Consequences, a parlour game. Draw a head on a piece of paper. Pass it folded. Draw a body on the piece you receive . . . Next time you dredge up that old game, perhaps to entertain the kids on a wintry weekend, spare a thought for its history. Originally called Cadavre Exquis, it provided light relief for a group of refugees in wartime France.
From October 1940 a number of artists threatened with deportation from France to Germany under the notorious "surrender on demand" clause (Number 19) of the armistice, gathered on Sundays in a villa in Marseilles. Fugitive members of the surrealist movement, they came to the aptly named villa "Air Bel" to play "Exquisite Corpse", to exhibit their work, and, in the words of a great wartime movie, "to wait . . . and wait . . . and wait . . ."
The villa's occupants included the pope of surrealism, Andre Breton, his wife, the painter Jacqueline Lamba, Max Ernst and writer and itinerant revolutionary, Victor Serge, who renamed it "Chateau Espere Visa". Their American host and saviour was a 32-year-old classics scholar, driving force of the US-funded Centre Americain de Secours (American Rescue Centre).
The classicist seemed an unlikely candidate for the role of Pimpernel. With his wavy, neatly-brushed hair and horn-rimmed specs he was a passable stand-in for Harold Lloyd, or perhaps Clark Kent. His manner, too, had more of the mild alter-ego than the superhero about it. One photograph taken at Air Bel shows him pensively drying the dishes. As he said: "I didn't give the impression of being hotheaded." Almost the only unusual thing about him was his name: Varian Mackey Fry. After becoming involved in work to help evacuees in the US, he had been asked to go to France as emissary for the New York-based Emergency Rescue Committee, but once in France stayed for a year helping those in danger to escape. The abnormality of the situation was not lost on Fry, who later wrote to his wife that Europe had become a strange place in which great artists were "reduced to hanging around patiently in an unimportant, young American's waiting room".
Ninety-year-old Lisa Fittko, a surviving member of the organisation, confirms that Fry was polite but not very talkative. Yet "he was definitely the boss". His powers did not stretch to lifting ocean liners in distress, but did enable him, between August 1940 and September 1941, to lift hundreds of threatened souls to safety.
Fry was highly persuasive in his dealings with authority. The minions of Vichy and (with almost the sole exception of their vice-consul, Hiram Bingham jnr) American bureaucrats in Marseilles were hostile and obstructive. Nevertheless, with the aid of legitimate and forged passports and visas, with funds from wealthy sympathisers such as Peggy Guggenheim and Mary Jayne Gold, by legal and clandestine means, Fry got some 2,000 refugees out of Petainist France.
Some, such as Marc Chagall and the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, were celebrities whose names appeared on the alphabetical list with which Fry's American sponsors had equipped him, and which he described as "obviously arbitrary and drawn up in haste". Others were ordinary individuals whose lives, by reason of race or politics, were in imminent danger.
Naturally, Fry could not work alone, so he had to be equally persuasive in recruiting helpers for the perilous task. He wasted no time.
Soon after his arrival in wartime France, Fry met Hans and Lisa Fittko in a bar in Marseilles. A few days previously Lisa Fittko had gone to check out possible escape routes in the Pyrenees. With the aid of Vincent Azema, mayor of Banyulssur-Mer, a coastal town near the border, she made her first crossing, smuggling the philosopher Walter Benjamin into Spain.
"We had had plenty of experience already smuggling people out of Germany into Holland and Czechoslovakia," Fittko explains. "So Fry was keen to use us . . . and very persuasive."
As veteran anti-fascists the Fittkos were already in danger, added to which compliant Vichy was executing those caught helping others to escape. Nevertheless, the Fittkos returned to Banyuls-sur-Mer.
"We planned to help for a few weeks, but ended up staying seven months," Lisa Fittko says.
Aided by Azema and briefly by Walter Meyerhof, whose father, a Nobel prizewinner, had already fled on a Fry passport, they took refugees across two or three times a week.
"We'd set off early pretending to be vineyard workers," Fittko explains. "If the people were old, it took a day to cross."
Known at the CAS as route "F" the Fittkos's was one of the most consistently successful exits employed by "la filiere Fry" (Fry's network).
Varian Fry's firm sense of purpose enabled him to remain supervising the flight of others. His visit in August 1940 was to have lasted three weeks. Yet he managed to stay a year, a thorn in the side of his own government's policy of appeasement and of Petain's collaboration with the Third Reich. Fry's personal mission ended involuntarily in September 1941 when he was expelled from France.
As his right-hand man, Daniel Benedite, wrote later: "He never capitulated, he stayed firm, smiling and full of compassion."
In November 1941, Fry arrived in New York and the Fittkos finally left Banyuls. "We took advantage of two weeks when the frontier was open," Lisa explained. "Fry had arranged everything. It was almost funny leaving like that after all those illegal crossings."
Varian Fry may never find a Kenneally or Spielberg to tell his story, but its importance has gradually been acknowledged. In April 1967, shortly before his death in relative obscurity, he was honoured by the French. And in February 1996 his was the only American name included, like Schindler's, "amongst the Just" at Yad Vashem by the state of Israel.
Sadly, great artists' memories seem shorter. Only Lipchitz contributed with good grace to the exhibition Fry was asked to organise in 1965 to commemorate the Rescue Committee's work. Others appeared to have forgotten how much they owed him, the man who had enabled them to play at exquisite corpses instead of becoming them.