In September 1940, the writer Leonhard Frank fled from Marseilles to Lisbon, whence he travelled on to the United States. Upon arrival in Portugal he still had no visa for the United States and so he wrote a worried and panic-stricken letter to Hermann Kesten in New York on 1 October 1940.

Like many others, Leonhard Frank had crossed the French-Spanish border illegally with the help of the Emergency Rescue Committee, and travelled from Spain to Lisbon by train. Frank largely omitted the circumstances of his escape in his literary autobiography Links wo das Herz ist, but others recalled encounters with him in their memoirs. According to these, Frank had travelled under a fake Czech passport which the Committee had procured for him in Marseille, where he was also in close contact with Walter Mehring who was also seeking to obtain papers which would help him leave the country.

Leonhard Frank finally received his visa via the European Film Fund and left Lisbon in mid-October. Marta Feuchtwanger and the writer Friedrich Torberg were on the same ship - the S. S. Exceter - which arrived in New York on 25 October. Torberg later reported in his published memoirs entitled Die Erben der Tante Jolesch that Frank was still on tenterhooks while on the boat, not knowing if he would be allowed to disembark in New York because of his lack of currency.