Having never heard of Feuchtwanger before, I read The Oppermanns, one of the few contemporary novels he ever wrote. Set in 1932 and 1933, The Oppermanns is the story of four Jewish siblings in Berlin, scions to a successful furniture business founded by their grandfather in the nineteenth century. As the Nazi influence grows, each family member’s sense of self-worth is degraded or destroyed in a dramatic way—from the elder brother, who is forced to surrender the family’s firm to a competitor, to the teenage son, who resorts to suicide to end his humiliation at the hands of his high school teacher, to a younger brother, who signs a petition and ends up in a concentration camp, where he is tortured into madness. Ultimately, the close-knit family is scattered across the world as they flee the country they had always considered home. The novel’s events are described as taking place at the end of “fourteen years of antisemitic incitement” in Germany, tracing back to Germany’s devastating defeat in the first World War. The book is full of references to Judaism, including quotations from the Talmud, yet Feuchtwanger’s writing is conventional, engaging but not artistic. Today, the story feels familiar, even trite—until one remembers that it was first published, in German, in November of 1933.

  In my own novels, I often struggle with the desire to write current events into fiction. Usually I chicken out, too nervous about branding myself politically or making statements I might later regret. If this is how a writer feels in peacetime in the freest of societies, then the courage required to write a novel like Feuchtwanger’s when he did is almost unfathomable. I saw a hint of the scope of that courage in the author’s note that appears on the book’s first page: “After the type of this volume had already been set, a family by the name of Oppermann advised the publisher that Oppermann is a strictly Christian name and that they would, therefore, like to have it avoided that bearers of the name Oppermann be branded before the general public as belonging to a Jewish family. In view of the existing circumstances, the publisher readily understands this attitude on the part of the Oppermann family and herewith advises the readers of this novel of the facts which the Oppermann family wishes to have readily understood.”

  Reading the delicate wording of this “author’s note” is like watching someone balance on a tightrope over a bonfire. Feuchtwanger had spent 1932 in America on a lecture tour; when Hitler came to power, his house in Berlin was confiscated and he was among the first public figures to be stripped of his German citizenship. With his wife, Marta, he went to France, and by 1940 he had landed in a French concentration camp. A photograph of him behind barbed wire moved one of his readers, Eleanor Roosevelt, to offer her support to the Emergency Rescue Committee—support she would withdraw once the State Department began to turn against the committee’s work. By the time Fry arrived in France, Feuchtwanger had already escaped from the camp with the help of the American vice consul in Marseille, Hiram Bingham IV, a righteous Gentile from a long line of traveling truth-seekers. (Hirams I and II introduced Christianity to Hawaii; Hiram III discovered the ruins of Machu Picchu.) Bingham had nabbed Feuchtwanger while prisoners were bathing in a river and then disguised him in women’s clothes for the trip to Marseille. Fry found him and Marta hiding in Bingham’s house; Feuchtwanger was so famous that he was terrified of being recognized on the street.

  The internationally acclaimed and similarly bestselling Austrian Jewish novelist Franz Werfel was even more passionate in warning his readers about the totalitarian menace. His best-known book, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, has rightly become an enduring classic. As an anti-Nazi novel it is more coy than The Oppermanns, hiding behind a historical story about the persecution and murder of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks. In his own author’s note, Werfel goes out of his way to maintain the charade, declaring, “This book was conceived in March of 1929, in the course of a stay in Damascus” that inspired him to write about “this incomprehensible destiny of the Armenian nation.” It was published in 1933 and became a phenomenon around the world. Werfel lost his citizenship when Germany annexed Austria in 1938, and, like Feuchtwanger, he fled to France.

  For all of Werfel’s international fame, he became even better known through his wife, Alma, who was notorious among Europe’s creative elite. A non-Jew with family connections high in the pre-Nazi Austrian government and a romantic attraction to fame, Alma Schindler had already broken the heart of the Austrian painter Gustav Klimt before she turned eighteen. From that humble beginning, she moved on to Jewish artists, embarking on a lifetime of screwing over brilliant Jewish men. She dumped Klimt for the prominent Austrian Jewish composer Alexander Zemlinsky, whom she subsequently dumped to marry the rather more prominent Austrian Jewish composer Gustav Mahler. Mahler, besotted, dedicated the movements of various symphonies to ­her; her later control over Mahler’s legacy became so intense and distorting that the term “the Alma Problem” is now a concept in musicology. Alma dumped Mahler in 1910 to marry one of her few non-Jewish lovers, the Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius—an experience that exiled Mahler to Freud’s couch and, five months later, an untimely death. To no one’s surprise, Gropius failed to meet Alma’s standards, and she dumped him for the artist Oskar Kokoschka (also later saved by Fry’s mission)—whom she subsequently dumped because, as she told a friend, “Oskar is not a genius, and I only marry geniuses.” Being no genius, Kokoschka took this even harder than Mahler. He coped by custom-ordering a nude life-size Alma mannequin, accurate down to the breasts and genitals, which he dressed in haute couture and lived with for over a year, dining with it in restaurants and sitting beside it at the opera. He then threw a party during which he and his friends smashed wine bottles over the mannequin’s head until it was destroyed. Alma, meanwhile, had already moved on to genius husband number three, Franz Werfel—to whom she wasn’t faithful either, but who at least earned her a place on the lists of the Emergency Rescue Committee.

  It was at his first meeting with the Werfels that Varian Fry would realize, as he put it in a letter to his wife, “the shock of my own inadequacy”—that is, just how over his head he actually was in Marseille.

  They met in the hotel where the Werfels were staying, as Fry mentions in his memoir, “under the name Mr. and Mrs. Gustav Mahler.” When I read this line, I laughed out loud. The dark comedy routine between the famous and the star-struck had only just begun.

  “Werfel looked exactly like his photographs,” Fry wrote, “large, dumpy and pallid, like a half-filled sack of flour.” The half-filled sack of flour was completing a novel, Song of Bernadette, the sale of movie rights to which would later buy him a house in Beverly Hills. Meanwhile he and Alma were hiding from death. In a bathrobe and slippers—because really, why bother getting dressed for the person offering to save your life?—he explained to Fry the precise nature of the problem. Thanks to the Emergency Rescue Committee, the Werfels had obtained their American visas at the U.S. Consulate in Marseille. But leaving Vichy France actually required two visas—one for the destination country, and the other an exit visa from the French government. The French government would not issue exit visas to persons whom it had promised to “surrender on demand” to the Gestapo; in fact, applying for one was among the more efficient ways to alert the Gestapo to one’s presence in Marseille. Alma knew of people who had left France without exit visas by crossing into Spain over the Pyrenees, but no one knew what happened to them once they arrived in Fascist Spain. Should the Werfels apply for exit visas and hope for the best? Or should they risk leaving the country illegally—and if so, how was this half-filled sack of flour going to climb over a mountain range?

  “You must save us, Mr. Fry,” Franz Werfel pleaded in English, according to Fry’s memoir. “Oh, ja, you must save us,” Alma said casually, and poured them more wine. Reading this, I could almost hear Alma’s languid voice—the voice of a jaded celebrity, accustomed to using other people as means to ends. It seemed clear to me, if not immediately to Fry, that the Werfels in their pajamas had instantly recognized the awed young American as their latest hired help. Unfortunately, Fry had no idea how to help them.

  After his date with the Werfels, Fry met Frank Bohn, an American who had been sent by the American Federation of Labor to rescue refugees who were labor activists. Bohn already knew the drill. He explained to Fry that he didn’t need to go out looking for the people on his lists. Word would spread quickly that an American had arrived with dollars and visas, and they would come to him. Bohn also explained that the only way to get these refugees out of France was through illegal means. Fry’s would be an underground operation, with the cover story that it was a humanitarian mission to provide refugees with money while they waited for legal visas—money they desperately needed, as most had had no income source for months. Fry set up shop at the Hotel Splendide and referred to his “office” by the abbreviated name “Emerescue,” or in French, “Centre Américain de Secours.”

  The visa game had complicated rules. The U.S. State Department had authorized special emergency visas, but the American Consulate in Marseille, eager to please its allies in the Vichy government, took its time issuing them. Even refugees who were able to obtain French exit visas often found that by the time they did so, their American visas had expired. Sometimes a third “transit visa” was also required for travel through Spain and Portugal to Lisbon, from where New York sailings departed. Many stateless refugees could not even obtain the necessary papers for travel within France. Refugees with no papers at all, or whose names were well known—true of many on Fry’s lists—needed false passports, which Fry obtained from a disgruntled former Czech consul. One of the first refugees who met Fry helpfully provided him with a map of the French-Spanish border town of Cerbère, where refugees could bypass border patrols by crawling behind a cemetery wall.

  Fry hid the map behind the mirror in his room at the Splendide. Within days, he looked outside his hotel room window and saw long lines of terrified refugees, all waiting for him. The hotel concierge was becoming irate. Fry decided to hire a staff. And these were the dead people whom I was able to meet in Los Angeles, courtesy of the many hours of filmed interviews conducted by Pierre Sauvage.

  Fry’s right-hand man was Albert Otto Hirschmann, a young German Jew who had come to France to study before the war and then enlisted in the French Army, where he invented an identity for himself as a Philadelphia-born Frenchman named Albert Hermant. With the army’s defeat, he had become a specialist in all things illegal, making friends with Marseille’s gangsters and becoming Fry’s chief link to Marseille’s underworld, supplying bogus passports and fenced cash. “My advantage,” he told Sauvage, “was that I was not easily scared.”

  To manage the crowds at the door, Fry hired Charlie Fawcett, a wrestler from the American Volunteer Ambulance Corps. Fawcett recalled a Vichy policeman who tried to deter refugees from entering Fry’s offices; Fawcett’s professional wrestling hold on the man’s head ended his interference. Fawcett also found ingenious ways to conceal messages between Marseille and New York. Since the Vichy police censored all telegrams and mail, important information about the mission had to be sent to New York with refugee couriers—in condoms inserted into toothpaste tubes, for example. Fawcett found a way to hide messages in a trumpet and even learned to play a few tunes that didn’t require the third valve, where the messages were hidden, in case border guards got suspicious. It worked. “No one takes you seriously when you’re holding a trumpet,” Fawcett said with a laugh. Working hard at not being taken seriously, he was once asked by a refugee if he were a bachelor. “When I said I was, she said she had two Jewish women for me to marry, to get them out of France,” he remembered. “In the end I married six of them.”

  Another essential employee was Miriam Davenport, a Smith College graduate from a poor family in Iowa who had been studying art on scholarship in Paris when the Nazis took over. “In France I suddenly realized that I had lost my future,” Davenport told Sauvage years later. She came to Fry only because she had fled to Marseille with her next-door neighbor Walter Mehring, a German poet who was on Fry’s lists. Noticing her knowledge of art, Fry hired her to process the steady stream of refugees who came through his door—to decide who was famous, who was talented, and who was really in danger. “I’m terrible with names,” she said, “but at that time I remembered every client’s name, because all these people had were their names.” When asked why she took the job, Davenport recalled her Christian upbringing. “The Book of Ruth was read to me as a fairy tale,” she told Sauvage. “I felt very strongly that these people were my people, and that I had to do something about it.”

  One of the things she did about it was to approach Mary Jayne Gold, a young WASP heiress from Illinois whom she had met during the flight from Paris, for funding to expand Fry’s A-list to include a B-list. Gold, who had already donated her private plane to the French Resistance, provided more than cash. When four refugees on Fry’s list were imprisoned in the Vernet concentration camp, Fry suggested that Gold use “feminine wiles” to persuade the camp’s commandant to release them. Gold, who at thirty-one had already had a dozen years’ worth of sexual adventures across Europe, was game. When she arrived at the camp, she saw guards filling in graves before she met the commandant and gave him the names of the prisoners she wanted freed. “I tried to be something between sexy and ladylike,” she said. It worked: He asked her out to dinner that night, and their agreement was as tacit as it was clear. But that evening she waited in the restaurant for hours; the commandant had stood her up. The following day she went back to the camp. “I asked him, ‘What about our date?’ He told me, ‘Mademoiselle, I assure you I would have rather had dinner with you, but I had to dine with the Gestapo. Your friends will be on the train at noon, on my honor.’ It killed me that he had a sense of honor.”

  One of the strangest things about watching Sauvage’s interviews with these brave people is, as Sauvage had told me, how happy they appear. Articulate, warm, witty, and brilliant, they are impossible to dislike. Their age—most were in their eighties when Sauvage interviewed them—makes their happiness seem almost a part of them, a defining feature of who they are, as Sauvage would have it. But as I watched them recall their experiences, often laughing at their antics from their youthful days, I couldn’t help but feel as though something were missing. Perhaps it was merely the filter of an interview, or the polite reserve of a generation taught to hide emotions. But as they spoke of a time that was surely full of impossible choices, the horror of imminent arrest, and the devastating reality of being forced to turn away many thousands of people and leave them to their deaths, these genuine heroes gave no signs on-screen that they had been involved in something that didn’t have an entirely happy ending. Instead, they seemed to see the whole thing as a fun adventure, free from any anger or regret.

  But then I began to wonder if I were the one being fooled.

  “We were misfits,” Miriam Davenport said of Fry’s team. “We didn’t fit the pattern of human behavior, of staying out of trouble and keeping your mouth shut.” The biggest misfit was Fry himself. Wanting to project an air of authority, he dressed in dapper pinstriped suits each day, with a pressed handkerchief in his pocket and a flower in his lapel, shaking refugees’ hands with supreme confidence and sending them off with a “See you in New York.” It was a stage act of the breezy American, at a time when Fry’s organization was still so under-resourced that he and his staffers, unable to afford their own office space, were holding meetings in the bathroom of his hotel room with the faucets running to avoid being overheard by Vichy spies. Fry’s confident persona with his refugee clients was incongruous, both in war-torn Marseille and with the difficult personality his closest associates knew. “One of the secrets of his success,” Gold told Sauvage, “was that he was an ornery cuss.” As I was starting to realize, Fry had trouble getting along with anyone.

  His need to micromanage the mission led Fry to escort the Werfels over the Pyrenees himself. He also took three other refugees: Heinrich Mann, a phenomenally popular anti-Nazi novelist and brother of Thomas Mann; Heinrich Mann’s wife, Nelly; and Thomas Mann’s son Golo, a renowned historian. The Feuchtwangers would follow shortly along the same route.

  To say the refugees were unprepared for the journey would be a massive understatement. Alma Werfel arrived at the train station with seventeen pieces of luggage, all of which she insisted were essential. (Some contained manuscripts of Mahler’s symphonies, though most contained her clothes.) For her stealth trek over the Pyrenees, she wore a bright-white dress, which even the least attentive border guard scanning the horizon would be hard-pressed to miss. Heinrich Mann, unaccustomed to the name on his forged documents, had forgotten to relabel his clothes; Fry, gladly playing the part of hired help, picked Mann’s monogram out of his hat for him. When they reached the border, Fry and Alma’s luggage took a train through the mountains while the refugees traversed them on foot—with the athletically challenged Werfel nearly being carried over the hills by Leon Ball, another American expatriate who worked for Fry. Along with the luggage, the refugees also ditched their old identification papers with Fry on the train. Their noble servant then had to torch them all in the train’s bathroom. “The paper burned with an acrid, choky smoke,” Fry later wrote, “and not daring to open the door, I had to get down on the floor for air.” When the refugees met him at the Spanish border post many hours later, “we almost fell into one another’s arms, as though we were old friends who had been separated for years and had met by accident in some strange city where none of us ever expected to be.” That warm embrace, I was beginning to understand, was not quite what it seemed.