This story begins October 22 in 1940 when seventy-two hundred Germans were rounded up in Baden, placed aboard trains and sent to unoccupied France. The Vichy government sent these trains to Gurs, a small village near Pau in the western Pyrenees. "Camp de Gurs" was built for the Spanish republicans who were interned by France when they fled from Franco’s forces in 1939.

In October 1940 the world paid little attention to an obscure French village named Gurs. For the people of France unthinkable things occurred that spring and summer of 1940. In just a few weeks their proud army had been humbled. The third republic voted itself out of existence.

Paris was full of foreign uniforms. And soon all of Europe as far as Greece and Russia was to learn the meaning of such new foreign words as Stuka, panzer, blitzkrieg and, especially—Gestapo.

The two years from September 1939 to December 1941, though filled with drama and momentous, unparalleled events, often tend to be overshadowed by the grim horrors that followed. This novel tells just one of many untold or forgotten stories from that neglected period.

In the autumn of 1940 refugees of every sort converged on southern France: European Jews, English and Polish soldiers and airmen, German and Austrian socialists, politicians, union leaders, writers and artists, all of them a step ahead of the Gestapo.

The fatal decisions had been made earlier. Spectacular and overwhelming German victories were like a blank cheque. The easy conquest of Poland in 1939 and then the quick collapse of the French army and government encouraged NAZI fantasies of a world of victors, vanquished, and victims. Slowly during 1941 the doors of Europe swung shut. Today when we read the agenda of the Wannsee conference of January 1942 we can almost hear the last click of the latch.

Marseilles and the Spanish border became the last exit points for western Europe—the door to Lisbon and North Africa, and then to North or South America. The fugitives struggled to find a visa with little faith in the Vichy government. A visa at could mean the difference between life and death.

As the trains moved south through unoccupied France the passengers knew that they had been cast as victims. They had lost their homes and property and citizenship but they didn’t know yet that much worse awaited them. Later the first class carriages would become cattle-cars and the destinations would cease to be improvised.

Tormented by thirst and hunger, fear, confusion and lack of sleep, they clung to their meagre baggage, listened to the many rumours and tried to plan. For many, escape to another country was an idea hard to grasp. Some were demoralized. But there were others who would resist the role of victim. The obstacles were daunting. Visas were needed. Money had to be found, passage booked. They didn’t know it then but later many of those on the trains from Baden would make a return trip to a dread place called Auschwitz. Others, a lucky few, would be among the last to slip through that "closing door."

In 1941 in the still neutral port of New York the crowded ship NAVEMAR docks on a hot mid-September day. Among those jostling down the gangway is a very young woman who, with her family, had been expelled from her home on the German-French border.

In a vivid web of reality and fiction the author has woven her memories of that desperate time into the passionate novel BYE-BYE, BADEN-BADEN.

Torpedoed on her return voyage, the NAVEMAR lives on now as the ship BALEARES. The author’s experience as a journalist in New York, Montreal, Mexico and Guatemala has spun out a rich assortment of refugees—refugees with faces and voices that will stay with you.