Miriam Davenport or Miriam Davenport Ebel (June 6, 1915 – September 13, 1999) was an American painter and sculptor, She worked with Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee in 1940 helping European Jewish and intellectuals refugees escape from German-occupied France during World War II.
After her return to the United States in late 1941, she worked on cultural issues in primarily academic settings. She also continued to support human rights organizations.
Personal life and education
Miriam Davenport was born on June 6, 1915, in Boston, Massachusetts. They also had a son, Howard, who was born about 1926.
In 1930, the family of four lived in New Rochelle, New York. Her father died on April 30, 1936. There she fell in love with fellow artist, Rudolph Treo, an exile from Yugoslavia.
World War II
With the June 1940 German occupation of France, Davenport fled Paris with Treo. As they traveled south, they split up. In Toulouse, Davenport met poet Walter Mehring and other German and European refugees who were seeking to escape France to go to the United States. The port city of Marseille, although under control of the Vichy Regime, was not yet occupied by the Nazis.
Seeking ways for refugees to leave from there, Davenport met American journalist Varian Fry, who invited her to join his staff at the Centre Américain de Secours, or American Relief Center on August 27, 1940. (It also became known as the Emergency Rescue Committee.) She persuaded him to bring on others, including fellow American, Mary Jayne Gold, a wealthy Chicago socialite. Davenport sought out artists and other refugees, interviewed them, and determined who was most in need of help.
With Gold and Theodora Bénédite, Davenport rented the Villa Air-Bel in Marseille. They used it as a place to house some of the people they were aiding to escape. She invited her clients Victor Serge and André Breton and their families to move into the immense house. It became a "famous last gathering place" of the Surrealists.
| salign=right
| quoted=1
The Gestapo had identified notable people whom they wanted to capture.
Davenport worked on the effort until October 1940. The consulate address was named "Place Varian Fry" in recognition of the lives he saved.
They later reached Portugal. On December 12, 1941, just after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Davenport and her husband, Professor Rudolph Treo, sailed for the United States from Lisbon on the SS Excambion. On her return to the United States, Davenport became involved with the American Council of Learned Societies Committee for the Protection of Cultural Treasures in War Areas. She helped prepare maps and documentation for use by the Allied Forces to help avoid bombing culturally important sites as well as to enable military units on the ground to secure these sites to prevent pillaging.
Over the decade from 1941 to 1951, she was also involved in a number of humanitarian efforts, including the International Rescue Committee, the Progressive Schools Committee for Refugee Children, and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Davenport worked at Princeton University where she oversaw the office of the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists for Albert Einstein.
In 1951 she and her husband moved to Iowa, where he had been offered a professorship at the University of Iowa.