linguistic:translation
Escaping occupied France

According to Wullschlager, "he speed with which France collapsed astonished everyone: the capitulated even more quickly than Poland had done" a year earlier. Shock waves crossed the Atlantic... as Paris had until then been equated with civilization throughout the non-Nazi world." Yet the attachment of the Chagalls to France "blinded them to the urgency of the situation." Many other well-known Russian and Jewish artists eventually sought to escape: these included Chaïm Soutine, Max Ernst, Max Beckmann, Ludwig Fulda, author Victor Serge and prize-winning author Vladimir Nabokov, who although not Jewish himself, was married to a Jewish woman. Russian author Victor Serge described many of the people living temporarily in Marseille who were waiting to emigrate to the US:

Here is a beggar's alley gathering the remnants of revolutions, democracies and crushed intellects... In our ranks are enough doctors, psychologists, engineers, educationalists, poets, painters, writers, musicians, economists and public men to vitalize a whole great country.

After prodding by their daughter Ida, who "perceived the need to act fast", and with help from Alfred Barr of the New York Museum of Modern Art, Chagall was saved by having his name added to the list of prominent artists whose lives were at risk and who the United States should try to extricate. Varian Fry, the US journalist, and Hiram Bingham IV, the US Vice-Consul in Marseilles, ran a rescue operation to smuggle artists and intellectuals out of Europe to the US by providing them with forged visas to the US. In April 1941, Chagall and his wife were stripped of their French citizenship. The Chagalls stayed at the Hotel Moderne in Marseille where they were arrested along with other Jews. Varian Fry managed to pressure the French police to release him, threatening them of scandal. Chagall was one of over 2,000 who were rescued by this operation. He left France in May 1941, "when it was almost too late", adds Lewis. Picasso and Matisse were also invited to come to the US but they decided to remain in France. On 10 June 1941 Chagall and Bella left Lisbon aboard the Portuguese ship Mouzinho. The passengers included 119 refugee children, to whom Chagall gave drawing lessons on the voyage. The ship reached Staten Island on 21 June, the day before Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Ida and her husband Michel followed on the notorious refugee ship Navemar with a large case of Chagall's work. A chance post-war meeting in a French café between Ida and intelligence analyst Konrad Kellen led to Kellen carrying more paintings on his return to the United States.