Short answers, pulled from the story.
Jean Wahl (the 25th of May 1888 - the 19th of June 1974) was a French philosopher and professor at the Sorbonne from 1936 to 1967. He introduced Hegelian thought and the work of Søren Kierkegaard to French audiences before these thinkers became widely known there, and he influenced major figures including Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Wahl was interned as a Jew at the Drancy internment camp, north-east of Paris. He escaped and lived in the United States from 1942 to 1945, during which time he co-founded the École Libre des Hautes Études in New York City with Gustave Cohen and backing from the Rockefeller Foundation.
The École Libre des Hautes Études was a university in exile established in New York City during World War II by Wahl and Gustave Cohen, backed by the Rockefeller Foundation. It was designed to sustain French intellectual life for scholars who had fled occupied France.
Jean Wahl founded the Collège philosophique in 1946 as an influential center for non-conformist intellectuals in post-war France. It functioned as an alternative to the Sorbonne for thinkers who did not fit within mainstream academic philosophy.
Wahl translated the second hypothesis of Plato's Parmenides as "Il y a de l'Un" (there is the One). Jacques Lacan adopted this translation as a central point in his psychoanalytic theory, treating it as an antecedent in the Parmenides of the analytic discourse.
In 2021, Angelico Press published Outside the Gates by W. C. Hackett, a novel based on the true story of Wahl's release from the Drancy Internment Camp. Wahl himself is the narrator of the novel, alternating between recounting his immediate experience and reflecting philosophically on suffering and the existence of God.