French roadblock
May 1940. Nevers.
Father is arrested at a French roadblock as an "enemy alien."

The roads from Luxembourg to Southern France were clogged with fleeing refugees. In Nevers our car was stopped at a roadblock set up by a complement of French "gendarmes" and our father was taken away as an "enemy alien," notwithstanding pleas that his brother Jakob—now Jacques—was at this very moment serving in the French Army, a patriotic duty from which these stalwarts were apparently exempted.

The explanation that Ludwig Moritz was not an enemy alien, but a stateless refugee from Luxembourg, did not sway these upholders of the Law. Our cousin René Wolf, being a Luxembourg citizen, was not apprehended and was thus in a position to drive on, with his four passengers, to the home of our uncle Jacques in Issoudun, in Central France.