Marc Chagall was a Russian Empire-born Belarusian-French artist. An early modernist, he was associated with several major artistic styles and created works in a wide range of artistic formats, including painting, drawings, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramics, tapestries and fine art prints.
Franz Viktor Werfel was an Austrian-Bohemian novelist, playwright, and poet whose career spanned World War I, the Interwar period, and World War II. He is primarily known as the author of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, a novel based on events that took place during the Armenian genocide of 1915, and The Song of Bernadette (1941), a novel about the life and visions of the French Catholic saint Bernadette Soubirous, which was made into a Hollywood film of the same name.
Alma Mahler-Werfel was an Austrian composer, author, editor, and socialite. Musically active from her early years, she was the composer of nearly fifty songs for voice and piano, and works in other genres as well. Only 17 songs are known to have survived. At 15, she was mentored by Max Burckhard.
Varian Mackey Fry was an American journalist. Fry ran a rescue network in Vichy France that helped 2,000 to 4,000 anti-Nazi and Jewish refugees to escape Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. He was the first of five Americans to be recognized as "Righteous Among the Nations", an honorific given by the State of Israel to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.
Lion Feuchtwanger was a German Jewish novelist and playwright. A prominent figure in the literary world of Weimar Germany, he influenced contemporaries including playwright Bertolt Brecht.
Hiram "Harry" Bingham IV was an American diplomat. He served as a Vice Consul in Marseilles, France, during World War II, and, along with Varian Fry, helped more than 2,500 Jews to escape from France as Nazi forces advanced.
Mary Jayne Gold was an American heiress who played an important role helping European Jews and intellectuals escape from Nazi-occupied France in 1940–41, during World War II. Many had fled there in preceding years from Germany, where oppression had mounted.
Miriam Davenport or Miriam Davenport Ebel was an American painter and sculptor who played an important role in 1940 helping European Jews and intellectuals escape from German-occupied France and the Holocaust during World War II.
Lionel Chetwynd is a British-American screenwriter, director and producer.
Numerous internment camps and concentration camps were located in France before, during and after World War II. Beside the camps created during World War I to intern German, Austrian and Ottoman civilian prisoners, the Third Republic (1871–1940) opened various internment camps for the Spanish refugees fleeing the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Following the prohibition of the French Communist Party (PCF) by the government of Édouard Daladier, they were used to detain communist political prisoners. The Third Republic also interned German anti-Nazis.
Walter Mehring was a German author and one of the most prominent satirical authors in the Weimar Republic. He was banned during the Third Reich and fled the country.
Charles Fernley Fawcett was an American adventurer, soldier, film actor, and a co-founder of the International Medical Corps. He was a recipient of the French Croix de Guerre and the American Eisenhower medal, and was declared Righteous Among the Nations for his assistance in rescuing and safeguarding Jewish refugees during World War II. Varian Fry, his longtime associate, described him as "a moral adventurer".
Waitstill Hastings Sharp was a Unitarian minister who was involved in humanitarian and relief work in Czechoslovakia and Southern Europe during World War II. In 2005, Sharp and his first wife Martha were named by Yad Vashem as Righteous among the Nations, the second and third of five Americans to receive this honor.
Raymond Couraud, was a French soldier and gangster, who through his World War II military exploits became a highly decorated member of the French-section of the British Army's Special Air Service.
German Exilliteratur is the name for works of German literature written in the German diaspora by refugee authors who fled from Nazi Germany, Nazi Austria, and the occupied territories between 1933 and 1945. These dissident writers, poets and artists, many of whom were of Jewish ancestry and/or held anti-Nazi beliefs, fled into exile in 1933 after the Nazi Party came to power in Germany and after Nazi Germany annexed Austria by the Anschluss in 1938, abolished the freedom of press, and started to prosecute authors and ban works.
Marta Feuchtwanger was the irrepressible and somewhat eccentric third child of a prosperous Munich businessman who in 1912 married the author Lion Feuchtwanger. Although they married only after Marta became pregnant with Feuchtwanger's child, the marriage lasted forty-six years and she became both a devoted wife and a huge influence on his work. The Jewish couple were forced to emigrate during the Hitler period. After her husband died in 1958 Marta Feuchtwanger spent nearly three decades as a high-profile widow in Los Angeles.
Pierre Sauvage is a French-American documentary filmmaker and lecturer, who was a child survivor of the Holocaust. Described by Tablet Magazine as "a filmmaker of rare moral perception."
Led first by Philippe Pétain, the Vichy regime that replaced the French Third Republic in 1940 chose the path of collaboration with the Nazi occupiers. This policy included the Bousquet-Oberg accords of July 1942 that formalized the collaboration of the French police with the German police. This collaboration was manifested in particular by anti-Semitic measures taken by the Vichy government, and by its active participation in the genocide.
Justus Rosenberg was a literature professor who spent most of his life teaching in the United States, ending his career as a professor emeritus of languages and literature at Bard College. Before that, as a teenager he began playing a role in saving many lives when the Nazis overran France, working first as part of a French-American network organized to help anti-Nazi intellectuals and artists escape from Vichy France to the United States, and later as a member of the French Resistance during World War II, providing assistance as well to the US Army.
Transatlantic is a television miniseries created by Anna Winger and Daniel Hendler for Netflix, based on the novel The Flight Portfolio (2019) by Julie Orringer. The novel explores the historic Emergency Rescue Committee that operated in Marseilles, Spain, and Portugal in 1940 after the fall of France. The series includes or refers to well-known artists or scholars of the time who were saved by the Committee or interacted with it, including Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Marc Chagall and his wife, Marcel Duchamp, Andre Breton, Jacqueline Lamba, Max Ernst, Peggy Guggenheim, Walter Mehring, Victor Serge, Victor Brauner, and Hans Bellmer. The series closed the 2023 Festival Séries Mania in March ahead of its Netflix premiere on 7 April 2023.
