Summary:
It’s 1940, and France has fallen to the Nazis, leaving the
country divided between occupied France in the north, and so-called “Free
France,” with its government at the spa town of Vichy, in the south. The Vichy government is headed by Marshall Phillippe
Petain, a collaborationist puppet of the Germans running a collaborationist
puppet state. But unlike the north, the
south is still technically unoccupied, and people fleeing the Nazis from all
over Europe make their way there in the hope of finding a way off the European
continent, and so a kind of black market in emigration develops, centered in
the port city of Marseille.
Among the groups working out of Marseille is the Emergency
Rescue Committee, an organization set up by the journalist and editor Varian Fry
and his friends, and with the support of Eleanor Roosevelt. The ERC has sent Fry to Marseille with a list
of names of people to be assisted to emigrate, and the list is a Who’s Who of
the European cultural elite: artists,
writers, philosophers, and the like, many of whom are Jewish and/or have
opposed the Nazis and are thus wanted by the Gestapo. It is Fry’s job to shelter them, get them fake
transit visas, and ultimately smuggle them out, usually to neutral Spain or
Portugal, or even directly to the States.
The Vichy government, which has an agreement with Germany to surrender
any identified fugitives, knows this is going on, and together with their
German allies, is always hot on the trail of these now stateless refugees, and
thus hot on Fry’s trail also.
The Flight Portfolio is based on several of the
thirteen months Fry spent in Marseille as the representative of the ERC. Along with his staff, he “brings in” (and
successfully gets out) Marc Chagall and his wife, Franz Werfel and Alma Mahler
Gropius Werfel, Max Ernst, Lion Feuchtwanger, a young Hannah Arendt (“Name?” “Johanna Arendt. My friends know me as Hannah”), and
others. All the while, he and his staff
are but one step ahead of the agents of Vichy and the Gestapo. And during this
time, Chagall has been compiling the flight portfolio, a collection of artworks
which testify to the humanitarian crisis in Europe, to be smuggled out as a
warning to the free world.
Complicating the issue—and a major part of the story line—is
the fact that Fry, whose wife Eileen had stayed behind in New York City, has reconnected
with a Harvard classmate named Elliot Grant with whom he had been romantically
involved as an undergraduate. Grant has
come to Marseille to be with Gregor Katznelson, a fellow Columbia University
professor who has returned to Europe to find his son Tobias who has disappeared. Tobias is a brilliant young Berlin physicist
and is wanted at all costs by the Gestapo for his scientific acumen and his
value to weapons development. Gregor is desperate to secure his safe passage
to New York. Fry promises Grant that he
will get Katznelson’s son to safety. When
the elder Katznelson returns to the United States, Fry and Grant resume their
relationship, and Varian finds himself becoming increasingly emotionally involved
with Grant and distanced from Eileen, although he still loves her. Ultimately Tobias shows up in Marseille; but
there is another fugitive, a world-renowned and respected artist, who has been waiting,
is in immediate danger, and needs to get out of Europe. And only one can leave on the waiting ship.
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