Villa Air-Bel

Rosemary Sullivan

• Verlag: HarperCollins e-books
• Jahr: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061856891
• Thema: Geschichte
• Thema: Geschichte des Holocaust

"Rosemary Sullivan goes beyond the confines of Air-Bel to tell a fuller story of France during the tense years from 1933 to 1941.... A moving tale of great sacrifice in tumultuous times." — Publishers Weekly

Paris 1940. Andre Breton, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, Consuelo de Saint-Exupery, and scores of other cultural elite denounced as enemies of the conquering Third Reich, live in daily fear of arrest, deportation, and death. Their only salvation is the Villa Air-Bel, a chateau outside Marseille where a group of young people, financed by a private American relief organization, will go to extraordinary lengths to keep them alive. In Villa Air-Bel, Rosemary Sullivan sheds light on this suspenseful, dramatic, and intriguing story, introducing the brave men and women who use every means possible to stave off the Nazis and the Vichy officials, and goes inside the chateau's walls to uncover the private worlds and the web of relationships its remarkable inhabitants developed.

NOTES

THE ROAD OUT

1. Lisa Fittko, Escape Through the Pyrenees, trans. David Koblick (Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1991), p. 108.

2. Ibid., p. 104.

3. Ibid., p. 103

4. Ibid., p. 109.

5. Ibid., p. 112.

6. Letter dated October 11, 1940, from Frau Gurland to Arkadi Gurland, reprinted in Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn (Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia, 1981), p. 225.

7. Ibid., p. 225.

8. Ibid., p. 226.

9. Fittko, Escape Through the Pyrenees, p. 115.

THE PHOTOGRAPH

1. International Herald Tribune, September 25, 1930:

Hitler Warns in Court
Berlin: The tragic scenes enacted in the Place de la Révolution (now Place de la Concorde) in Paris during the French Revolution when the guillotine swept hundreds of aristocratic heads into the basket, will be repeated in Berlin when the Fascists come into power, Adolph [sic] Hitler, the Fascist leader, promised before the criminal chamber of the supreme court in Leipzig today during a further hearing of the trial of three Reichswehr officers who are charged with treason for attempting to establish Fascist cells in the German army. Not only the blood of the nobility will flow in Berlin when the “third Reich” comes to pass in Germany, according to the leader of the National Socialists, but Socialist proletarians and pacifist professors will also be massacred. In three years, Hitler predicted, his party would be the strongest in the country, and when the day of their triumph came the treaty of Versailles and the Young plan would be tossed in the wastepaper basket.

So sensational indeed was the nature of Hitler’s remarks about what his party proposed to do in the event of its gaining power, that stocks on the Berlin and Frankfort markets, which had recovered in the last two days, broke again sharply today all along the line.

(Reprinted in International Herald Tribune, September 26, 2006.)

2. Author’s interview with Leonora Carrington, Mexico City, July 7, 2003.

THE DINNER PARTY

1. Miriam Davenport, An Unsentimental Education: A Memoir by Miriam Davenport Ebel (1915–1999), p. 63. Web page: www.varianfry.org/ebel_memoir_en.htm.

2. Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (De Capo Press, New York, 1997), p. 480.

3. Ibid., p. 22.

4. Ibid., p. 402.

5. Ibid., p. 5.

6. Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, trans. Peter Sedgwick (Writers & Readers, London, 1984), p. 361.

7. Susan Weissman, Victor Serge: The Course Is Set on Hope (Verso, London, 2001), p. 183.

8. William Wiser, The Twilight Years: Paris in the 1930s (Carroll & Graf Publishers, New York, 2000), p. 243.

9. Andy Marino, A Quiet American: The Secret War of Varian Fry (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1999), p. 213.

THE HEIRESS

1. Mary Jayne Gold, Crossroads Marseilles, 1940 (Doubleday, New York, 1980), p. 25.

2. Wiser, Twi...