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Stories about all the things that make America the country we know and love.

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This is Chris Flannery with the Claremont Institute.

I call this one. Yvonne I love you.

The beautiful 17-year-old actress, Madeline Lebeau, fled Paris in June 1940, just hours before the Germans marched in.

The face of her Jewish husband, a celebrated film star in France,

was featured on Nazi propaganda posters as a typical Jew.

The rest of his family died in Nazi concentration camps.

Like thousands of other refugees, they made their way to Lisbon, and from Lisbon,

with forged visas and all the complications, uncertainties, and delays imaginable in wartime.

They managed to make their way eventually to Hollywood.

Two years later, still only 19, Madeline de Boa would play a memorable role in a pivotal

scene in what would become one of the most well-loved movies ever made.

Casablanca.

Leboa and her husband both had parts in the movie, and in a sense the movie was really about them and others like them.

Warner Brothers purchased the story for Casablanca just a few weeks after Pearl Harbor.

The film premiered on Thanksgiving Day in 1942, just two weeks after the city of

Casablanca in the real world, had surrendered to American forces.

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