The Gurs internment camp had been created a couple of years earlier to accommodate fighters returning from the Spanish Civil War. By around 1942 it was conventionally secure, but during 1940 "security" was for most purposes dependent on the fact that it was a long way up a small mountain valley and a very long way off the beaten track. Sources record that she escaped from Gurs, which she probably did by walking out through the front gate and not returning from the village in the evening. Making her way back across France, as she did, would have been a greater challenge. On returning to Paris she was able to work incognito, singing for the radio stations set up in France to entertain the German troops controlling northern France.