BOOK REVIEW

Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille

by Rosemary Sullivan

On September 3, 1939, at 5 p.m., France officially entered the Second World War. The clubs and theatres shut down. Those who could fled. Civil defence called for a “blue-out” in Paris.

Paris fell in May of the following year. On June 22, the new Vichy government, under the authoritarian leadership of Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain, signed an armistice to surrender on demand any German nationals (and refugees from German-occupied countries such as Poland and Austria) requested for extradition by the Nazis.

Rosemary Sullivan’s Villa Air-Bel is as much about the anger, confusion, and terror that overcame France under Nazi occupation as about the actual Villa Air-Bel, an “immense three-story, nineteenth-century manse ... somewhat battered but still elegant,” which became a safehouse for artists and intellectuals while they waited for international visas, paperwork, or the optimal circumstances for flight.

The book’s short chapters alternate between the path of fascism through France and stories of men and women making their way through the devastation. The cast is large, led by Max Ernst, André Breton, their peers, and one Varian Fry, a plucky American who came to France as part of the American Emergency Rescue Committee, dedicated to saving European artists from the Third Reich. As Sullivan tells it, Fry arrived in Marseille in a Brooks Brothers suit, with $3,000, a letter of introduction from the U.S. State Department, and a list of 200 people he intended to save.

The anguish of these years – the arrests, the interrogations, the perpetual fear – is striking. The Villa is only so safe, and Fry can save only so many. And though France had little choice but to enter the war, so many terrible choices followed. Sullivan has written a book of great detail and complexity, though one that is full of darkness.

Reviewed by Andrew Kett (from the November 2006 issue)

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