# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
"Partizaner-himen" (Partisans’ Hymn) or "Zog nit keyn mol," performed by The JPPC

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Varian Mackey Fry (October 15, 1907 - September 13, 1967) was an American journalist. Fry ran a rescue network in Vichy France that helped approximately 2,000 to 4,000 anti-Nazi and Jewish refugees to escape Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. He was the first of five Americans to be recognized as " Righteous Among the Nations", an honorific given by the State of Israel to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.

Varian Fry was born in New York City. His parents were Lillian (Mackey) and Arthur Fry, a manager of the Wall Street firm Carlysle and Mellick. The family moved to Ridgewood, New Jersey, in 1910. He grew up in Ridgewood and enjoyed bird-watching and reading. During World War I, at 9 years of age, Fry and friends conducted a fund-raising bazaar for the American Red Cross that included a vaudeville show, an ice cream stand and fish pond. He was educated at Hotchkiss School from 1922 to 1924, when he left the school due to hazing rituals. He then attended the Riverdale Country School, graduating in 1926.

An able, multi-lingual student, Fry scored in the top 10% on the entrance exams to Harvard University and, while a Harvard undergraduate, founded , an influential literary quarterly, in 1927 with Lincoln Kirstein. He was suspended for a prank just before graduation and had to repeat his senior year. Through Kirstein's sister, Mina, he met his future wife, Eileen Avery Hughes, an editor of Atlantic Monthly, who was seven years his senior and had been educated at Roedean School and Oxford University. They married on June 2, 1931.

While working as a foreign correspondent for the American journal The Living Age, Fry visited Berlin in 1935, and personally witnessed Nazi abuse against Jews on more than one occasion, which "turned him into an ardent anti-Nazi". He said in 1945, "I could not remain idle as long as I had any chances at all of saving even a few of its intended victims."

Following his visit to Berlin, Fry wrote about the savage treatment of Jews by Hitler's regime in the New York Times in 1935. He wrote books about foreign affairs for Headline Books, owned by the Foreign Policy Association, including The Peace that Failed. It describes the troubled political climate following World War I, the break-up of Czechoslovakia and the events leading up to World War II.

Greatly disturbed by what he saw, Fry helped raise money to support European anti-Nazi movements. Shortly after the invasion of France in June 1940, which the Germans quickly occupied, Fry and his friends formed the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC), with support of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and others. By August 1940, Fry was in Marseille representing the ERC in an effort to help persons wishing to flee the Nazis, and circumvent the processes by French authorities who would not issue exit visas. Fry had $3,000 and a short list of refugees under imminent threat of arrest by agents of the Gestapo, mostly Jews. Clamoring at his door came anti-Nazi writers, avant-garde artists, musicians and hundreds of others desperately seeking any chance to escape France.

Some historians later noted it was a miracle that a white American Protestant would risk everything to help the Jews.

Beginning in 1940, in Marseille, despite the watchful eye of the collaborationist Vichy regime, Fry and a small group of volunteers hid people at the Villa Air-Bel until they could be smuggled out. More than 2,200 people were taken across the border to Spain and then to the safety of neutral Portugal from which they made their way to the United States.

Fry helped other exiles escape on ships leaving Marseille for the French colony of Martinique, from which they too could go to the United States. Among Fry's closest associates were Americans Miriam Davenport, a former art student at the Sorbonne, and the heiress Mary Jayne Gold, a lover of the arts and the "good life" who had come to Paris in the early 1930s.

When the Nazis seized France in 1940, Gold went to Marseille, where she worked with Fry and helped finance his operation. Also working with Fry was a young academic named Albert O. Hirschman.

Among the people who have come into my office, or with whom I am in constant correspondence, are not only some of the greatest living authors, painters, sculptors of Europe . . . but also former cabinet ministers and even prime ministers of half a dozen countries. What a strange place Europe is when men like this are reduced to waiting patiently in the anteroom of a young American of no importance whatever.

Especially instrumental in getting Fry the visas he needed for the artists, intellectuals and political dissidents on his list, was Hiram Bingham IV, an American Vice Consul in Marseille who fought against anti-Semitism in the State Department and was personally responsible for issuing thousands of visas, both legal and illegal. He was also helped in his mission by Alfred Barr, Museum Director at the MoMa and his wife Margaret Scolari Barr art historian also working at the MoMA.

From his isolated position in Marseille, Fry relied on the Unitarian Service Committee in Lisbon to help the refugees he sent. This office, staffed by American Unitarians under the direction of Robert Dexter, helped refugees to wait in safety for visas and other necessary papers, and to gain ship passage from Lisbon.

Fry was forced to leave France in September 1941 after officials both of the Vichy government and at the United States State Department had become angered by his covert activities. In 1942, the Emergency Rescue Committee and the American branch of the European-based International Relief Association joined forces under the name the International Relief and Rescue Committee, which was later shortened to the International Rescue Committee (IRC). The IRC is a leading nonsectarian, nongovernmental international relief and development organization that still operates today.

Refugees aided by Fry

Among those Fry aided were:

There are some things so horrible that decent men and women find them impossible to believe, so monstrous that the civilized world recoils incredulous before them. The recent reports of the systematic extermination of the Jews in Nazi Europe are of this order... we can offer asylum now, without delay or red tape, to those few fortunate enough to escape from the Aryan paradise. There have been bureaucratic delays in visa procedure which have literally condemned to death many stalwart democrats... This is a challenge which we cannot, must not, ignore.

Fry, Varian. "The Massacre of Jews in Europe." The New Republic, 1942.

Fry wrote and spoke critically against U.S. immigration policies particularly relating to the issue of the fate of Jews in Europe. In a December 1942 issue of The New Republic, he wrote a scathing article titled: "The Massacre of Jews in Europe".

Although by 1942 Fry had been terminated from his position at the Emergency Rescue Committee, American private rescuers acknowledged that his program in France had been uniquely effective, and recruited him in 1944 to provide behind-the-scenes guidance to the Roosevelt administration's late-breaking rescue program, the War Refugee Board.

Fry published a book in 1945 about his time in France under the title Surrender on Demand, first published by Random House, 1945. (Its title refers to the 1940 French-German armistice clause requiring France to hand over to German authorities any refugee from "Greater Germany" the Gestapo might identify, a requirement Fry routinely violated.) A later edition was published by Johnson Books, in 1997, in conjunction with the U.S. Holocaust Museum. In 1968, the US publisher Scholastic (which markets mainly to children and adolescents) published a paperback edition under the title Assignment: Rescue.

After the war, Fry worked as a journalist, magazine editor and business writer. He also taught college and was in film production. Feeling as if he had lived the peak of his life in France, he developed ulcers. Fry went into psychoanalysis and said that "as time went on, he grew more and more troubled."

Fry and his wife Eileen divorced after he returned from France. She developed cancer and died on May 12, 1948. During her hospital convalescence, Fry visited her and read to her daily. At the end of 1948 or early 1949, Fry met Annette Riley, who was 16 years his junior. They married in 1950, had three children together, but were separated in 1966, possibly owing to his irrational behavior, believed to have been a result of manic depression.

Fry died of a cerebral hemorrhage and was found dead in his bed on September 13, 1967 by the Connecticut State Police. He was buried at Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York with his parents.

Fry's papers are held in Columbia University's Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

"A Bibliography of the Writings of Thomas Stearns Eliot". Hound & Horn, 1928.

Headline Books. New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1938.

Surrender on Demand. New York: Random House, 1945. LCCN 45-3492 OCLC 1315136

To Whom it May Concern. 1947.

Popper, David H., Shepard Stone and Varian Fry. The puzzle of Palestine. New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1938.

Wolfe, Henry Cutler, James Frederick Green, Stoyan Pribichevich, Varian Fry, William V. Reed, Elizabeth Ogg and Emil Herlin, Spotlight on the Balkans. New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1940.

1967 - The government of France recognized Fry's contribution to freedom with the Legion of Honor.

1980 - Mary Jayne Gold's 1980 book titled Crossroads Marseilles 1940 sparked an interest in Fry and his heroic efforts.

1991 - The United States Holocaust Memorial Council awarded Fry the Eisenhower Liberation Medal.

1994 - Fry became the first United States citizen to be listed in the Righteous Among the Nations at Israel's national Holocaust Memorial, award by Yad Vashem.

1997 - Irish film director David Kerr made a documentary entitled Varian Fry: The America's Schindler that was narrated by actor Sean Barrett.

1998 - Fry was awarded the "Commemorative Citizenship of the State of Israel" on January 1, 1998.

2001 - Fry's story was also told in dramatic form in the 2001 made-for-television film Varian's War, written and directed by Lionel Chetwynd and starring William Hurt and Julia Ormond.

2002 - On the initiative of Samuel V. Brock, the U.S. Consul General in Marseille from 1999 to 2002, the square in front of the consulate was renamed Place Varian Fry.

2005 - A street in the newly reconstructed East/West Berlin Wall area in the Berlin borough of Mitte at Potsdamer Platz was named Varian-Fry-Straße in recognition of his work.

2005 - A street in his home town of Ridgewood, New Jersey, was renamed Varian Fry Way.

2007 - On October 15, 2007, the U.S. House of Representatives honored Varian Fry on the 100th anniversary of his birth.

2019 - Julie Orringer's historical novel The Flight Portfolio is a fictionalized account of Fry's life and experiences in Marseille, which merges real events and historical characters with invented elements. The invented elements include a clandestine love affair and intrigue surrounding the plot to rescue a fictional young physics genius.

Bibliography

McCabe, Cynthia Jaffee. "Wanted by the Gestapo: Saved by America - Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee", pp. 79-91 in Jackman, Jarrell C. and Carla M. Borden, eds. The Musses Flee Hitler: Cultural Transfer and Adaptation 1930-1945. Washington, D.C.: (Smithsonian, 1983.

Marino, Andy. A Quiet American: The Secret War of Varian Fry. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. ISBN 978-0-3122-0356-6.

McClafferty, Carla Killough. In Defiance of Hitler: The Secret Mission of Varian Fry. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR), 2008. ISBN 978-0-374-38204-9.

Richards, Tad. The Virgil Directive. New York: Fawcett, 1982. ISBN 978-0-4450-4689-4.

Sogos, Giorgia. "Varian Fry: „Der Engel von Marseille". Von der Legalität in die Illegalität und zur Rehabilitierung", in Gabriele Anderl, Simon Usaty (Hrsg.). "Schleppen, schleusen, helfen. Flucht zwischen Rettung und Ausbeutung". Wien: Mandelbaum,2016, S. 209-220, ISBN 978-3-85476-482-3.

Strempel, Rüdiger, Letzter Halt Marseille - Varian Fry und das Emergency Rescue Committee, in Clasen, Winrich C.-W./Schneemelcher, W. Peter, eds, Mittelmeerpassagen, Rheinbach 2018, ISBN 978-3-87062-307-4

Subak, Susan Elisabeth. Rescue and Flight: American Relief Workers Who Defied the Nazis. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-8032-2525-1.

Sullivan, Rosemary. Villa Air-Bel. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. ISBN 978-0-0607-3251-6.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Varian Mackey Fry (October 15, 1907 - September 13, 1967) was an American journalist. Fry ran a rescue network in Vichy France that helped approximately 2,000 to 4,000 anti-Nazi and Jewish refugees to escape Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Hiram "Harry" Bingham IV (July 17, 1903 - January 12, 1988) was an American diplomat. He served as a Vice Consul in Marseilles, France, during World War II, and, along with Varian Fry, helped over 2,500 Jews to flee from France as Nazi forces advanced.

Bingham was one of seven sons of former Governor of Connecticut and U.S. Senator Hiram Bingham III and his first wife, Alfreda Mitchell, heiress of the Tiffany and Co. fortune through her maternal grandfather Charles L. Tiffany. His father was also the first American to explore the Inca ruins at Machu Picchu. His great-grandfather Hiram Bingham I and grandfather Hiram Bingham II were among the first Protestant missionaries to the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi.

Bingham attended the Groton School and graduated from Yale University in 1925.

Foreign service

Bingham served in Kobe, Japan, as a civilian secretary in the United States Embassy. He worked part-time as a schoolteacher. He traveled to India and Egypt before returning to the United States to attend Harvard University. After obtaining his law degree, he scored third in his class on the foreign service exam.

Bingham's first assignment in the United States Foreign Service was in Beijing, China. There, he witnessed the beginnings of the communist revolution. His travels through Asia piqued Bingham's interest in eastern religious philosophy. He spent the rest of his life trying to reconcile eastern religious philosophies with that of the Christian traditions his family historically had been known to preach.

Bingham also served in Warsaw, Poland, sharing a flat with another diplomat, Charles W. Yost, whose daughter, Felicity, became Bingham's god-daughter. In 1934, Bingham served as third secretary to the United States Embassy in London.

Vice Consul in France

In 1939, Bingham was posted to the US Consulate in Marseilles, where he had responsibility for issuing entry visas to the USA.

On May 10, 1940, Adolf Hitler's forces invaded France and the French government fell. The French signed an armistice with Germany and forced most of France's large population of foreign refugees to move to internment camps. Many thousands of refugees went to Marseilles to seek visas for the USA and other foreign destinations.

Anxious to limit immigration into the United States and to maintain good relations with the Vichy government, the U.S. State Department actively discouraged diplomats from helping refugees. In Marseilles, as elsewhere, foreign service staff usually showed little flexibility or compassion towards the desperate refugees. However, American rescue workers soon noticed that "Harry" Bingham was an exception. Bingham personally toured some of the wretched internment camps and sought American aid to improve conditions. He helped many refugees to avoid internment and prepare for emigration and freely issued Nansen passports, a useful form of identity for stateless persons. An American rescue worker, Martha Sharp, organized a group of children to leave southern France for the US in late 1940. She had this to say about Bingham, "I am proud that our government is represented in its Foreign Services by a man of your quality," she wrote. "I feel so deeply about this that I shall take the earliest opportunity to transmit it through the Unitarian Service Committee to the United States State Department, for I believe that such humane and cooperative handling of individuals is what we need most coupled with intelligence and good breeding." Bingham also cooperated a great deal with Varian Fry, the most effective rescue worker based in Vichy France during the early years of the war. Bingham worked with Fry on notable cases, including the emigration of Marc Chagall, political theorist Hannah Arendt, novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, and many other distinguished refugees. In the case of Feuchtwanger, Bingham went so far as to help spirit the novelist out of an internment camp and sheltered him in his own house while plans were made to help the refugee walk over the Pyrenees.

Consequence

In 1941, the United States government abruptly pulled Bingham from his position as Vice Consul and transferred him to Portugal and then Argentina. When he was in Argentina, he helped to track Nazi war criminals in South America. In early 1946, after being passed over for promotion, he resigned from the United States Foreign Service.

Bingham did not speak much about his wartime activities. His own family had little knowledge of them until after Bingham's death in 1988. In 1991, Bingham's widow Rose and son Thomas found 50-year-old Marseilles documents in the Connecticut farmhouse. Rose and Thomas subsequently donated these documents to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Several years later, Bingham's youngest son found documents in a cupboard behind a chimney and family members continued to unearth documents at the farmhouse. The materials told of Bingham's struggle to save German and Jewish refugees from death, details long hidden from the public.

While posted in London, he met Rose Lawton Morrison (1908-1996), a college drama teacher from Waycross, Georgia, whom he escorted to Buckingham Palace to meet the Queen. They later married and had 11 children: Hiram Bingham, Thomas Bingham, David Bingham, John Bingham, Robert Kim Bingham, Benjamin Bingham, William Bingham, R. Tiffany Bingham, Cecilia Bingham Hanson, Abigail Bingham Endicott (mother of Sam Endicott), and Margaret Bingham Turner.

Although family members knew some of the details, the whole story became known only when his youngest son William discovered a tightly wrapped bundle of letters, documents, and photographs hidden in the wall of a cupboard behind a chimney in the family home. That bundle disclosed Hiram Bingham's carefully guarded past. As a consequence of the discovery, Hiram Bingham IV has been honored by many groups and organizations including the United Nations, the State of Israel, and by a traveling exhibit entitled " Visas for Life: The Righteous and Honorable Diplomats". The exhibit records the events of that time and the efforts of Bingham and others who risked and lost so much to help their fellow man.

After considering for several years Bingham's deeds during the war years in Marseilles, Israel's memorial Yad Vashem ("Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority") issued the Bingham family a letter of appreciation on March 7, 2005. Although not a Righteous Among the Nations designation, the letter noted the "humanitarian disposition" of Bingham IV "at a time of persecution of Jews by the Vichy regime in France.... [in] contrast to certain other officials who rather acted suspiciously toward Jewish refugees wishing to enter the United States."

On June 27, 2002, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell presented a posthumous " Constructive Dissent" award to Bingham's children at an American Foreign Service Officers Association awards ceremony in Washington, DC. Since December 1998 his son Robert Kim Bingham Sr. had lobbied the US Postal Service to issue a stamp depicting his father in recognition of his humanitarian deeds. After the proposal received wide bipartisan support in Congress, a commemorative stamp portraying Hiram Bingham IV as a "Distinguished American Diplomat" was issued on May 30, 2006.

On October 27, 2006, the Anti-Defamation League posthumously presented Bingham its " Courage to Care Award" at the ADL's national conference in Atlanta. In November 2006, the U.S. Episcopal Church added Bingham to a list of " American Saints" published in the book A Year with American Saints with a summary of his life and character.

On March 28, 2011, the Simon Wiesenthal Center posthumously awarded Bingham their Medal of Valor in New York City with a film tribute. The film shows the Nazis on the march in Europe and how US Vice-Consul Bingham rose to the dangerous occasion to save lives. According to The Wall Street Journal, "more than 450 supporters of the Simon Wiesenthal Center gathered for the 2011 Humanitarian Award Dinner. The Medal of Valor was awarded posthumously to Sir Winston Churchill, Hiram Bingham IV, and Pope John Paul II...."

Wainstain, C. "La liste de Hiram Bigham", L'Arche, November 2007

Subak, Susan Elisabeth, "Rescue and Flight: American Relief Workers Who Defied the Nazis, University of Nebraska Press, 2010, 342 pp.

Assignment Rescue. Institutional Archive. U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Hiram Bingham IV website http://www.hirambinghamrescuer.com/

Simon Wiesenthal Center film Tribute to Hiram Bingham IV https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6MfzibYZFU .

History Channel DVD "Diplomats for the Damned" http://www.cduniverse.com/productinfo.asp?pid=7688861

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Hiram "Harry" Bingham IV (July 17, 1903 - January 12, 1988) was an American diplomat. He served as a Vice Consul in Marseilles, France, during World War II, and, along with Varian Fry, helped over 2,500 Jews to flee from France as Nazi forces advanced.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The happiest man on earth: 99 year old Holocaust survivor shares his story | Eddie Jaku | TEDxSydney

# data[].attributes.body
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roddie_Edmonds

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Master Sergeant Roderick W. Edmonds (August 20, 1919 - August 8, 1985) was a master sergeant of the 106th Infantry Division, 422nd Infantry Regiment in the United States Army during World War II, who was captured and became the ranking U.S. non-commissioned officer at the Stalag IX-A prisoner-of-war (POW) camp in Germany, where - at the risk of his life - he saved an estimated 200-300 Jews from being singled out from the camp for Nazi persecution and possible death.

For his defense of Jewish servicemen at the POW camp, Edmonds, a Christian, was awarded the title " Righteous Among the Nations", Israel's highest award for non-Jews who risked their own lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. Of 25,000 people to receive the award, Edmonds was the fifth of five Americans, and the only one of the five who was an active serviceman during World War II. His service was the subject of a speech by President Barack Obama at the Israeli Embassy in Washington.

Family and early life

Roderick W. "Roddie" Edmonds was born in 1919 in South Knoxville, Tennessee, and graduated from Knoxville High in 1938. He had three brothers: Thomas "Shake" Edmonds Jr., Leon Edmonds, and Robert Edmonds. He grew up attending a Methodist church in South Knoxville.

World War II

Edmonds enlisted in the Army on March 17, 1941, at Fort Oglethorpe.

Edmonds, along with other inexperienced troops, arrived in the combat zone December 1944, with the 106th Infantry Division, arriving only five days before Germany launched a massive counteroffensive, the Battle of the Bulge. During the battle, on December 19, 1944, Edmonds was captured and sent to a German prisoner-of-war (POW) camp: Stalag IX-B. Shortly thereafter, he was transferred, with other enlisted personnel, to another POW camp near Ziegenhain, Germany: Stalag IX-A. As the senior noncommissioned officer at the new camp, Master Sergeant Edmonds was responsible for the camp's 1,275 American POWs.

Instead, Edmonds ordered all 1,275 POWs to assemble outside their barracks. The German commandant rushed up to Edmonds in a fury, placed his pistol against Edmonds's head and demanded that he identify the Jewish soldiers under his command. Instead, Edmonds responded, "We are all Jews here," and told the commandant that if he wanted to shoot the Jews he would have to shoot all of the prisoners. He then warned the commandant that if he harmed any of Edmonds' men, the commandant would be prosecuted for war crimes after the conflict ended-since the Geneva Conventions required prisoners to give only their name, rank, and serial number; religion was not required. The commandant backed down.

Postwar life

Edmonds never told his family of the event at the POW camp. He was again recruited to service during the Korean War. After returning from Korea, he worked variously for the Knoxville Journal and in sales related to mobile homes and cable television.

After his death in 1985, Edmonds' wife gave his son, Chris Edmonds, a couple of the diaries his father had kept while in the POW camp. Chris Edmonds, a Baptist minister, began researching his story, and stumbled upon a mention of the event at the POW camp. He located several of the Jewish soldiers his father saved, who provided witness statements to Yad Vashem. Among the Jewish-American POW servicemen who were saved was Sonny Fox, American television host and executive, who witnessed, and in interviews spoke of, Edmonds' actions.

On 10 February 2015, Yad Vashem recognized Edmonds as " Righteous Among the Nations," Israel's highest honor for non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. The awards ceremony was held January 27, 2016, at the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., where the then-President Barack Obama praised Edmonds for action "above and beyond the call of duty," and echoed Edmonds' statement of solidarity with Jews. Chris Edmonds received the Righteous medal and certificate of honor from Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer and Yad Vashem Council Chairman Rabbi Lau on his father's behalf at the ceremony.

"...Edmonds seemed like an ordinary American soldier, but he had an extraordinary sense of responsibility and dedication to his fellow human beings," Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev.

Chris Edmonds has sought to have his father's bravery recognized with the Medal of Honor. However, the initial U.S. Army position has been that he was a captive, and therefore ineligible because his actions were not in combat.

To overcome this obstacle, on March 23, 2016, in the U. S. House of Representatives, Rep. John J. Duncan Jr. (R-TN-2) introduced H.R. 4863, the "Roddie Edmonds Congressional Gold Medal Act" bill. The bill's original purpose was to recognize Edmonds with a Congressional Gold Medal, one of the two highest civilian awards in the United States (along with the Presidential Medal of Freedom). It was referred to the House Armed Services Committee, from where it was referred, on April 5, 2016, to the Subcommittee on Military Personnel.

On February 13, 2017, in the U. S. Senate, members from Edmonds's home state of Tennessee-U.S. Senators Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Bob Corker (R-TN), joined by Senators Tim Kaine (D-VA) and Ben Cardin (D-MD)-introduced a bill to have Sergeant Edmonds honored with the Congressional Gold Medal. The effort was renewed on April 21, 2021, with US Representative Tim Burchett (TN) introducing the "Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds Congressional Gold Medal Act." A companion bill was also introduced in the US Senate.

A historical marker honoring Edmonds was placed in Knoxville, Tennessee, on November 15, 2020. It was donated by the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation, with support from the Knoxville Jewish Alliance.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Master Sergeant Roderick W. Edmonds (August 20, 1919 - August 8, 1985) was a master sergeant of the 106th Infantry Division, 422nd Infantry Regiment in the United States Army during World War II, who was captured and became the ranking U.S.

# data[].attributes.body
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Jaku

# data[].attributes.body
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irene_Gut_Opdyke

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Warsaw Ghetto ( German: Warschauer Ghetto , officially Jüdischer Wohnbezirk in Warschau Jewish Residential District in Warsaw; Polish: getto warszawskie ) was the largest of all the Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Europe during World War II.

# data[].attributes.body
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justus_Rosenberg

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Justus Rosenberg (January 23, 1921 - October 30, 2021) was a literature professor who spent most of his life teaching in the United States, ending his career as a professor emeritus of languages and literature at Bard College. Before that, as a teenager he began playing a role in saving many lives when the Nazis overran France, working first as part of a French-American network organized to help anti-Nazi intellectuals and artists escape from Vichy France to the United States, and later as a member of the French Resistance during World War II, providing assistance as well to the US Army.

Rosenberg was born in the Free City of Danzig on January 23, 1921. He came from a Jewish home where his Polish-born parents also spoke both German and Yiddish. After witnessing violent antisemitism in Danzig along with the Nazi expulsion of Jewish students from local schools, his parents sent him to study in Paris. He was 16 when he left his father, Jacob, a successful businessman, and his mother, Bluma (née Solarsky), a homemaker; he was reunited with them and his sister only in the 1950s. In 1997 he married Karin Kraft, whom he had known since the 1980s.

With his wife he founded the Justus and Karin Rosenberg Foundation to fight hate in general and antisemitism in particular.

He did not talk about his wartime experiences until the Shoah Foundation interviewed him in 1998 as a witness to and survivor of the Holocaust. In 2020 he published his autobiography, The Art of Resistance: My Four Years in the French Underground: A Memoir.

When it became too dangerous for Rosenberg to stay in Paris, he moved south, ending up in Marseille, having followed Miriam Davenport there when she recruited him to join Varian Fry's Emergency Rescue Committee, a network formed to extract artists and intellectuals from Vichy France. He was then seventeen.

The Committee helped such figures as Hannah Arendt, Marcel Duchamp, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, and André Breton to escape; Rosenberg personally accompanied Heinrich Mann and Franz Werfel, along with their wives Nelly Mann and Alma Mahler-Werfel, on foot across the Pyrenees to Spain.

His first roles with the group were office boy and courier, carrying messages and forged identity papers to those the group was trying to save. "I looked very blond, very Germanic and younger than my own age, so I wouldn't be stopped often to be asked for papers, because I looked so innocent and angelic," he told the International Rescue Committee in an interview. He also spoke fluent French and German.

After Fry's network had to shut down its activities in France (it later became part of the International Rescue Committee), Rosenberg was picked up for transport to a camp in Poland but managed to escape and join the French Resistance. During this time he was again a courier but also actively participated in armed attacks on the enemy. Once the US Army had landed in France, he was attached to the 636th Tank Destroyer Battalion, and suffered a serious injury when a jeep he was in hit a land mine. In addition to acting as a guide, his ability to speak German was useful to the Army, as he sometimes interrogated German-speaking prisoners.

For his wartime service, Justus received a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. In 2017 the French ambassador to the United States personally made Rosenberg a Commandeur in the Légion d'Honneur, among France's highest decorations, for his heroism during World War II.

Immediately after the war Rosenberg worked at a United Nations camp for displaced persons, before studying at the Sorbonne. In 1946 he obtained a preferential visa and emigrated to the United States. He earned his PhD at the University of Cincinnati in 1950, and held post-docs at Columbia University and Syracuse University before obtaining positions at Swarthmore College, The New School, and Bard College. He taught at Bard from 1962 until he retired.

His linguistic skills led to teaching language courses in French, German, Russian, Yiddish, and Polish at Swarthmore as well as Bard. At Bard he affiliated with the programs in French and Jewish studies, as well as literature, and taught traditional literature courses on such subjects as classic 19th century French, Russian, and German literature, as well as popular compilation courses, for example, one entitled "10 Plays that Shook the World." After his retirement, he continued teaching, broadening his subject matter to include modern literature from Africa, the Middle East, India, and Asia; at The New School he taught a weekly course in political and cultural history.

He published many scholarly works on French and German literature along with linguistic subjects, especially to do with translation. He was invited as a guest professor at universities at various European universities as well as in Singapore, and received many honors including one from the New York Council for the Humanities.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Justus Rosenberg (January 23, 1921 - October 30, 2021) was a literature professor who spent most of his life teaching in the United States, ending his career as a professor emeritus of languages and literature at Bard College.