In December, 1940 Australian-French woman, Sophie King and her French mother Marie-Claire are arrested and interned at the Citadel of Besançon. It is her first experience of war. Her Australian pharmacist father, Thomas King had been arrested before them and imprisoned at the notorious Fresnes prison.
Sophie’s parents met during WW1 and married at the end of the war. She was born in Melbourne in 1921 but lived in Paris from 1929 to 1946. Her mother’s continual feelings of not belonging in Australia eventually resulted in the family migrating to Paris when Sophie was almost nine. Her father is manager of an American style drug store in Paris, and Sophie’s childhood is exposed to the excitement and gaiety of Paris during the ‘Golden Years’.
At the outbreak of WW2 her father’s family plead for them to return to Melbourne but her mother refuses to leave and they are trapped in Paris. After two months internment in horrific conditions at the former fortress in Besançon, Sophie and her mother are released, but she is arrested for a second time. Her second internment of almost three years is at Vittel camp.
Hotels from the former spa-town were enclosed by barbed wire fence by the Germans and made into an internment camp. It was meant to negate the rumours of concentration camps and created for the eyes of the neutral Swiss inspectors. The mainly female British internees formed committees and created a university of sorts, since many of the internees were former academics. Classes were held in a variety of subjects and Sophie enrolled in several of them. It was at Vittel that 19 year old Sophie learned survival skills, formed close friendships, and found her vocation as a teacher.
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