“I want to ask what it feels like to move from freedom to occupation,” Rosemary Sullivan writes at the beginning of Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille (HarperCollins, $34.95). “To feel threatened, administered, restrained.”

Sullivan, an English prof at the University of Toronto, gets right inside that feeling in her new work of history. During a break at the Ottawa International Writers Festival, Sullivan is quick to point out that feelings, not new material, are her quarry here. “We all think we know the Second World War,” she says in her warm, distinctive growl. “We grew up on it as kids. We saw war films and so on, and so the point of this is to try to locate the war in the lives of people you could get to know, and feel it as they felt it.”

Those people are the European artists and intellectuals threatened by encroaching fascism: Jews, Communists, surrealists, and other enemies of totalitarianism. They find a haven in Marseille, deep in the Vichy south, which gives the book its title. “Air-Bel is a symbol,” Sullivan says. “It's a symbol of refuge in a time of terror.” And at the heart of that refuge is Varian Fry, a 33-year-old American classical scholar who'd arrived in the country with a list of 200 refugees to save, and $3,000 taped to his leg.

Fry's story, as Sullivan is quick to caution, has been told before, as have those of his many clients: Max Ernst, André Breton, and Victor Serge among them. Some of his colleagues published their own memoirs as well, but Sullivan chose to highlight their achievements for a variety of reasons. “I suppose I had a sub-theme,” says the biographer of such notable women as Elizabeth Smart, Margaret Atwood, and Gwendolyn MacEwen. “As remarkable as the story of CAS [Fry's Centre Américain de Secours] is, it was very clear that the inner circle was men. And the outer circle was women until Lucie Heymann and a few others towards the very end were involved in actual espionage activities. But there was a moment when Mary Jayne...said, 'I would have liked to have done a little more, but I had no standing and today I would have demanded more.' It struck me that the women...were distracted by romantic engagements. That's how you saved.”

Mary Jayne is Mary Jayne Gold, an American heiress who chose to remain in Vichy France to help the refugees of Villa Air-Bel. A fierce iconoclast, she donated her plane to the French Air Force to combat the Germans, ploughed her personal fortune into the CAS, and took a “black-hearted” lover named Killer. Her story””and her commitment and bravery””are not unusual among those who surrounded Fry, himself a man who comes off with enormous integrity in the face of threats from the French and indifference from his own countrymen.

“What to me was astonishing, I started out with 12 people at a table [at Air-Bel] and just trusted that as I told their stories””because I was researching as I was writing””I'd get a sense of the war. I was thrilled to discover that each of the stories were so different that collectively they gave you a pretty solid portrait of what people went through....I really think that a part of my motive is””as I suppose for all people who write biographical history””that notion that, how does Beckett put it? 'There is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us or been deformed by us.' That in fact though it always happens differently, the same story can occur again.”

Rosemary Sullivan appears at the Vancouver International Writers Festival next Friday (October 20) at the PTC Studio at 10 a.m. and the Waterfront Theatre at 1 p.m., and next Saturday (October 21) at the Arts Club's Granville Island Stage at 2 p.m.