The Sun And Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler's Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood

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Nor did Salka’s famous friends, including Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht, feel much compunction to mention Salka in their memoirs or diaries beyond an occasional reference to the excellent coffee and cake she served them.

Rifkind firmly establishes Viertel's unique place in history as someone who singlehandedly comforted a generation of European emigrees who made their way to Los Angeles in the 1930s to escape fascism and the murdering Nazis.Cari Beauchamp’s Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Power of Women in Hollywood ; Erin Hill’s Never Done: A History of Women’s Work in Media Production ; Evelyn Juers’s House of Exile: The Lives and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann ; and Emily D. S. and settled in Klosters in Switzerland, where later, her son Peter and his second wife, actress Deborah Kerr, [2] lived.

In Santa Monica, she made it her mission to provide a refuge for them in her own home and to absorb them into her social and professional network, all to help them survive in a wholly unfamiliar new world.

An estimated ten thousand refugees from Germany and Austria settled in greater Los Angeles between 1933 and 1941, a significant part of “the most complete migration of artists and intellectuals in European history” up to that time, according to California historian Kevin Starr.