Varian Fry is rightly being lauded for his amazing courage in saving so many people in the south of France who were fleeing Nazi tyranny. At last: this acknowledgement is long overdue.
But there’s another hero who also deserves much more recognition – a quiet, self-effacing Scot dubbed the Tartan Pimpernel. This is what I posted back in 2012, with an update:
***This is a fascinating period with many unsung heroes, including an incredibly brave Scottish minister, the Rev. Dr. Donald Currie Caskie. He was a minister at the Scots Kirk in Paris when the Nazis invaded in 1940. He made his way south to Marseille to find a boat back to the UK, but was so struck by the needs of the many refugees in the town that he decided to form the British Seamen’s Mission. This quickly became a centre for helping stranded aircrew and soldiers – Caskie burned their uniforms and threw the ashes into the Vieux Port overnight. He had to get identity documents for them and managed to get many across to the Pyrenees and safety. It’s thought he saved 2000 lives. Sadly a fellow Briton betrayed him.
His time as a prisoner makes difficult reading but he survived and, after the Liberation, calmly made his way back to Paris to re-open his church. His book The Tartan Pimpernel was written to raise money for the necessary renovations. Thank you to Jean for recommending this book to me. She met Dr Caskie, a fellow Scot, in Paris in the fifties and said that he was a very modest man – few people knew what he had done until the book was published.
In our celebrity-obsessed culture in which people are admired so much for so little, it’s salutary to read about someone who turned his back on a boat to Scotland and safety and set about helping those in dire danger. ***
Since 2012, there has been some recognition: he was honoured by the Alliance France-Ecosse society who erected a memorial plaque at the rue de Forbin in Marseille, France. And on 26 October 2019 a memorial plaque marking his work was unveiled at the Fort de la Revere near Nice by the Le Devoir du Memoire organisation, which honours those affected by the war.
Add to that, a plaque unveiled at the Scots Kirk in 2021 (below). Now how about a TV series? What a story that would be!
aixcentric 
There is a T.V. series.It’s called ”Transatlantic”
About Donald caskie?
new period drama is now on Netflix. Transatlantic tells the true story of Varian Fry, a journalist who arrives in France in 1940 with the Emergency Rescue Committee—dedicated to helping artists and writers flee the Nazis and immigrate to the United States. Fry and American heiress Mary Jayne Gold, who helped lead the efforts, found themselves hiding out in a French villa. The two would help some of Europe’s most prominent artists and thinkers flee, including Hannah Arendt, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and Marc Chagall. (All of whom feature in Transatlantic.) Fry would later become the first American to be named “Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum, for his efforts saving so many Jewish refugees.Here’s everything we know about the show.