He helped between 2,000 and 4,000 people.
He ran a rescue network in France helping Jewish refugees - and anti Nazi’s -escape Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. It doesn’t take long to fall in love with Varian Fry.
Paris was a woman, a fallen woman in the arms of her Nazi captors but Marseille was a man, a schemer in a secondhand coat, ready to sell his soul or whatever else came quickly to hand”. If Paris reeked of sex, opera, art, and decadent poverty, Marseille reeked of underground crime, opportunism, trafficked cocaine, rowdy tavern song. “To be in Marseille, not Paris, still carried a certain novelty, a whiff of the unknown. Masterfully crafted, exquisitely written, impossible to put down, this is historical fiction of the very first order, and resounding confirmation of Orringer's gifts as a novelist. The Flight Portfolio opens at the Chagalls' ancient stone house in Gordes, France, as the novel's hero desperately tries to persuade them of the barbarism and tragedy descending on Europe. Among his many clients were Hannah Arendt, Franz Werfel, André Breton, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and Marc Chagall. Instead, he ended up staying in France for thirteen months, working under the veil of a legitimate relief organization to procure false documents, amass emergency funds, and set up an underground railroad that led over the Pyrenees, into Spain, and finally to Lisbon, where the refugees embarked for safer ports. In 1940, Varian Fry-a Harvard-educated American journalist-traveled to Marseille carrying three thousand dollars and a list of imperiled artists and writers he hoped to rescue within a few weeks. The long-awaited new work from the best-selling author of The Invisible Bridge takes us back to occupied Europe in this gripping historical novel based on the true story of Varian Fry's extraordinary attempt to save the work, and the lives, of Jewish artists fleeing the Holocaust.
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