Villa Air-Bel

On August 15th, 1941, Varian Fry arrived in Marseille, France with enough clothing for a summer abroad, a list of two hundred people he was meant to rescue, letters of recommendation, and $3000 in cash taped to his leg. Chosen by the Emergency Rescue Committee, whose ranks included novelist Thomas Mann, Reinhold Niebuhr, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Upton Sinclair, Fry had been given the mission of saving the intellectual and artistic elite of Europe.

Fry, his collaborators, and the men and women they sought to protect spent a year hiding in a chateau called Villa Air-Bel in the suburbs of Marseille. Bestselling author Rosemary Sullivan draws from the diaries, memoirs, and letters of the residents of the chateau to reveal their private worlds and the web of relationships that developed. Villa Air-Bel is a beautifully written work about one of the most intriguing untold stories of the German occupation of France.

Rosemary Sullivan is an award-winning author, poet, biographer and literary critic. Her works include Labyrinth of Desire: Women, Passion and Romantic Obsession, The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out, Shadow Maker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwan, By Heart: Elizabeth Smart /A Life and The Garden Master: Style and Identity in the Poetry of Theodore Roethke. She is a professor of English at the University of Toronto.

“Sullivan has written a book of great detail and complexity, though one that is full of darkness.” — Quill & Quire