New evidence reveals that American journalist Varian Fry, who went to Marseille in 1940 with "a checkbook and a list of 200 names," ended up saving some 4,000 people — including the leading lights of the then-banned surrealist movement — from the Nazi regime.

Fry helped smuggle Chagall, Ernst, Breton and Duchamp as well as Franz Werfel, Hannah Arendt, Claude Levi-Strauss and thousands of others out of France and into New York, where the surrealists notoriously remained for some time.