According to Wullschlager, "speed with which France collapsed astonished everyone: the [British supported French army capitulated even more quickly than Poland had done" a year earlier. Shock waves crossed the Atlantic... as Paris had until then been equated with civilization throughout the non-Nazi world." Yet the attachment of the Chagalls to France "blinded them to the urgency of the situation." Many other well-known Russian and Jewish artists eventually sought to escape: these included Chaim Soutine, Max Ernst, Max Beckmann, Ludwig Fulda, author Victor Serge and prize-winning author Vladimir Nabokov, who although not Jewish himself, was married to a Jewish woman. Russian author Victor Serge described many of the people living temporarily in Marseille who were waiting to emigrate to America: