Villa Airbel World War Ii Escape And A House In Marseille Rosemary Sullivan by Rosemary Sullivan, Emergency Rescue Committee, Varian Fry 9780061856891, 0061856894 instant download after payment.

France, 1940. The once glittering boulevards of Paris teem with spies, collaborators, and the Gestapo now that France has fallen to Hitler's Wermacht. For André Breton, Max Ernst, Victor Serge, Marc Chagall, Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, Remedios Varó, Benjamin Péret, and scores of other cultural elite denounced as enemies of the Third Reich, fear and uncertainty define daily life. One wrong glance, one misplaced confidence, could mean arrest, deportation, and death. Their only salvation is the Villa Air-Bel, a château outside Marseille where a group of young people will go to extraordinary lengths to keep them alive.

“With tremendous suspense and emotional pull, Sullivan recounts the little-known story of Varian Fry, the intrepid young American who sheltered [dozens of artists and intellectuals], helping them and hundreds more escape from Vichy France.”

—Vogue

“The great virtue of Sullivan’s account of these dark times is the meticulous research that informs it, the uncovering of memoirs, photos, and other documents in numerous Canadian and American libraries, as well as archives in France and private collections…. Sullivan’s Villa Air-Bel sings of the good deeds of those heroes of so long ago. It memorializes the great men and women of the rescue team who were bastions of humanity in a time of man’s most shameful display of sadistic cruelty. Villa Air-Bel is a most welcome book, a triumph of the human spirit.”

—Philadelphia Inquirer

“Gripping…. Sullivan captures the tense atmosphere of France as the Germans invaded, and the fear and anxiety of the intellectuals, some held in detention camps and some who ignored the danger until it was nearly too late.”

—Booklist

“Rosemary Sullivan’s Villa Air-Bel is a marvelous addition to the surging literature on occupied France. Sullivan writes not as a historian—she has little new material—but as a dramatist. Her scene-by-scene evocation of life at the house reads like an updated Chekhov comedy laced with horror.”

—Financial Times