After the 1940 invasion, Isolani and her daughter, like several thousand other refugees from Hitler's German, were ordered to report to the municipal authorities. Identified as enemy aliens, the women among them were gathered together and detained in the Vélodrome d'Hiver (sports stadium) in central Paris. (The men were taken separately to the Buffalo Stadium.) They were held for about two weeks in the velodrome, under increasingly insanitary conditions, and then were transported to the southern half of France, which over the next couple of years would by ruled under a puppet government from Vichy, enjoying a greater (albeit progressively diminishing) level of autonomy than the northern half of France which was placed under direct German military administration with effect from June 1940. The refugees internees were almost all Jews or Communists (or both). During the early part of June 1940 they were transported by train to various internment camps in Vichy France, far to the south. Isolani and her daughter were taken to the Camp at Gurs which had been hastily established a few years earlier to accommodate defeated anti-Franco "Brigadists" returning north after the Spanish Civil War. Now it was re-deployed as an internment camp for German women refugees from Hitler. In 1940 it had still not been provided with the level of security commonly associated with wartime internment camps, but its extremely remote location surrounded by high mountains still rendered escape beyond the very small village of Gurs something of a challenge. Nevertheless, conditions in the camp were dire in terms of sanitation and accommodation. During that first summer plenty of the women interned in the camp escaped simply by walking out of the camp and continuing down the mountains past the village.