But the endless quest for life-saving papers was becoming harder all the time. As the stream of fugitives kept swelling, more and more tasks fell to Miriam, both in the factory and at the police station. Her elder brother, Jack, had left Paris to live with his wife and baby in Honfleur, her mother was occupied with Miriam’s much younger brother, as well as with an elderly mother, and was cooking for large numbers of transient people, so Miriam not only became buyer for the business but also worked at cutting, sewing and designing the garments they produced. However, for the previous four years she had been engaged to Ben, the son of close family friends from Poland, who was now living in England. In 1939 Ben came to Paris and begged her to marry him and leave for London. ‘But how could I leave my parents when a war was going to come? How could I just go?’ she later wrote. In addition, having spent so much of her time organizing travel permits for others, she now found that her own were invalid. She could not travel as her Polish passport had expired and, in order for it to be valid for renewal, she required a red stamp which showed she had been to Poland in the last five years, which she had not. When she went to have it renewed it was confiscated. Marriage was her only hope of escape, but Ben, convinced from his London vantage point that there would be a long and devastating war ahead, had already volunteered in 1938 and now could not get enough leave for the two weeks necessary to fulfil the residency requirements in order to obtain a wedding licence in France. Like so many other young women in Paris, Miriam Sandzer was doubly trapped, both by her sense of duty to family and by the interminable complications of documentation.
Anyone who had been reading newspapers in the previous year would have been aware of the true situation – how at Munich in 1938 British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French premier Edouard Daladier had avoided going to war over Czechoslovakia, insisting that by agreeing to Nazi demands they had achieved ‘peace in our time’. Although half a million people had greeted Daladier euphorically at Le Bourget airport in the belief that war had been averted, others recognized that this was little more than a breathing space. In Britain it was not long before the infamous prime ministerial waving of a piece of paper at Croydon airport was revealed to be meaningless. Kristallnacht had, after all, started on a Parisian pretext: the shooting two days previously of a German diplomat, Ernst vom Rath, at the Embassy in Paris by a young Jewish teenager, Herschel Grynszpan. When on the night of 9–10 November 1938, thugs viciously attacked Jewish shops and businesses throughout Germany, not only were windows and store fronts shattered but with them any illusions which some still held that Hitler could be satisfied merely with the Sudetenland. It became increasingly difficult for Jewish or political refugees to escape from the Reich. On 15 March 1939 Hitler’s forces invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia while France and Britain stood by. But the invasion of Poland, six months later, could not be tolerated. There was little to cheer about at the start of hostilities because memories of the Great War were still too raw.
Mobilization began immediately. The French government telephoned its chosen young men or sent private messengers to their homes, and posted notices announcing Appel Immédiat. There was general chaos and an oppressive worry as plans were suddenly made or changed without warning. The nineteen-year-old Jacqueline de La Rochebrochard, who hailed from a large family of old Breton nobility, had been planning her wedding to Lieutenant Joseph d’Alincourt for later that year. But, given only a few hours’ notice of his departure for a post in eastern France, ‘Without hesitation, we decided to marry at once. It was already late at night. We awakened the mayor. He agreed to officiate in the little town hall that also served as the village school. Early the next day our parish priest celebrated the wedding mass, and Joseph left immediately.’