History: An illuminating account of the French mansion where artists were saved from Nazi harm.
Karl Frank, an Austrian psychoanalyst, fled Germany in 1933, changed his name to Paul Hagen, and thereafter worked tirelessly to mobilise opinion against Hitler.
After the invasion of Holland, in May 1940, Hagen realised something must be done, and soon, for those on the Reich's list of state enemies, the majority of whom were refugee artists living in France. Once the Germans invaded, as everyone was predicting, they were finished.
Within weeks, Hagen established, in New York, the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC) to get these artists out. And to oversee the work in France, he hired Varian Fry, a Harvard-educated intellectual of immense probity. In Fry, Hagen knew he had a man who would stand up to fascist functionaries and get those on the Nazi list out of France.
In August 1940, with $3,000 taped to his leg and a list of 200 names, Varian Fry arrived in Marseille, then part of Vichy or unoccupied France. He quickly established the Centre Américain de Secours (CAS) in that port city and recruited staff to run his office, a mix of French, British, Romanian and American nationals.
Fry lasted 15 months before he was deported. During that time 20,000 refugees approached him for help. Stretching his mandate as far as he dared, he took 4,000 into the care of the CAS. He gave financial support to 600, helped 1,500 to leave legally and illegally, and evacuated 300 British soldiers and officers. He also established a dozen communities around Grass and a charcoal business in the Var where refugees could work and hide. From 1942, after Fry's departure, up to the Liberation, the CAS helped a further 300 to escape.
Though these figures are simple, the individual stories of the refugees and those who helped them are not. Sullivan has had to be selective, and her choices are uniformly judicious. Her principal characters are Fry, of course; Fry's English-speaking French assistant, Danny Bénédite; Bénédite's British wife Theo; Mary Jayne Gold, the American heiress who partly bankrolled the CAS; and the most famous of the artists saved by the CAS: Max Ernst, the painter; André Breton, the writer; and, my favourite, Victor Serge, the great anti-communist, anti-Stalinist and anti-fascist author of the penal classic Men in Prison. Finally, there is the thing that allows Sullivan to bring all the strands together and the most important character of all in the story, the Villa Air-Bel, the decrepit mansion outside Marseille that Fry rented and used to shelter many of his refugees - Ernst, Breton and Serge included - while they waited for the papers to come that would allow them to leave France.
As a piece of narrative Villa Air-Bel is considerable. It tells a number of individual stories - about 40 - brilliantly and it places them in context. Furthermore, as one would expect, the style is beautifully clear and concise. It also illuminates a little known but important aspect of the history of the second World War. I knew nothing about the CAS until I opened this book and I am grateful to the author for informing me.
But more important, not to mention timely, is what this book tells us about how things go wrong. The excesses of the Vichy regime, the Drancy interment camp outside Paris, and the voluntary transfer of 75,000 Jews, most of whom were French nationals, by other French nationals, bureaucrats and policemen, to the Germans, who then murdered them, didn't happen by accident. These things happened because of decisions made by politicians, often years before the war started, which in turn created the conditions that made genocide possible. Sullivan shows us, through the stories she tells, exactly what those decisions were, as well as their dire consequences.
Fry did a lot to alleviate human misery, but what he achieved in comparison to the suffering caused by Vichy and her allies was small: it is a melancholy truth but the achievements of good men and women will always be minor while the harm done by malevolent politicians and their states will always be major. That was the way of the world back in the 1940s, and that is the way of the world now. Nothing changes except in one respect: now, arguably, we know more than they did about horror, or we should, because today we have a book like this, which explains in the clearest possible language what happened when politicians forgot it was their duty to leave the world a better place than they found it, and decided instead to leave it in a worse state. In which case, surely, there must be an argument that Sullivan's book should be mandatory reading for contemporary politicians - and I mean all of them, not just the despots. It would certainly do them no harm.
Carlo Gébler is a writer. His play Silhouette was recently performed at the Tricycle Theatre in London, as part of How Long is Never, an evening of short plays exploring the current situation in Darfur, western Sudan
Villa Air-Bel: The Second World War, Escape and a House in France By Rosemary Sullivan John Murray, 477pp. £25.00
