In June of 1935, two years after the German government falsely portrayed the burning of the Reichstag as a Communist plot to overthrow the state and just at the moment that it had banned all but “Aryans’’ from serving in the military and made homosexuality a crime, Varian Fry, a young Manhattan editor who was preparing to take over a magazine called The Living Age, traveled to Berlin.

About one month into his stay, he witnessed a night of gruesome rioting in which Jews were kicked, bloodied and spat on, leaving him to provide one of the earliest accounts of Nazi cruelties in the American news media. Relaying his observations to The Associated Press, Fry remarked that the police “nowhere’’ seemed “to make any effort whatever to save victims from this brutality.’’ Occasionally, he said, “they attempted to clear areas for motor traffic,’’ or to keep people from congregating in front of beloved cafes, but “that was all.’’ The crowds — made up of people young and old, well-bred-looking and common — chanting “‘The best Jew is a dead Jew,’” he continued, conducted themselves as if “in holiday mood.’’

The impression left was so searing that journalism alone became insufficient. During times of crisis, ordinary people often ask themselves what they can do; Fry’s pursuit of this line of self-inquiry did not take him to a place of protest clothes and phone banking. He became a founding member of the Emergency Rescue Committee, a group of activists who opposed the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924, sentiments of which are echoed in the Trump plan to stop protections against the deportation of young immigrants, worrying that the quotas it imposed would prevent refugees in need from finding safety in this country. The committee was concerned in particular about foreigners who had fled to southern France — an unoccupied part of the country under Vichy control — and who could now be turned over to the Nazis at any time.

With that in mind, in August 1940, Fry, a Protestant and 32-year-old, went to Marseilles to begin a covert rescue operation that during his 13-month stay would result in the escape of more than 2,000 people, among them many artists and intellectuals, including Marc Chagall, Hannah Arendt, Max Ernst, Heinrich Mann, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Jacques Lipchitz and Alma Mahler, who crossed the Pyrenees carrying Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 10, her former husband’s final composition.