France, 1940. The once-glittering boulevards of Paris teem with spies, collaborators, and the Gestapo now that France has fallen to Hitler's Wehrmacht. It was on this circumstance that three enterprising Americans concentrated their efforts in the first two years of the war. Ivy League scholar Varian Fry, sent by the American Emergency Rescue Committee, heiress Mary Jayne Gold and graduate student Miriam Davenport turned a Marseille chateau into a safe haven for dozens of prominent artists and intellectuals waiting for a chance to emigrate in secrecy, including Hannah Arendt, Marcel Duchamp, Marc Chagall, Andr Breton, Franz Werfel and perennial exile Victor Serge.