FROM SOCIALITE TO SAVIOR

Before the United States officially entered World War II, there were Americans who were already fighting against Nazi aggression. These heroic efforts took place not on the frontlines, but in back rooms during hushed conversations. Evanston native Mary Jayne Gold (1909-1997) was one such American. The recent Netflix series Transatlantic brings renewed attention to her efforts, inspired by as her great-nephew, Thor Gold, says, “the proudest thing she ever did in her life.”

For the short time they lived in Evanston, the Golds were among the area’s wealthiest families, members of Exmoor Country Club and Evanston Country Club, hobnobbing with movers and shakers, and frequently mentioned in the local society pages.

Gold attended finishing school in Verona. In 1928, she earned her own pilot’s license and purchased her own airplane. In 1937, she participated in an international flying race. Three years later, she donated her plane to the French government’s war efforts.

What had started as a carefree, jet-setting life, socializing her way through Europe with her privileged friends and her French poodle, Dagobert, ended in Marseilles when Germany invaded France. Anti-Nazi activists, artists, and free-thinkers who had fled to France for safety were suddenly at risk of deportation.

Instead of returning to her sheltered life back in the States, Gold stayed in Marseilles and joined the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC). As Gold recalled in her memoir, Crossroads Marseilles 1940, “1940-41 proved to be quite a year for a nice girl from Evanston, Illinois.”

From August 1940 until politics and war forced them out, the small, but mighty ERC helped some 2,000 European Jews and intellectuals escape Nazi-occupied France. Led by American journalist Varian Fry, the group also enlisted help from U.S. diplomat Hiram Bingham, support from Eleanor Roosevelt, and seed funds from Peggy Guggenheim. Gold kept the ERC afloat with her own money, often securing black market visas and passports.

Although the ERC launched with a list of 200 well-known Nazi targets the likes of artist Marc Chagall, writer Hannah Arendt, and sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, it soon became clear that there were many more people who needed their help. Gold’s friend and fellow ERC member Miriam Davenport suggested Gold subsidize an expansion of the relief and rescue efforts. This became known as “the Gold list.” As Gold described during a 1993 interview, it was comprised of “people who might be considered in danger, but not on anyone’s list.”

The members of the ERC were also in danger, and Gold learned how to spot if she were being trailed, how to quickly jump on and off streetcars, and how to use her female charms to help the cause.

In one incident, Fry sent Gold to persuade a French commandant at a concentration camp in the Pyrenees to release four political prisoners. “I wasn’t an expert in the art of love, but four men’s lives were at stake,” Gold recalled during the 1993 interview. She sweet-talked her way into the commandant’s office, and within days, the men were freed.

Gold never married and, after returning to America, she split her time between a Manhattan penthouse and a villa in the south of France, “except in election years,” says her niece, Alison Leslie Gold, author of Anne Frank Remembered. She describes her aunt as “a real bon vivant who had a million boyfriends and a million decorators, but she was never flamboyant.”

One thing Thor Gold says most people don’t know about his great aunt is, “Mary Jayne was deeply caring, not just during extraordinary times, but during everyday life.” A group of historians is currently advocating for Gold and other members of the ERC to receive a Congressional Medal of Honor.