It's 1944, and there's a train packed full of paintings by the likes of Picasso and Monet and Van Gogh, and it's circling Paris.

And there is a woman desperately and secretly trying to stop this train.

So, Michelle, maybe you can set the scene.

So we have a woman named Rose Valen, who is an art historian in a museum called Jit Pomme, which is right next to Louve, a modern art museum.

And she's been secretly undercover working inside this museum that's been taken over by Nazis

since 1940.

And they're using it as really a clearinghouse for looted art that they've been stealing from France,

predominantly from Jewish families.

And as the Allies get closer and closer to Paris following D-Day,

the Germans think we have one chance to get as much art out to Germany as we can.

And so she's been watching this happen in the museum, packing, moving, labeling.

And now we are in the days before Liberation Day,

and she has passed her information to the resistance members in France, working with

the train service, as well as the resistance in London.

And she's hoping she can stop this train from leaving France.

I'm Dolan Thuris, and this is Atlas of Skira, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible,

and wondrous places.

Today, we are talking to author Michelle Young about her book, The Art Spy, the extraordinary untold

tale of World War II resistance hero, Rose Valon. It's a kind of heist story in reverse.

It is the story of how this French curator infiltrated the Nazi army to save art

masterpieces from the Jude de Palme Museum in Paris, how she wound up racing against a train

full of stolen art to, in this case, stop the heist.

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