Project: Completion of a book manuscript entitled Villa Air-Bel and the Road Out: ln Peril in France 1940-1942. The book focuses on a two groups: a number of artists living together at the Villa Air-Bel in La Pomme, Marseille, as they waited for visas to escape from Vichy France and also on the individuals who had made it their business to save them. The artists included Andre Breton, Jacqueline Lamba, Victor Serge, and later Max Ernst, Benjamin Péret, Remedios Varo, and Victor Brauner. A rich young American, Mary Jayne Gold, and members of the Centre Américain de Secours, an organization headed by Varian Fry, had rented the villa. Fry had been sent by the Emergency Rescue Committee in New York in August 1940 to save European artists and anti-Nazi activists blacklisted by Hitler's Third Reich and at risk of imprisonment in French internment camps or of deportation back to Germany. The book begins with an opening scene of a dinner at the Villa Air-Bel, and then goes back to 1931 and the arrival of Mary Jayne Gold in France. Through the course of the next nine years as the fates of individuals interconnect, a story of the prelude to and unfolding of war is recorded. No individual's experience of war is quite like official history. By exploring the diaries, memoirs, and letters of the individuals involved (and both artists and their rescuers left memoirs), I look at the private world of this group and the web of relationships they developed. I want to understand the fear and the courage in that villa. What does it feel like to move from freedom to occupation: to feel threatened, administered, restrained? Suddenly the bits of bureaucratic paper one can or cannot obtain control one's life and death. The words forbidden, investigated, imprisoned enter one's vocabulary and everything is uncertain–child, family, lover–and can be taken away or left behind. The story is closely detailed, vividly local and particular, so that the reader may grow to know these people as intimately as possible. The drama of this book is the slow, relentless process by which ordinary lives were turned into lives lived in terror because small pieces of paper remained under the control of authorities that could deny liberty at win, with no recourse. And yet individuals with imagination and courage rose above their fears and helped as much as they could to stop the tide of terror sweeping their world away.