Netflix’s ‘Transatlantic’: Rescue of WWII Refugees

In 1940, American journalist Varian Fry was sent to Marseille to help Europeans fleeing Nazi terror. Working on behalf of the American Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC) and with the help of American heiress Mary Jayne Gold, who provided financial and logistical assistance, Fry and his team rescued more than 2,000 people.

Among them were some of Europe’s greatest artists and intellectuals, including philosopher Hannah Arendt, as well as artists Marc Chagall, Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp – who helped spark an intellectual renaissance in America.

“It’s the greatest story never told,” says Berlin-based American writer and producer Anna Winger, who turned the story of Fry and the ERC into a seven-part “Transatlantic” series. for Netflix. “Everybody who lived through it was a writer or an artist. They’ve all written memoirs, plays, fiction, stories and novels. So there’s actually a lot of material about it once you get into it.”

Winger also wrote and produced the Emmy Award-winning “Unorthodox” for Netflix – the story of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish woman who flees a closed Hasidic community in Brooklyn for freedom in Berlin – and the Amazon series “Deutschland ’83/’86/’89” — a cold war thriller told from the perspective of an East German spy.

She first heard about Fry and the ERC from her father, who, as a professor at Harvard, had known the famous economist Albert Hirschman. Hirschman, played by Austrian newcomer Lucas Englander in the Netflix series, was a German-Jewish refugee who remained in Marseille to help others escape.

But Winger was inspired to try to tell Fry’s story when she experienced a refugee crisis firsthand in Berlin in 2015.

“My office was at Tempelhof Airport in Berlin and downstairs in the hangars was the first point of entry for refugees who were mostly coming from Syria. And so we were all volunteers there,” she recalled. “My daughter, who was 12 or 13 at the time, said, ‘Well, you know, it’s just people like us, except people like us used to leave Berlin. And now these people are coming here to seek refuge’.”

In 2019, while Winger was making “Unorthodox”, American novelist Julie Orringer published “The Flight Portfolio”, a fiction of Fry and the exploits of the ERC in Marseille. “It looked like kismet,” says Winger. “So I opted for the book and that’s how the whole thing came together.”

Taking inspiration from ‘Casablanca’

Instead of trying to make a docudrama, Anna Winger and co-writer Daniel Hendler created “Transatlantic” as a fictional romantic adventure, inspired by Hollywood films of the day.

“I read a little bit about the making of ‘Casablanca,’ which is one of my favorite movies, and the fact that many of the people who worked on that movie were actually recent German immigrants,” says Winger. “They were suddenly, in real time, dealing with World War II and the news from home, all the trauma and tragedy and channeling it into humor and romance.”

The conventions of 1940s melodramas and screwball comedies inform the pacing and storytelling of “Transatlantic,” which focuses not only on Fry, played by Cory Michael Smith, and the ERC, but also on an imaginary romance between Hirschman (Lucas Englander ) and Mary Jayne. Gold (Gillian Jakobs), who in the Netflix series, has a parallel role as a spy for British intelligence, helping to free some British soldiers from a Nazi POW camp.

Some of the show’s strongest scenes are comedy set pieces. German actor Alexander Fehling delivers a delightfully campy performance as an over-the-top Max Ernst. “Deutschland ’83” star Jonas Nay makes a cameo as German satirist Walter Mehring, and hosts a musical cabaret show.

“I think, in a way, that’s the truth of hard times,” says Lucas Englander. “There’s a reason why people in Ukraine are keeping their spirits so high right now, because they’re not willing to say ‘I would give up’. They’re willing to say, ‘I’m going to go on and, and I’m going to stay, and you can’t take my mood away because it’s stronger than you’.”

A ‘positive story for refugees’

Alongside rescue efforts, which included dramatic attempts to transport refugees across the Pyrenees to Spain or stow away on cargo ships bound for the Americas, the series explores the undercurrents of a broader revolution that was beginning to take shape. .

“When France was still fighting the Nazis, all kinds of people from the French colonies in Central Africa, North Africa and Asia were brought in, and after Paris fell these people were released from service, but they were still in the country”, he said. says Anna Winger. “It was the beginning of the French Resistance and many Africans were part of that process. And because everything is connected, the French Resistance was also the beginning of the end of the colonial system. never would have had the chance to meet. It spawned new ideas about freedom.”

These different stories of freedom – Jewish refugees fleeing Europe for freedom from terror in the US, African revolutionaries fighting to free France from the Nazis and eventually Africa from France, even Mary Jane Gold finding personal freedom from her patriarchal American family among this ragtag group of European artists – is the unifying force of “Transatlantic”.

“This is a positive story for refugees, explicitly. It’s not controversial, but it is,” says Winger. “In this story, you have all the refugees who are trying to come to America looking for political freedom.

“Transatlantic” premieres worldwide April 7 on Netflix.

Edited by: Brenda Haas