How a Paris hotel that once hosted Hemingway and Picasso became a home for anti-Nazi exiles, German intelligence officers, and, finally, concentration-camp survivors

By Jane Rogoyska

When I first started working on the book that would become Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War, I never envisaged featuring a hotel. My interest began with the idea of exile, specifically the experiences of a group of prominent German anti-Nazis who were faced with a stark choice when Hitler came to power in February 1933: to remain in Germany and face arrest, imprisonment, or even death, or to flee. At the time, the Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny was prominent in my mind. Navalny made the extraordinary choice to return to Russia after a poisoning attempt READ ON