A Beautiful Heiress Saved The Lives Of Thousands During WWII
Born in 1909 into a rich Chicago business empire, Mary Jayne Gold lived a life of luxury for her first 30 years. She wanted for nothing, spent her time and money traveling, and had little idea of how cruel the world could be to certain people. That was, until the Nazis invaded Paris in 1940. Soon, something changed within Gold: with a courage few could have suspected she possessed, she put her life on the line in a series of secret missions to help spirit thousands of persecuted Jews out of France.
Heiress to freedom fighter
In little more than a year, Gold went from care-free cast-iron-radiator-firm heiress to freedom fighter twice detained by the authorities. Her first arrest came when head of Vichy France Philippe Pétain visited Marseilles; his arrival saw Gold and Varian Fry — who we’ll get to soon — imprisoned without due process on a boat.
As she stared at the cold, imposing walls of the vessel, Gold must have wondered how she’d ended up leading this life — but perhaps also why such a predicament didn’t seem to scare her anymore.
She could have left — but she stayed to fight
According to Meg Waite Clayton — author of The Postmistress of Paris, which was heavily inspired by Gold’s life — she truly didn’t need to put her life in danger. As Clayton told the Chicago Tribune, “She had an American passport. She could have left at any time.”
The writer added, “She could have lived in her big mansion and had filet mignon every night, but she chose to stay and do this.” Why? What was it about Gold — and the war — that gave her the courage to risk everything?
“A pleasant, carefree time”
In a synopsis of Gold’s memoir Crossroads Marseilles 1940, she described her life before the war in an almost dismissive tone. She wrote, “I am an upper-middle-class WASP born and raised in Chicago, Evanston, and Michigan. I attended the Master’s School at Dobbs Ferry, New York and a finishing school in Italy.”
She continued, “For ten years before the war I lived in Europe, dividing my time between Paris, London, and the fashionable resorts. I flew my own plane, skied all winter, visited innumerable museums and in general had a pleasant, carefree time.”
Fleeing the German army
Yet with the outbreak of World War II, Gold’s carefree existence came to a crashing halt. She wrote, “I found myself, along with several million others, on the congested roads of France, fleeing before the German Army.”
She tried to secure passage for a friend’s two-year-old boy back to the States with her, but this proved impossible, and she was forced to leave the boy and his mother in southern France’s Unoccupied Zone. The trauma of this event showed Gold, in as stark a fashion as possible, the human cost of war.