Is Transatlantic based on a true story?

Transatlantic dramatises Fry's real-life adventures, but how much of the seven-part drama is based on a true story, and who is real and who is fictional? Read on to find out.

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The new Netflix series is inspired by Julie Orringer’s novel The Flight Portfolio and by the real adventures of Varian Fry, Mary Jayne Gold, Albert Hirschman and the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC), who were an international gang of young heroes who saved refugees during World War II.

Risking their lives, they helped more than 2000 refugees escape occupied France, including many artists on the Nazis' most-wanted list.

Some of those refugees saved by the ERC were Europe’s greatest artists and intellectuals, including Andre Breton, Hannah Arendt, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Marc Chagall.

Although the rescue mission of Varian Fry is a heroic and unthinkable one, it went largely unrecognised during his life but in this drama, Cory Michael Smith stars as the young former journalist and Harvard graduate who was sent to Marseilles to help the ERC's rescue mission.

Reportedly, he showed up in Marseilles in 1940 with little more than $3000 taped to his leg and a list of 200 names. Fry was among 200 Americans – including creatives, university professors, Jewish refugees and more – who created the committee in New York and were intent on saving anti-Nazi intellectuals who were trapped in France under Article 19 in France’s armistice with Germany.

But when he got to France, he realised the task before him was a grand one and formed a small international group to help. He rented the Villa Air-Bel, which has been recreated in the series, to house those waiting for visas.

These relatively unknown members of the ERC were just a handful of young people, both American and European, who forged an escape route across the Pyrenees while navigating a minefield of police, bureaucracy, British intelligence, diplomats and the beginnings of the French resistance.

Real-life figures Hans and Lisa Fittko (played in the series by Deleila Piasko) devised an escape route to Spain, guiding refugees across the Pyrenees mountains on foot. In Transatlantic, Lisa is heralded as "the ERC’s real-life action hero", she is a child of the Austro-Hungarian Jewish intelligentsia and a Socialist, who believes that Jews and the other oppressed people of Europe must rely on themselves to save themselves.

However, the series is only inspired by real-life events and Orringer’s novel, so many characters and plotlines in the Netflix show are fictionalised.

Speaking about hearing the story of Fry and the ERC for the first time, Winger told The Hollywood Reporter: "Actually, my father told me this story, because he knew a couple of the people involved in it.

"He knew [anti-Nazi activist] Lisa Fittko in Chicago. They were part of the same organisation that was protesting the Vietnam War in the ’60s. And he knew Albert Hirschman because they were both professors at Harvard in the '70s. So when he and I were walking through Potsdamer Platz, maybe in 2012 or 2013, and he saw that there was a Varian Fry Street, he told me their story."

She continues: "But probably the idea to make it into a TV show really started the year 2015, when so many refugees moved to Berlin .. And then, while I was making Unorthodox, Julie Orringer’s novel [The Flight Portfolio] came out. It felt like kismet. So I optioned the book. And Julie had done so much research. She’d spent years writing this novel and really thought about the psychology of Varian Fry."

In reality, although Fry's efforts were deemed illegal, his originally small-scale operation led to the escape of 2000 people. But it has also been estimated that approximately 20,000 refugees made contact with his Marseille rescue centre.

Because of his actions, Fry became an enemy of his own country due to people deeming him to be interfering with America's stance of neutrality in the war.

Just a few months before his death in 1967 aged 59, he was bestowed with France's highest order of merit for both military and civilian, the Croix de Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur. It was the only recognition he received in his lifetime.

Transatlantic is now available to stream on Netflix. Sign up for Netflix from £4.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream.

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