I hope readers will be inspired by this novel to learn more about the real stories that underpin it. Some of the sources on which I relied include:
- Mary Jayne Gold’s Crossroads Marseille, 1940;
- Varian Fry’s Surrender on Demand;
- Miriam Davenport’s unpublished “An Unsenti- mental Education”;
- Justus Rosenberg’s The Art of Resistance; and
- Lisa Fittko’s Escape through the Pyrenees
I also relied on the following writings of real artists and intellectuals who were rescued:
- Lion Feuchtwanger’s The Devil in France;
- André Breton’s Letters to Aube;
- Victor Serge’s Notebooks 1936–1947; and
- Hans Sahl’s The Few and the Many
And I found the following sources particularly useful:
- the oral history interview with Mary Jayne Gold on the US Holocaust Memorial Museum website;
- Villa Air-Bel by Rosemary Sullivan;
- Surrealism by Amy Dempsey;
- The Holocaust & the Jews of Marseille by Donna F. Ryan;
- In Defiance of Hitler by Carla Killough McClafferty;
- A Quiet American by Andy Marino;
- André Breton in Exile by Victoria Clouston;
- Marseille • New York by Bernard Noël;
- and the many wonderful resources made available by the Varian Fry Foundation at varianfry.org, as well as those at AndréBreton.fr, and villaairbel1940.fr.