Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University. She is the author of several books, including The
Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret
Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

Villa Air-Bel is the true story of occupied France in 1940 and the years
that led up to it. It tells of a group of artists, intellectuals,
scientists, musicians, writers, philosophers, and political leaders who
found help, shelter, and sanity in a world turned murderous. Many
writers in France, and others of the cultural elite have already been
denounced as enemies of the Third Reich, and they fear arrest,
deportation, and death. They have only one hope: the Villa Air-Bel, a
chateau outside Marseille where a group of young people in the 1930s and
’40s are willing to risk their own lives to help keep these writers
and artists alive.

One by one, we learn of their backgrounds. Their stories are set
outside Marseille, where a group of young intellectuals—intense,
brilliant, terrified yet determined to fight the Nazis and the newly
installed Vichy government—lived, planned, and plotted. Villa Air-Bel
is an unusual work of non-fiction that explores a hidden story in recent
history. The villa brought together many individuals who would otherwise
never have met, and who waited together for a chance to escape: “This
book is their story.”

In an afterword, credit is given to some two dozen individuals who
helped to run the Villa Air-Bel and who worked for the French
Resistance. The Villa Air-Bel was torn down in 1970 and replaced by an
apartment complex to house recent immigrants, particularly ones from
North Africa.

Villa Air-Bel is an unusual and very impressive work, part history and
part thriller. It is a meticulously researched true story that readers
will find difficult to put down, and that deserves a place in the
history section of every library. There are also numerous
black-and-white photographs to illustrate the text, its residents, and
the many people whom they helped to escape.