“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.
ROSEMARY SULLIVAN, the author of fifteen books, is best known for her recent biography Stalin’s Daughter. Published in twenty-three countries, it won the Biographers International Organization Plutarch Award and was a finalist for the PEN /Bograd Weld Award for Biography and the National Books Critics Circle Award. Her book Villa Air-Bel was awarded the Canadian Society for Yad Vashem Award in Holocaust History. She is a professor emeritus at the university of Toronto and has lectured in Canada, the U.S., Europe, India, and Latin America.
It was slightly after 4 A.M. on the morning of September 25, 1940, when Lisa Fittko opened the door of the inn in the seaport town of Banyuls-sur-Mer and looked apprehensively up avenue Puig del Mas. After seven years on the run, she had grown adept at controlling her panic. She looked across at the harbor and listened for the sound of the waves beating on the shore. She tried to match her breathing to that calming rhythm. She glanced at the mayor's office on the central square. The gendarmes would not be arriving for hours yet. Up the avenue to the right, she noted that the vineyard workers had already begun to come out of their houses. It was time to leave.
She turned to the two people behind her and told them to put on the espadrilles they would need for the rough climb up the mountain. She gestured for them to follow her and reminded them again not to speak. Their German accents would betray them. The woman was a stranger to her, but Lisa believed she could be trusted not to lose her nerve. The boy, just sixteen, had been through enough to know the danger they were in. The two had understood immediately when she told them there was always someone watching and they must carry nothing but a small knapsack in order not to drawattention to themselves. Not that they had anything to carry. They had already lost everything.
The three walked slowly up the avenue, the women first, the boy trailing behind. In the waning moonlight, Lisa could make out the silhouette of the church tower. Only the previous week she had sat in its garden, contemplating the autumn butterflies gorging on the last sweet tastes of life. On that day, the Spanish simplicity of the church's façade with its three bells consoled her and the gothic mausoleums lined up like sentinels in the graveyard had made her think, then, of sanctuary. Now, though, the idea of the dead witnessing this flight through the blackness made her shudder.
She thought of her husband, Hans, who was still in Marseille. He'd sent her these strangers to guide over the mountains to freedom. For a moment she was almost angry with him. Why was it always they who had to risk their lives to save someone else? They'd been fighting Fascism since 1933 when Hitler first came to power and they'd fled, distributing anti-Fascist tracts as they ran across borders, first Czechoslovakia, then Switzerland, and now France. She knew that Hans was constitutionally incapable of abandoning his convictions. They were young, he said, and someone had to stay and fight.
She turned left at the railway bridge and her companions quietly followed. Now came the precipitous climb up stone steps into the vineyards. She could feel the cold wind, the tramontane, against her cheeks, bringing the exhilarating smell of the sea and lifting her courage. They mingled amid the vineyard workers who were moving casually through the darkness, their spades slung over their shoulders, their cabecs for carrying earth swinging with the motion of their footsteps. The workers were pointedly ignoring them. It was not the first time they had seen worried strangers slipping over the mountains. A year ago the refugees had been pouring into France because of the Spanish Civil War. Now the flight was reversed, back into Spain, away from the Gestapo and the French police, away from a country trapped in the totalitarian vise of irrational hatred. Lisa knew the vineyard workers, so accepting of life's patient seasonal pace, would not betray them.
She could smell the mature grapes hanging from the vines and felt their weight. The ritual of the harvest was about to begin. It shocked her to think about how life continued, oblivious to her fear. The light was lifting, and she glanced up at the hills to see if the border patrols, the gardes mobiles, were already on duty. If the three of them were spotted, she could offer no explanation for the presence of two women and a boy making their way through the alleys of vines up into the mountain. They would be arrested as apatrides, stateless people, without the papers that gave them the right to be walking on this ancient ground. It would mean immediate transportation to an internment camp.
They moved up, still unnoticed, into the foothills. Lisa looked at the crude chart on the paper she held in her hand. She noted they'd passed the empty stable marked on the map. They were obviously going in the right direction. Then they reached the huge landmark boulder.
Now she was looking for the old man. Yesterday she had wanted these people to see the climb they were in for and so she'd walked them up to the meadow. The daytime hikers were not suspicious and no one had stopped them. The old man had insisted on carrying his black leather briefcase. In frustration, she tried to dissuade him. She was sure the heavy briefcase would give them away, but he said it contained his new manuscript, which he valued more than his life. Then, to her shock, when they'd reached the meadow, he refused to return to the town. He was halfway, he said. He could not climb down and start again from the bottom. He was going to sleep on the mountain overnight. He would meet them in the morning.
In the distance she saw his body stretched out on the ground, there, where she had left him. She ran to him. Her first thought was that he had died in the night, probably from the cold. He had nothing to cover him. Wild bulls and other animals roamed the mountainous terrain. And smugglers. But he opened his eyes and smiled up amiably at her. Clearly in pain, he stood up slowly. It was then she noticed that his eyes were rimmed with dark red spots. Responding to her shock, he took off his glasses: "It's the dew," he reassured her. "See, the rims of the spectacle frames. The color rubs off when they get wet."1
