The IRC’s founders responded to the rise of Nazi terror with swift, independent action. Thanks to the daring work of Varian Fry and others, thousands of refugees were able to escape from Nazi-occupied France. More than that, however, the IRC stayed with the suffering refugees of Europe long after the guns of World War II had fallen silent. We helped Europe’s displaced to return to their homes, and we aided the brave Hungarian revolutionaries in 1956.

By 1960, the IRC faced a crossroads. The IRC had begun as a temporary committee, arising from a crisis in Europe. The question that now arose went to the core of the IRC’s mission and was to determine its course into the 21st century. Did the IRC’s mandate extend to aiding the many thousands of refugees being driven from their homes in Asia, Africa, and Latin America?

The IRC’s leadership decided that to limit its mission to the borders of Europe would betray the impulse on which it was founded. Instead, the IRC determined that the organization had a global mission and responsibility. From 1960 to 1967, the IRC helped people fleeing Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Angola, Uganda, and Nigeria.

During those same years, the IRC began a long-term relationship with people fleeing Cuba. In 1959, rebel forces in Cuba overthrew its unpopular dictator, Fulgencio Batista. A young revolutionary by the name of Fidel Castro took control of the government. By year’s end he had drawn closer to the Soviet Union and committed a series of political executions and expulsions.

So began a new flow of refugees, one that would profoundly shape the IRC’s emerging international role.

Within a month of Castro’s rise to power, the IRC was on the scene gathering information and soon become one of the principal agencies helping Cubans to reach America, resettling more than 62,000 during the 1960s and 70s. As more and more refugees arrived in Florida, the IRC opened an office in Miami, its first resettlement office outside New York. IRC caseworkers focused on helping to find jobs, a place to live, and warm clothes for the refugees. Today, the IRC’s 25 U.S. resettlement offices carry out much the same work.

In 1969, two young Cubans hid in a wheel compartment on a jetliner bound for Madrid. One of the refugees dropped into the sea; but the other, a 17-year-old, miraculously survived the nine-hour flight. With the IRC’s sponsorship, he found a home in the United States. Then IRC president William J. vanden Heuvel reported that when asked why the young man had taken such an incredible risk, the new refugee replied, “I was looking for a better world and a new future.”

In the fall of 1956, a cable was sent from Vienna to IRC headquarters in New York:

Best we can do to demonstrate solidarity with hungarian liberation forces… is to rush at once massive quantities relief supplies … we are preparing  for tragic possibility soviet recapture control of hungary, when countless escapees will flood into austria and must be ready with resources.

It was signed by IRC chairman Leo Cherne and president Angier Biddle Duke.

A week earlier, on October 23, Hungarian workers, students, and intellectuals publicly proclaimed their desire to be free from domination by the Soviet Union. Staging a peaceful demonstration in Budapest, two thousand marchers made their way to Parliament Square, where the secret police fired upon them. The news spread quickly and disorder and violence erupted throughout the capital. The revolt spread across Hungary and the pro-Soviet government fell. The Red Army intervened but failed to crush the movement and withdrew from Budapest.

From Vienna, Cherne and the director of the IRC’s Vienna office, Marcel Faust, crossed the border into Hungary in a battered Chevrolet loaded with medicine – the first American relief workers to arrive on the scene.  Since the end of World War II and the division of Europe into rival Soviet and Western blocs, the IRC had been aiding stateless refugees and escapees from the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain. Now, the IRC was at the vanguard of the Hungarian rescue mission: While Duke organized refugee assistance in Vienna, Cherne returned to the U.S. to raise funds.

Within 60 days, $2.5 million had collected from the American public – $357,000 of it raised after a passionate appearance by Cherne on the popular Ed Sullivan television show.

On November 4, the Red Army moved into Budapest and this time crushed the revolt. In the aftermath some 200,000 Hungarians fled into Austria. IRC volunteers were among the many that stood on the border to offer aid, encouragement, and support to the refugees.

The burden of so many refugees was more than Austria could handle.  So the IRC stepped up its activities in several European countries. We opened health and training centers and homes for children in Great Britain, Belgium, West Germany, and Sweden.

Cherne and the IRC brought several leaders of the revolution to the U.S to tell their stories to the American people, including the Mayor of Budapest. Many Hungarian refugees were resettled in this country. Long after the Hungarian revolt had been crushed and had faded from the headlines, the IRC continued working to integrate Hungarian refugees into their new environment.

In 1940, shortly after the world watched the appalling spectacle of Nazi troops goose-stepping down the Champs-Élysées in Paris, a 32-year old American editor by the name of Varian Fry settled into a small hotel in Marseille, France. There he initiated a clandestine operation to rescue some of Europe’s most famous artists, writers, and intellectuals who had fled to France.  Among them were many whose names were on the Nazis’ most wanted list.

Fry had been sent on his mission by the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC), which would combine in 1942 with the International Relief Association to form the International Rescue Committee. 

Fry arrived in Marseille with $3,000 strapped to one of his legs and a list of some 200 artists thought to be in particular danger.  But once Fry set up his operation, he recognized that the need was much greater.  Consequently, he expanded his mission to rescue many more in flight from the Nazis and their collaborators.

Over the next 13 months, Fry and a small team of Americans and French helped at least 1,500 refugees escape from France to Spain and provided aid to more than 2,000 others.  Among those spirited out of France were the painters Marc Chagall and Max Ernst, the philosopher Hannah Arendt, and Nobel Prize winning medical researcher Otto Meyerhof.

Within a year, the collaborationist Vichy French government learned of Fry’s efforts.  In August 1941, he was expelled “for helping Jews and anti-Nazis.”  In 1942, the ERC office was raided and closed.

Back in New York, Fry loudly, but in the end futilely, tried to alert the world to what would come to be known as the Holocaust.  “There are things so horrible that decent men and women find them impossible to believe,” Fry wrote in The New Republic in December 1942.  He continued, “their ends are the enslavement and annihilation of the Jews . . . [and] after them, of all the non-German peoples of Europe, and if possible, the entire world.”

It was many years before Fry’s exploits won the recognition they deserved.  Five months before his death in 1967, France awarded him the French Legion of Honor.  In 1996, Israel honored him posthumously, when he became the first American to receive its “Righteous Among Nations” medal.

The conviction exemplified in the determination of Varian Fry, that every life has dignity and is worth saving, remains the foundation of the IRC.

In January 1933, Adolf Hitler, the head of the Nazi party, became chancellor of Germany. Within two months, the Nazis had gained virtually total control of the country and had begun what would be a 12-year nightmare eventually engulfing the entire world.  For starters, Germany’s labor unions and opposing political parties were banned.  Civil liberties were suspended.  And the purging of Jews from the German government and universities was launched. 

Although much of the world greeted the Nazi takeover with indifference or apathy, some people were alert to what was happening and the threat it represented.

In July 1933, a committee of 51 prominent Americans was established in New York at the request of German-born physicist Albert Einstein in his role as head of the International Relief Association.  The Americans included intellectuals, artists, and members of the clergy.  Among them were the philosopher John Dewey, the writer John Dos Passos, and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. 

The committee established offices at 11 West 42nd St., opposite Bryant Park and not far from our current headquarters location.  Its mission, as The New York Times reported on July 24, 1933, was to “assist Germans suffering from the policies of the Hitler regime.”  And so came into being the organization that would grow into today’s International Rescue Committee.  Although the IRC today is vastly larger and more complex than it was at the beginning, we are still motivated by the same concern that led to our founding: a commitment to fellow human beings who are suffering as the result of persecution, war, or civil conflict.