In December, 1940, Australian Sophie King and her French mother Marie-Claire are arrested and interned at the Citadel of Besancon. Her pharmacist father Thomas had already been arrested and imprisoned at the notorious Fresnes prison. Sophie's parents met during WW1 and married after the war. Sophie was born in Melbourne in 1921 but her family migrated to Paris when she was almost 9 and her father was manager of an American style drug store.
At the outbreak of WW2 Thomas' Australian family plead for them to return to Melbourne but Sophie's mother refuses and they are trapped in Paris. After 2 months internment in horrific conditions at the former fortress in Besancon, Sophie and her mother are released, but she is arrested a second time and interned for almost 3 years at Vittel camp. Hotels from the former spa-town for the rich and famous, were enclosed by barbed wire fence and used to negate rumors of concentration camps. The mainly British female internees, many of them former academics at the French universities, formed committees and created a university of sorts where 19 year old Sophie learned survival skills and found her calling as a teacher of English and French.