On May 21, 1940, the German Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger took a taxi from his home in Sanary-sur-Mer, on the Mediterranean coast, to Les Milles, an internment camp near Aix-en-Provence. It was a last extravagance to ward off reality, because Feuchtwanger knew what awaited him behind the gates. Eight months earlier, during the so-called Drôle de guerre (Phony War) that followed Hitler’s conquest of Poland, France had ordered all Germans and Austrians in the country, including those, like Feuchtwanger, who had fled fascism, to report to camps and detained them briefly. On May 14, four days after the Germans invaded France, an order went out for all “enemy aliens” between the ages of seventeen and fifty-five to turn themselves in once again. This time things were far worse. Even though Les Milles was not a labor or death camp, the conditions were squalid enough to make Feuchtwanger regret not having left for America while there was still time.

Fueled by a new methamphetamine called Pervitin, which it had developed to eliminate the need for sleep, the German army had broken through French defenses and was advancing at a pace that no one thought possible. Eight to ten million people fled in panic, jamming the roads. The situation was particularly dire for the German and Austrian refugees—many of them important writers and artists and many of them Jews—who had sought safety in France following Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 and found themselves once again at his mercy. The country they had escaped tosuddenly became a country they needed to escape from. After the signing of the armistice on June 22, 1940, the Germans occupied the northern part of France, including Paris, as well as the Atlantic coast, while the south became a “free zone,” with its capital in the spa town of Vichy and a collaborationist government led by the World War I hero Marshal Philippe Pétain. Many of the refugees converged on Marseille, France’s sole port not in Nazi hands, hoping to find a way out.

In Marseille 1940: The Flight of Literature, the German literary critic Uwe Wittstock traces the anguished itineraries of more than a dozen refugee writers and artists and the efforts by a group of courageous Americans—along with many anonymous but no less courageous French people—to rescue them. Told in a series of short, suspenseful vignettes, it is a sequel to his book February 1933: The Winter of Literature, which followed a group of German intellectuals in the days after Hitler came to power.¹ Some of those whose hasty escape from Germany Wittstock narrated in the first book reappear in the second in even more dire straits. February 1933 struck a chord by charting the shift from denial to panic when Germans suddenly found themselves living in a fascist country, and Marseille 1940 makes another timely intervention: as governments once again shut borders and attempt to turn us against the foreigners in our midst, it helps us understand the plight of those fleeing dangerous or difficult circumstances as well as our responsibility to help them.

Central to the story is Varian Fry, a temperamental American journalist who had witnessed Nazi cruelty toward Jews and other dissidents firsthand while reporting from Berlin in the 1930s and who realized early on the peril that the refugees faced in occupied France. Fry’s story is known to English-speaking readers—less so in Germany—thanks to several historical studies and to Julie Orringer’s novel The Flight Portfolio (2019), which was adapted into the TV miniseries Transatlantic (2023). With the help of associates, including his wife, Eileen, Fry formed the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC), which raised funds to send him to Marseille with a list of two hundred prominent writers, artists, and intellectuals to track down and save. His efforts to obtain American visas for them received an unexpected boost from Eleanor Roosevelt, who remembered meeting Feuchtwanger on a book-signing tour in the 1930s and who was moved when his American publisher sent her a snapshot of the writer in tattered clothing staring out from behind the barbed-wire fence of Les Milles.

During an election year, FDR feared opposition to such efforts from isolationists as well as from those, like Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who claimed that the refugees would pose a threat to the United States. Applicants for entry were forced to prove that they had sufficient financial resources or a guarantor to support them so they would not become a public burden, to provide certification of their morality or good character (including an affirmation that they had never belonged to a Communist organization), and to submit a biographical sketch indicating the danger they faced at the hands of the Nazis. Despite enormous need, the State Department granted very few visas. However, the First Lady was able to apply pressure on her husband to speed the process for the famous names on the ERC’s list.

Even with American visas in hand, Fry had a difficult task. Locating the refugees on the list was the least of his problems: many sought him out after word spread of his presence in Marseille. But getting them out of France was another matter. After the start of the war the only large transatlantic ocean liners departed from Lisbon, which meant that the refugees needed transit permits to cross Franco’s Spain and Portugal. Obtaining an exit visa from Vichy France was even more difficult, particularly for any refugee whose papers were not in order—as was the case for those who had refused to report to a French concentration camp or who had escaped from one. Fry eventually convinced an intrepid couple, the Hungarian-born Jewish antifascist resistance fighter Lisa Fittko and her husband, Hans, to smuggle frightened refugees over the Pyrenees into Spain.

Drawing mainly on letters, diaries, and memoirs, Wittstock follows a wide cast of characters as they struggle to obtain visas and seek passage out of Marseille. Some of the stories end happily. Hannah Arendt, who later drew on her refugee experience to write her magnum opus, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), managed to escape from the French concentration camp of Gurs with forged papers and miraculously reunite with her husband before eventually obtaining an exit visa from France with the help of Fry and American Jewish groups. The writer Anna Seghers (born Annette Reiling), who could not get a US entry visa because of her Communist affiliations, finally secured one to Mexico and found passage, thanks to Fry, on a cargo ship along with the Surrealist impresario André Breton and the young ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. She channeled her experience into the novel Transit (1944).

Other refugees, such as Heinrich Mann, had a harder time. Once considered more successful than his brother and fellow novelist Thomas Mann, he began to lose his grip after fleeing Germany. Nervous and exhausted, he and his alcoholic wife made it to the US with the help of Fry, but he could not adjust to life outside Europe and never managed to regain his former stature. The philosopher Walter Benjamin did not make it out. In late September 1940, as his Spanish and Portuguese transit visas were about to expire and he was unable to obtain an exit visa from France, he presented himself at the doorstep of Fittko, an acquaintance from Paris, having heard that she was smuggling people across the Pyrenees. After being stopped by officials on the Spanish side of the border, Benjamin swallowed a lethal dose of morphine tablets rather than be turned over to the Gestapo. The next day the Spanish authorities, rattled by his death, let the rest of the party through.

Fry went to a great deal of trouble to help two antifascist Weimar politicians, Rudolf Breitscheid and Rudolf Hilferding, both members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany who had fled to France after opposing Hitler’s rise to power. Hilferding faced the added danger of being Jewish. They refused to be smuggled out of France with forged documents provided by Fry because they believed that such an escape was beneath their dignity as German politicians. Eventually the Vichy government granted them exit visas, and Fry helped arrange passage on one of the ships now traveling from Marseille to Martinique, but Breitscheid refused because the only available berth was in a dormitory below deck. It didn’t matter: in early 1941, shortly before the ship was to leave, they were both arrested by the Vichy police and handed to the Gestapo. Hilferding was tortured to death in custody, while Breitscheid perished at Buchenwald in 1944.

Although Wittstock makes readers feel the refugees’ overwhelming anxiety, he also relieves the tension with comedic moments. Feuchtwanger gets smuggled out of Saint Nicolas, another internment camp, by the American consul in Marseille, who gives him women’s clothes and tells him to pretend to be his mother-in-law when stopped by the French police. The novelist Franz Werfel and his wife, Alma Mahler-Werfel, travel through France with twelve suitcases, some of them containing the original scores of Alma’s ex-husband, the composer Gustav Mahler, which they hope to sell once they reach America to finance their lives in exile. When the precious suitcases go missing in the chaos of the exodus, Alma convinces a besotted hotel keeper to track them down for her. The couple eventually make it over the Pyrenees in the same group as the Manns, their luggage in tow.

Many of the writers and artists who cross Wittstock’s pages are familiar figures, but this glimpse into their flights reveals them in a new light. Marseille 1940 reads like a nonfiction version of Irène Némirovsky’s novel Suite française, which follows a group of (non-Jewish French) characters as they flee Paris after the Nazi invasion.² Like Némirovsky, Wittstock explores how the extreme pressure of the historical moment functions as a kind of magnifying glass, revealing human characteristics that might never have emerged otherwise. Some of Wittstock’s subjects rise to the occasion. This is true particularly of the rescuers: Fry refused to buckle in the face of attempts by both Vichy officials and his colleagues back in New York to end his mission. The Fittkos risked their lives each time they ferried a group to safety. But it’s also true of many of the refugees, including Arendt and Seghers, who displayed a remarkable sangfroid and ability to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances.

Some of them, however, descended into vindictiveness, pettiness, and worse. The catastrophe of France’s fall brought the deep-rooted rivalry between the Mann brothers to the surface and exacerbated tensions among the various Communist exiles. Mahler-Werfel, whose tortured romantic relationships with famous men—not just Mahler and Werfel but also the architect Walter Gropius—have earned her a dubious place in the pantheon of twentieth-century cultural icons, emerges in Wittstock’s account as a Hitler-loving harridan who regrets her marriage to the Jewish Werfel as soon as it puts her in danger. “Now I will have to wander to the ends of the earth with a people alien to me,” she confided to her journal, even as she and her husband engaged in an increasingly madcap folie à deux—lugging their twelve suitcases—through the south of France.

Historians may find fault with certain aspects of Marseille 1940. It lacks footnotes, making it impossible to tell which sources Wittstock used, and the bibliography is far from exhaustive. Some may bristle at the novelistic style. But Wittstock’s narrative method has advantages. By telling the stories of the refugees in the present tense, he forces us to see the world through their eyes. The book is filled with minute details that bring them to life—Feuchtwanger’s taxi to Les Milles, Mahler-Werfel’s suitcases—and allow us to experience the tragedy of France’s fall in a way that more conventional histories do not.

A more serious concern is the book’s focus on a relatively small number of renowned artists and writers. What about all the refugees who did not inspire the sympathy of the American First Lady and did not receive coveted American visas? Wittstock is not oblivious to this criticism. “Alongside every person mentioned in this book stood hundreds or thousands of others who had the same right to be memorialized,” he acknowledges in the epilogue. But the decision by the State Department to grant visas to only a select few is one of the great tragedies of the war, and Wittstock was not obliged to replicate it by keeping his focus so narrow. Aside from his descriptions of the throngs of people on the roads and the long lines at the American consulates, we get little sense of the plight of nonfamous refugees and no access to their inner lives.

Ultimately, though, I discerned a deeper purpose in his decision to focus on a narrow cast of celebrated characters. These are people we already know and care about. Some, like Arendt and Benjamin, are among the best-known intellectuals of our era. By depicting them as impoverished and desperate—denied, as Arendt put it, the “right to have rights”—Wittstock helps us conceive of a kind of suffering that all too often remains abstract when it affects unknown people in faraway lands.

Wittstock is preoccupied with the factors that enabled survival. To be sure, ingenuity and flexibility helped. Seghers turned to Mexico after the US closed its doors to her. Arendt saw an opening and slipped through when the time was right. They survived. Breitscheid and Hilferding refused to bend and did not. But as Wittstock makes clear, chance was a far more important factor. The decision to cross the Pyrenees at one place rather than another meant life or death. Whether refugees fleeing France happened to encounter a hostile border guard or one who was willing to let them through without the proper papers made all the difference: “In the end, whether one ends up with a supporter of Pétain or someone who sympathizes with the adversaries of the Nazis is a matter of luck.”

Even the luckiest refugees, however, would not have survived without a great deal of help from people who took enormous risks. By prolonging his stay in France to continue his work, Fry faced arrest and deportation, along with the dissolution of his marriage. The Fittkos faced certain death for their actions. The fact that Fry and his team—including two intrepid American women, the heiress Mary Jayne Gold, who funded a large part of the operation, and Miriam Davenport, who administered it—were not heralded as heroes after the war is an injustice that has only recently begun to be rectified. Fry published his memoirs in 1945, but as Wittstock points out, “In the euphoria of victory, the American book market was not particularly interested in stories about past wartime suffering,” and many resented Fry’s allegations that the US State Department had made it difficult for Jewish refugees to enter America. He was not recognized by Yad Vashem as one of the “Righteous Among the Nations” until 1994.

And yet, though Fry’s contributions received belated recognition, the contributions of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of French people to saving refugees have received no recognition at all. Over and over Wittstock describes small acts of generosity and quiet heroism by ordinary people who had no idea of the renown of those they were aiding. Vichy’s collaboration with Hitler casts a dark shadow over France in this period, but as Lisa Fittko put it in her memoir:

None of us could have survived without the help of French people in every corner of the country—French men and women whose humanity gave them the courage to take in, to hide, and to feed these displaced strangers.

When Fittko came out of the hospital drained and depleted, a kind butcher gave her an extra ration of meat even though she lacked the proper coupon. When she and her husband were stopped on the street by a French gendarme assigned to arrest foreigners, their landlady vouched that they were her neighbors. “It is astonishing how greatly influenced the populace is by the model set by personages like the prefect or the city’s bishop,” Wittstock writes of the residents of the town of Montauban, who allowed Arendt to live quietly among them. “Their commitment to refugees focuses public attention on how they can be helped, not on how they can be gotten rid of as quickly as possible.”

Wittstock does not explicitly make the connection to the dire circumstances facing refugees in Europe and the United States today, but he doesn’t need to. The parallels are all too apparent. When Fry received notice of his imminent arrest from the Marseille chief of police, he protested that his detention would be a violation of human rights. The Vichy functionary scoffed, “I am aware that they still believe in the antiquated notion of human rights in the United States.” But soon, he predicted, America would jettison such outdated ideas: “We’ve realized that society is more important than the individual. You will also come to understand that.” Now that our leaders are proving that policeman right, the stories of the refugees who flocked to Marseille in 1940 are more essential than ever.