Dorothea Tanning aboard the Gripsholm to New York

Soon the war is there [in Paris] like a train on time. My American embassy says go home. The telegram from my father says go to Stockholm to Uncle Hugo. In order to do this there is only the (disrupted) train service-across Belgium, across Germany, with queer stops and queerer changes of trains, my steamer trunk that had planned to stay somehow keeping up, not quite missing connections….

It was now goodbye France, hello Sweden…. Dry leaves were falling, skidding across the frosty grass. Winter was racing toward Stockholm; Nazi mines were planted in the North Sea.