My grandmother showed up the next day to find Gestapo agents on the scene and the Krämers’ home already emptied of its contents. “I heard my friends are dead,” she told them. They took down her name.

  By the spring of 1939, Kurt had moved with Helen and Christian to Paris, to an apartment across from Notre-Dame and overlooking the Seine. Helen found work there with a British publisher, but Kurt could land little more than the occasional freelance assignment. One piece, a December 1939 review of Thomas Mann’s Lotte in Weimar for a Paris-based German-exile newspaper, reads like therapy, an exercise in working through his own circumstances:

  Habent sua fata libelli [Books have their destiny]: Written on the shores of Lake Zurich and in southern France, in the cabin of an ocean liner and in an American college town, excerpted in a Swiss magazine, printed in Holland, graced with cover art by an illustrator from Prague, published (by Bermann-Fischer) in Stockholm—can the story of a book possibly be any more “far-flung,” any more grotesque a reflection of the diaspora of German intellectual life in our time? Yet no work by Thomas Mann is less distended than this, none more collected, more dense, more imposing, and we bow in awe before the moral achievement of this writer, who in times like these has created a work that so supremely captures the era. For Lotte in Weimar is a book of the highest relevance, a book that stands as a radiant and persuasive monument to the German genius, a book to tell the world of the stakes that Europe fights for today.

  And then, as noted in Kurt’s diary on September 1, 1939: 0545h Hitler Angriff gegen Polen. With the German invasion of Poland, everything changed. Despite the Wolffs’ anti-fascist credentials and Nice-born son, the French government now regarded Kurt and Helen as enemy aliens. On September 16 police interned Kurt at the Stade de Colombes. Only the intervention of Wladimir d’Ormesson, the brother of a friend who had served as France’s chargé d’affaires in Munich, secured his release three weeks later. During Kurt’s internment, Helen decided to send my uncle Christian, then five, as far from the Nazi threat as possible. Not willing to risk leaving Paris herself, she called on a neighbor, a Madame Bouty, to escort him west on a train to a convent school in La Rochelle, where France runs into the sea.

  By now the so-called Sitzkrieg (known in English as the “phony war”) had begun, with France and Britain bracing for the inevitable German attack. Through the French playwright and former diplomat Jean Giraudoux, Kurt and Helen had found work with the Ministry of Information, preparing propaganda leaflets to be dropped over those parts of Germany within range of French aircraft. “The only thing we lack is the freedom to travel, which could reunite us with our friends, in particular with you,” Kurt wrote his daughter in Munich at the end of April 1940. “But after all, in such times you can’t have everything—and it’s of course our wish and hope that freedom will return to us and doesn’t take too long to do so.”

  Days later the phony war went real, and the Wehrmacht easily circumvented the Maginot Line. “Einfall Belgien, Holland,” reads Kurt’s diary for May 10—invasion of Belgium and Holland. As Germans who had taken part in the hostile leafleting of German territory, Kurt and Helen knew the stakes if they were to be caught. Under the threat of Sippenhaft, a medieval Germanic custom that the Third Reich would invoke to hold all blood relatives responsible for the crimes of any individual, their actions also jeopardized Niko and Maria, as well as Helen’s sister Liesl and her family, back in Germany. From two friends, professors of German at French universities, Kurt and Helen exacted a promise: if the Nazis make it to Paris and we’re still here, come shoot us so we can’t fall into their hands.

  Around this time Kurt bought two gold bars and stashed them with one of those professors, Albert Fuchs, a French citizen who taught at the University of Strasbourg.

  With the German breakthrough at Sedan on May 15, French authorities interned Kurt again and soon detained Helen too—he first at the Stade de Buffalo in Paris, then at camps in Chambaran and Le Cheylard in the southeast; she at the Vélodrome d’Hiver in the capital before transfer to the Gurs internment camp in the southwest. But these second detentions turned out to be strokes of fortune, for they ensured that both were clear of Paris when the Wehrmacht took the city on June 14.

  Only ten days after Helen arrived in Gurs, France formally capitulated, signing an armistice with the Germans that left her free to go. But this was a mixed blessing, for the deal obliged the new, collaborationist Vichy government to “surrender on demand” anyone the Nazis wanted. In the meantime Christian remained at the convent in La Rochelle, and the last Helen knew, her husband was still interned at Le Cheylard. What to do?

  Acting on a tip from a fellow Gurs internee, the German painter Anne-Marie Uhde, Helen set out on foot in the vague direction of what would turn out to be a phantasmagoric kind of sanctuary. An anti-Nazi angel, a Habsburg countess, was said to be sheltering the hunted and homeless somewhere in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Feeling her way east along roads paralleling the mountains, Helen hitched a ride with a French military vehicle. When it ran out of gas, she boarded a bus for a village called Saint-Lary. From there she hiked several kilometers more and, after walking up a narrow, winding road, stopped in her tracks. In front of a medieval château, hewn of yellowing stone and hung with ivy, stood a striking woman, perhaps fifty years old and at least six feet tall, conversing with a knot of French officers.

  Several years later Helen would record her first encounter with the Countess Bertha Colloredo-Mansfeld, née Kolowrat-Krakowsky: “When she saw me, she came over with the swift, vigorous step of an Amazon, glanced me up and down, gave me a quick smile and said, ‘Thank God, you have an intelligent face. I will enjoy talking to you. But what you need now is a meal, a bath, and a bed.’”

  Helen was led into the château and found herself gazing out at a garden from beneath the Gothic arch of a window.

  Against a solid wall of intertwined, century-old cypresses stood a multitude of many-colored shrubs and flowers in full bloom. The whole place, inside and out, was such a miracle of beauty and color that it lifted me completely out of the misery of defeat and flight. I blessed the person who was at the core of that miracle and, instead of going to bed, followed the Countess around all afternoon. This was my first and probably unique chance to observe an obsolete remnant of the past: a true, un-degenerate aristocrat in full function.

  The Countess adopted me as naturally as if I were a stray cat. In fact, I could make myself useful as a kind of lady-in-waiting, and had a full-time job warding off the numerous French officers in search of romance. One of them commented sentimentally on the color of her dress, chosen, as he suggested, to set off in its ultimate perfection the color of her eyes. She crushed him for the time being with the answer: “That was exactly what I had in mind this morning, after reading the conditions of the armistice.”

  She spoke Polish with the Pole who cared for the horses, Italian with her farmers, Czech with her maid, and Russian with her foreman. When she heard that I had lost on the road what clothes I had been able to take along on the flight, she took me to the diminutive village adjacent to the castle grounds. Here she housed a Spanish seamstress, come to this place in some inexplicable manner during the civil war in Spain. After four years she was still there, sewing for the whole community, from the Countess’ costumes to the workmen’s overalls. Mercedes was told in Spanish to make me a complete outfit in the shortest possible time.

  The Countess Colloredo-Mansfeld had been raised by an heiress to a cigarette fortune and a Habsburg count who had survived the last fatal duel of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As a girl, course-correcting a classical education with her own strong will, she had read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and become inflamed with a spirit of racial justice. In fact, she had taken possession of this château for having acted on those beliefs in the most socially transgressive possible way.

  During the early twenties, the countess had become muse to Roland Hayes, the African American tenor then touring the concert halls of Europe, pictured alongside his patroness. As each got to know the other, she shared with Hayes her broad knowledge of literature and the arts; he in turn credited her with unlocking a sensibility he hadn’t realized he had. During long stretches apart they exchanged letters, and in one the countess, who had come to idealize the harmonious blending of the races, wrote, “we must have a child together”—as she would later put it—“to bring a new light to humanity.” In 1925 she informed her husband, Count Hieronymus Colloredo-Mansfeld, that she was carrying Hayes’s baby. After processing his anger, the count bought and renovated this château, gifted it to her, and supported her with a regular allowance, to keep his now estranged wife and the daughter she would bear as far from the light of scandal as possible.

  That affair did more than certify the countess’s anti-Nazi bona fides. It positioned her in those hills outside Toulouse to shelter many strays besides my fugitive step-grandmother: an Austrian whose legs and teeth had been shattered during two years in a concentration camp; a mother from Brittany with a four-year-old in tow; a Romanian soothsayer who kept his divining rod in a Cuban cigar box; and countless Russian refugees, most of them veterans of the Spanish Civil War who had fled over the Pyrenees. One, a former Soviet general’s orderly, ended up marrying Maya, the daughter of Bertha Colloredo-­Mansfeld and Roland Hayes.

  “If I ever figure things out beforehand, nothing would work out,” the countess told Helen of her management style. “My head would interfere with my heart. How could I feed and clothe all these people on a budget?”

  Now with a temporary address, Helen sent word to a family friend in Switzerland. Kurt, also free now, thanks to the deal struck between the Nazis and the Vichy French, reached out to him too. The friend, the pacifist classical scholar Baron Kurd von Hardt, forwarded to Kurt the location of the château and let Helen know he had done so. Thus, as Helen would recall, “I sat waiting for him, like a damsel in a castle, looking down the only road. And one day I saw him coming up that road.”

  “I could have stayed there forever,” Helen said later. But as much as my grandfather could learn to love château life, he had a healthy understanding of larger circumstances. Knowing the dark heart of the Vichy regime, and fearing the Nazis would soon occupy all of France, he insisted that they quickly find a way out. As Helen would later say, “We had to go someplace we would want to leave . . . near an American consulate.” By the second week of August they were back at the apartment in Nice, reunited with Kurt’s aunt and stepmother, Lullu.

  They still had to spring Christian from La Rochelle, which had since come under German occupation. Here they connected with Tina Vinès, a Parisian friend who worked at the Louvre. Because her duties included evacuating the museum’s treasures from the capital—she might stash a painting in this château or a vase in that cloister—Vinès carried papers that allowed her free passage between the Nazi-­occupied and the Vichy zones. She agreed to fetch Christian from the convent and deliver him to Nice. The two wound up spending a night in a château in the Loire valley, where Christian slept in a bed he recalls being told had once belonged to Talleyrand. The next day the two simply walked into unoccupied France, smuggling Christian’s belongings in the handcart of a farmer on his way to market. Shortly after ten p.m. on September 6, they appeared at the apartment on the rue Maréchal Joffre.

  The clause in the armistice that mandated “surrender on demand” struck fear in Kurt and Helen and every refugee in France. It also led to the formation in New York of the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC), which quickly sent to the unoccupied zone an idealistic thirty-one-year-old Harvard-educated journalist named Varian Fry. Working out of a succession of quarters in Marseille—a hotel room, a second-floor office, a tumbledown villa on the outskirts of the city—Fry helped save as many as two thousand people, most of them artists, writers, thinkers, and other cultural enemies of the Nazis. Sometimes Fry, shown here on a station platform in the French border town of Cerbère, bought visas on the black market. Sometimes he had them forged. Always he battled recalcitrant bureaucracies, including the State Department of his own country and its ingrained antisemitism—although an American vice-consul in Marseille, a former theology student named Hiram (Harry) Bingham IV, would defy orders from Washington and issue life-saving documents off the books. “Like the first bird note of a gloomy morning a rumor ran through the cafés of the vieux port and Canebière,” wrote Hans Natonek, a Czech journalist Fry would save. “It was said that an American had arrived with the funds and the will to help. It was another distraction in a city in which black-market operators sold hysterical men berths on ships which did not exist to ports which, in any case, would have denied them entry. But the rumor persisted and grew. It was said that this American had a list. . . . The word ‘list’ electrified us.”

  The ERC’s stateside allies included academics, philanthropists, various labor and anti-fascist organizations, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, as well as escapees who, after making it to the United States, refused to forget those left behind. Fry found himself in and out of trouble as the French tried to mollify their Nazi overlords, and he would be expelled for good after only thirteen months. But by then the ERC had helped such figures as Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, and Max Ernst escape from Vichy France. On September 13, 1940, a Friday the thirteenth, Fry personally escorted Kurt’s old authors Franz Werfel and Heinrich Mann—as well as Franz’s wife, Alma, and Heinrich’s wife, Nelly, and nephew Golo, the son of Thomas Mann—to a rendezvous with a guide at the trailhead of a path leading over the Pyrenees. That evening Fry met them all for dinner in Spain, where he handed over their luggage, which he had taken undisturbed over the border by train.

  Fry and his network would soon extend help to Kurt and Helen directly.

  Refugees trying to get out of France might have been trapped in one of Kafka’s stories. They needed a “safe conduct” pass to cross territory under Vichy control. They needed a French exit visa, which the collaborationists weren’t granting to Jews or anyone likely to be sought by the Gestapo. They needed transit visas for every sovereign way station between origin and ultimate destination. And of course there was the holy grail, the US entrance visa. To secure any one document seemed contingent on first having all others in hand.

  From Nice on August 27, my grandfather wrote to Fry, then freshly arrived in Marseille—“a romantic, dirty, hard-edged city,” as Fry’s biographer Andy Marino describes it, “the Casablanca of the northern shore.” Kurt asked after the simplest way forward: an “emergency visitor’s visa” from the US State Department. Helen seems not to have given his English a polishing, but as a result the letter crackles with urgency:

  My publishing house has been during long years the most active center of democratic German literature, as my American colleagues will be able to confirm, f.i. Mr. A. Knopf, New York, who has edited many of my publications in USA. Of the long list of my authors I mention: Heinrich Mann – Franz Werfel – Gustav Meyrink – René Schickele – Karl Kraus – Romain Rolland etc. I have also published a series of American authors, amongst others Sinclair Lewis. Eighty percent of my production was burnt by the Nazis and my publishing house put on a black list. It is not only on account of my former activity as publisher, that I feel myself menaced, but for other reasons which I prefer not to mention by letter.

  Among the unmentionable reasons Kurt feels endangered is his work for the French Ministry of Information, which would seal his fate if he were to fall into the hands of the Gestapo. His rave review of Lotte in Weimar, published in that journal for German exiles, wouldn’t have escaped the Nazis’ notice either.

  Kurt had no way of knowing, but he and Helen were on the Emergency Rescue Committee’s list of Europeans to help, which Fry had taped to a leg beneath his trousers before boarding a Pan Am Clipper for France earlier that month. Two weeks after writing his letter, Kurt received a telegram from the ERC in Manhattan, asking for information about Helen and Christian. A week after that, two requisite affidavits turned up at the ERC’s office on East Forty-Second Street. One, of sponsorship, came from Thea Dispeker, the heiress to a Jewish banking family in Munich and an old flame of Kurt’s. She had been a music educator in Berlin and, since fleeing to New York in 1938, had been working as an agent for classical musicians. In Berlin in February 1933, Kurt had given her a simple gold bracelet as a parting gift, with as much practical as sentimental intent: he told her to pawn it if she had to.

  The other affidavit, of support, came from Dispeker’s friend Robert Weinberg, a New York architect and urban planner who had vouched for so many refugees that he feared his endorsements had begun to arouse suspicion. To the ERC, Dispeker made sure to mention Kurt and Helen’s work for the French, which placed them, as she put it, “in imminent danger.” On September 20, ERC executive secretary Mildred Adams wrote the President’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees to urge action on their case.

  For the remainder of the fall, holed up on the rue Maréchal Joffre, Kurt heard nothing. From time to time he wrote Fry to recommend other candidates for the ERC’s support, using each letter as a chance to nudge along his own application. In the meantime he sent word to Professor Fuchs, who traveled to Nice to deliver the two gold bars, which Kurt exchanged for enough cash to underwrite an Atlantic crossing for three. In November he attended a funeral service for Walter Hasenclever, who five months earlier had killed himself in Les Milles, a Vichy internment camp near Aix-en-Provence, with an overdose of Veronal.