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New York Times, Oct. 7, 1997
PARIS — Mary Jayne Gold, a Chicago heiress who used some of her fortune to help prominent Jewish or anti-Nazi artists like Chagall flee Nazi-occupied France, died on Sunday at her home near St.-Tropez on the French Riviera. She was 88.
Miss Gold, who attended finishing school in Italy and joined the lively Paris scene in the 1930s, moved to Marseilles shortly after German forces invaded France in June 1940. There she began working with an emergency rescue committee formed by an American journalist, Varian Fry, to aid thousands of refugees who had fled the Gestapo.
Although Marseilles was in an area of southern France that was not seized by the Nazis until 1942, it was under the control of the collaborationist Vichy regime led by Marshal Philippe Petain. The committee's main goal was to get the refugees, many of them Jews, either to North Africa or through Spain to Portugal. From there, many could make it to the United States or Cuba.
The committee, which included a former French official, Daniel Benedite, had its base in a crumbling chateau near Marseilles, where the Surrealist leader Andre Breton, among others, would hold court.
"With them was a handsome American girl, Mary Jayne Gold, who gave them vast sums of money for their noble work in which she also took a hand," Peggy Guggenheim wrote in her memoirs, "Out of This Century," recalling that she visited the chateau as part of her own plan to finance the escape of several artists, including Max Ernst, whom she later married.
"Before I arrived Breton and Fry and Mary Jayne Gold and Benedite had been arrested and held incommunicado on a boat for days during Petain's visit to Marseilles," Miss Guggenheim said. "They had finally managed to get a secret note to the American consul, who rescued them." The United States did not declare war on Nazi Germany until 1941.
Before Miss Gold and Fry were forced to leave Marseilles in 1941, the committee is reported to have arranged the escape of some 2,000 refugees, including the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz and the writer Hannah Arendt, by giving them false passports and leading them to escape routes, often across the Pyrenees. Miss Gold's money was crucial since visas and passports could be bought on the flourishing Marseilles black market.
"I was not there to witness the worst, only the beginning," Miss Gold wrote in her memoir, "Crossroads Marseilles 1940," published by Doubleday in 1980. "Even then, I was sometimes embarrassed into a sort of racialism — like being ashamed of belonging to the human race."
The Associated Press quoted a friend, the filmmaker Pierre Sauvage, as saying that Miss Gold "felt that only one year in her life really mattered and it was the year she spent in Marseilles." He added, "She was a very shrewd woman whose heart was on the right side of issues and who at a crucial turning point in history understood what was called for."
After the war, she returned to France and settled on the Riviera. She never married and had no children.
Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company
Excerpts from "Crossroads
Marseilles 1940"
Excerpts from "Oh
You Must Not Peek Under My Sunbonnet"
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