In early summer 1940, the Wehrmacht drove refugees across Western Europe. Those who failed to make it to England by ship sought refuge in Lisbon: thousands waited in neutral Portugal for a vessel. British spies and German agents watched one another closely, while raw-material buyers sought to purchase huge quantities of sardines for Hitler’s army—and, more importantly, the rare and irreplaceable tungsten needed for shells.
Alexander Smoltczyk’s gripping narrative follows the fates of Josephine Baker, Otto von Habsburg, Salvador Dalí, Heinrich Mann, Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, Peggy Guggenheim, Lion Feuchtwanger, Alfred Döblin, Ian Fleming, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Jean Renoir, Arthur Koestler, Man Ray, and many others.