculptor, She worked with Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee in 1940 helping European Jewish and intellectuals refugees escape from German-occupied France during World War II.
Lionel Chetwynd is a British-American screenwriter, director and producer.
Walter Mehring was a German author and one of the most prominent satirical authors in the Weimar Republic. He was banned during the Third Reich and fled the country.
Charles Fernley Fawcett was an American adventurer, soldier, film actor, and a co-founder of the International Medical Corps. He was a recipient of the French Croix de Guerre and the American Eisenhower medal. Varian Fry, his longtime associate, described him as "a moral adventurer".
Waitstill Hastings Sharp was an American Unitarian minister who was involved in humanitarian and relief work in Czechoslovakia and southern Europe in 1939 and 1940, just before and during World War II. With his wife, Martha, he provided relief aid to refugees, many of them Jewish, fleeing from Nazi Germany and countries under Nazi control and assisted people in danger of persecution to flee Czechoslovakia and France and resettle in the United States and elsewhere. In 2005, Wainstill and Martha were named by Yad Vashem as Righteous among the Nations, the second and third of five Americans to receive this honor.
Raymond Couraud, was a French soldier and gangster, who through his World War II military exploits became a highly decorated member of the French-section of the British Army's Special Air Service.
German Exilliteratur is the name for works of German literature written in the German diaspora by refugee authors who fled from Nazi Germany, Nazi Austria, and the occupied territories between 1933 and 1945. These dissident writers, poets and artists, many of whom were of Jewish ancestry or held anti-Nazi beliefs, fled into exile in 1933 after the Nazi Party came to power in Germany and after Nazi Germany annexed Austria by the Anschluss in 1938, abolished the freedom of press, and started to prosecute authors and ban works.
Marta Feuchtwanger was the irrepressible and somewhat eccentric third child of a prosperous Munich businessman who in 1912 married the author Lion Feuchtwanger. Although they married only after Marta became pregnant with Feuchtwanger's child, the marriage lasted forty-six years and she became both a devoted wife and a huge influence on his work. The Jewish couple were forced to emigrate during the Hitler period. After her husband died in 1958 Marta Feuchtwanger spent nearly three decades as a high-profile widow in Los Angeles.
Robert Cloutman Dexter was the founder of the Unitarian Service Committee, which worked before and during World War II to rescue and assist refugees from Nazi Germany. Dexter headed the Unitarian's office in Lisbon, Portugal during World War II. The Unitarians and other humanitarian organizations helped thousands of intellectuals and artists, many of them Jews, fleeing the Nazis to emigrate to safety in the United States and other countries. Dexter also worked with the clandestine Office of Strategic Services (OSS), providing information about Nazi Germany to the U.S. from his network of refugee workers in France, Spain, and Portugal.
Pierre Sauvage is a French-American documentary filmmaker and lecturer, who was a child survivor of the Holocaust. He is described by Tablet Magazine as "a filmmaker of rare moral perception."
Led by Philippe Pétain, the Vichy regime that replaced the French Third Republic in 1940 chose the path of collaboration with the Nazi occupiers. This policy included the Bousquet-Oberg accords of July 1942 that formalized the collaboration of the French police with the German police. This collaboration was manifested in particular by anti-Semitic measures taken by the Vichy government, and by its active participation in the genocide.
Justus Rosenberg was a literature professor who spent most of his life teaching in the United States, ending his career as a professor emeritus of languages and literature at Bard College. Before that, as a teenager he began playing a role in saving many lives when the Nazis overran France, working first as part of a French-American network organized to help anti-Nazi intellectuals and artists escape from Vichy France to the United States, and later as a member of the French Resistance during World War II, providing assistance as well to the US Army.
Donald Alexander Lowrie, is best known for his work with the YMCA in France during World War II in 1940 and 1941. He helped anti-Nazi and Jewish refugees escape from Vichy France, which was dominated by Nazi Germany. Author Susan Subak said of the rescue activities in France that "it is the small group of American Christians overseas -- the Unitarian Service Committee and their collaborators, Varian Fry and Donald Lowrie -- who risked their lives over many months living in hardship in Europe and who embodied rescue and flight." Lowrie in France, who had much more international experience than most American aid workers, was effective while skirting the boundaries of legality but maintaining good relations with the governments of Vichy France and the U.S. which accorded a low priority to the fate of the refugees, especially leftists, in France.
