Monday, June 5, 2006
courage under fire is not always about physical bullets
Today, the day before the 62nd anniversary of Battle of Normandy, it is appropriate to note that in a month, on July 17th, we can also observe the 103rd anniversary of Harry S. Bingham IV's birth. Who is that, you ask? Well, he is a thoughtful and decent man, someone we should all know about and emulate (h/t and thanks to Wide Awake Cafe). He is the kind of man who made June 6, 1944 possible.
Bingham's flashy biography includes a mother, Alfreda Mitchell (granddaughter of Charles Tiffany, the founder of Tiffany & Co.) and a father, Hiram Bingham III (U.S. Senator and governor of Connecticut, an archaeologist who discovered the lost Inca city of Machu Picchu in Peru in 1911 and upon whom Steven Spielberg modeled Indiana Jones). Bingham graduated from Groton, Yale and Harvard Law, and entered the foreign service third in his class, serving first in Peking, China. By 1936 he was a U.S vice-consul in charge of visas, in Marseilles, France, putting him right where one Varian Fry found him in August 1940.
A month earlier, the French Government had surrendered to the Nazis, dividing France into two zones, one including Paris and administrated by Nazis and the other administered by the French at Vichy. The U.S. had not yet joined the War and did not do so until late 1941, and was for the time being intent on maintaining good relations with the Vichy government.
Fry, an American journalist determined to save all European intellectuals from the Naziis, was a volunteer with the Emergency Rescue Committee (now the International Rescue Committee) founded by German author Thomas Mann to raise funds and obtain U.S. visas for Jews, anti-Nazi Germans and others in France or concentration camps. When he arrived in Marseilles, Fry joined forces with two vice-consuls, one of whom was Harry Bingham, and eventually Bingham issued visas and travel documents that saved an estimated 2,500 lives. Among them were painter Marc Chagall, Nobel prize-winner Otto Meyerhof and philosopher Hannah Arendt. At one point he arranged for novelist Lion Feuchtwanger to be smuggled out of an internment camp disguised in women's clothing and then hid Feuchtwanger in his home until he could get him out of the country.
Unfortunately the State Department's desire to work with the Vichy government at the time led to its actively discouraging Bingham. He resigned from the foreign service and never wrote about his WWII work nor told any of his eleven children about it. A few years after his 1988 death his youngest son, William, found a bundle of letters and other documents behind a fireplace in the family home, revealing the amazing story. It took much letter writing and other efforts until 2002 when Secretary of State Colin L. Powell presented Bingham's children with a "Courageous Diplomat" award, praising Bingham's "constructive dissent." The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and Wally Findlay Galleries International, among others, joined the celebration that took place in the Rayburn House Office Building and included Chagall's granddaughter, Bella Meyer, and two recipients of Bingham-procured visas, one of whom said, "There were never enough visas, but somehow, when a Martinique-bound boat became available, Bingham produced 800 of them in 48 hours."
And on May 24 of this year, "Hiram Bingham IV, a U.S. diplomat whose unselfish actions in saving Jews from the Nazi Holocaust cost him his diplomatic career, was honored by the U.S. Postal Service in a commemorative stamp."
Bingham's flashy biography includes a mother, Alfreda Mitchell (granddaughter of Charles Tiffany, the founder of Tiffany & Co.) and a father, Hiram Bingham III (U.S. Senator and governor of Connecticut, an archaeologist who discovered the lost Inca city of Machu Picchu in Peru in 1911 and upon whom Steven Spielberg modeled Indiana Jones). Bingham graduated from Groton, Yale and Harvard Law, and entered the foreign service third in his class, serving first in Peking, China. By 1936 he was a U.S vice-consul in charge of visas, in Marseilles, France, putting him right where one Varian Fry found him in August 1940.
A month earlier, the French Government had surrendered to the Nazis, dividing France into two zones, one including Paris and administrated by Nazis and the other administered by the French at Vichy. The U.S. had not yet joined the War and did not do so until late 1941, and was for the time being intent on maintaining good relations with the Vichy government.
Fry, an American journalist determined to save all European intellectuals from the Naziis, was a volunteer with the Emergency Rescue Committee (now the International Rescue Committee) founded by German author Thomas Mann to raise funds and obtain U.S. visas for Jews, anti-Nazi Germans and others in France or concentration camps. When he arrived in Marseilles, Fry joined forces with two vice-consuls, one of whom was Harry Bingham, and eventually Bingham issued visas and travel documents that saved an estimated 2,500 lives. Among them were painter Marc Chagall, Nobel prize-winner Otto Meyerhof and philosopher Hannah Arendt. At one point he arranged for novelist Lion Feuchtwanger to be smuggled out of an internment camp disguised in women's clothing and then hid Feuchtwanger in his home until he could get him out of the country.
Unfortunately the State Department's desire to work with the Vichy government at the time led to its actively discouraging Bingham. He resigned from the foreign service and never wrote about his WWII work nor told any of his eleven children about it. A few years after his 1988 death his youngest son, William, found a bundle of letters and other documents behind a fireplace in the family home, revealing the amazing story. It took much letter writing and other efforts until 2002 when Secretary of State Colin L. Powell presented Bingham's children with a "Courageous Diplomat" award, praising Bingham's "constructive dissent." The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and Wally Findlay Galleries International, among others, joined the celebration that took place in the Rayburn House Office Building and included Chagall's granddaughter, Bella Meyer, and two recipients of Bingham-procured visas, one of whom said, "There were never enough visas, but somehow, when a Martinique-bound boat became available, Bingham produced 800 of them in 48 hours."
And on May 24 of this year, "Hiram Bingham IV, a U.S. diplomat whose unselfish actions in saving Jews from the Nazi Holocaust cost him his diplomatic career, was honored by the U.S. Postal Service in a commemorative stamp."
Labels: anniversaries, france, history
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