SURRENDER ON DEMAND

There's not the holding, drama here of Etta Shiber's Paris Underground, but there is a greater sense of authenticity for a story of underground rescue work on a far more extensive and organized scale. Fry was sent to Paris by the Emergency Rescue Committee to bring political and intellectual figures out of France. He planned to stay a month -- he stayed a year (1940-41) and engineered more than 500 escapes. He made contacts and found confederates, established ways to secure visas and passports and identity cards; he escorted the Werfels and the Henrich Manns into Spain; he arranged with the British to evacuate some of the F officers via trawlers to Gibraltar. He made connections with the Spanish underground. With the tightening of Gestapo regulations and supervision, he ran into increasing difficulties and disasters, became himself suspect, was twice arrested, and finally forced out on an expulsion order. A straightforward and selfless account of a present-day Scarlet Pimpernel.