On April 7, 1928, Maria Lani blew into Paris claim­ing to be a famous Ger­man actress and seduced the cul­tur­al elite with her unde­ni­able charis­ma and enig­mat­ic aura. She per­suad­ed fifty artists — Pierre Bon­nard, Marc Cha­gall, André Derain, Hen­ri Matisse, Georges-Hen­ri Rouault, Fer­nand Léger and Suzanne Val­adon among them — to immor­tal­ize her in paint­ings and sculp­tures, which would appear as a plot device in a forth­com­ing film. Unveiled as an exhi­bi­tion in New York, the art­works trav­eled to Chica­go, Lon­don, Berlin, Rot­ter­dam, and Paris. Then, in 1931, as leg­end even­tu­al­ly had it, she and her hus­band Max Abramow­icz van­ished, and so did the art. But the truth is still more inter­est­ing.

Although Lani long con­cealed her Jew­ish iden­ti­ty, like­ly to advance her film career, in the 1930s she and her hus­band decid­ed they could no longer neglect their roots, when scores of friends and fam­i­ly from back home con­tact­ed them beg­ging for help flee­ing west. The cou­ple suc­cess­ful­ly formed a fake war-vet­er­ans char­i­ty that bribed French offi­cials to issue visas to these des­per­ate refugees.