[5] They arrived in October 1934, setting up home in a small room, later described by Davidsohn as "très étroite et fort sale" ("filthy and very narrow") in the 5th arrondissement[5] in the city's left bank district.

[6] Early in September 1939 France declared war on Germany, two days after the German army had launched an invasion of Poland.

Dora Davidsohn (still living with Alfred Benjamin, but not yet married to him) still had no work permit, but she responded to the outbreak of war by reporting to the local prefecture in order to regularise her residency status.

After some rapid bureaucratic dithering, the authorities responded by arresting her as an enemy alien, and she was imprisoned at La petite Roquette.

[7] On 18 October 1939, joining a large number of others identified as enemy aliens, she was moved to Rieucros Women's Internment Camp at Mende in central southern France.

[6] It was a narrow escape: barely a month later, all the German and Polish Jews still held at Brens were separated from the other detainees and deported to concentration camps outside France.

[6] Alfred Benjamin escaped in August 1942 from a labour camp at Chanac where he was being held, but in September was killed in an accident while attempting to flee from Vichy France to Switzerland.

[5] Able to understand German without arousing suspicion, Dora Benjamin obtained work at a former medical school at 14 Avenue Berthelot, which had recently been requisitioned for use as a Sorting Office for the Military postal service.

The regional Gestapo leader, aged only 29 on his appointment in November 1942, was Klaus Barbie who, four decades later, found himself at the centre of a high-profile war-crimes trial in France.

Her work also enabled her to obtain and pass on more routine information on matters such as troop movements which were fed, via the Resistance network, back to Germany's enemies, while sources also indicate that her contacts with German soldiers gave her opportunities to distribute anti-Nazi fly-sheets and leaflets.

[10] For the next few years Dora Schaul worked as a research assistant at the Marxist Leninist Institute which had been established by the recently formed ruling SED (party) of the German Democratic Republic, the Soviet sponsored stand-alone German state itself founded in October 1949 out of what had till then been the Soviet occupation zone.

Her son, Peter Schaul, was present at the renaming ceremony: he spoke of his pride and satisfaction that at a time when the past is in danger of disappearing into oblivion, there were still moves to turn back the wheel of history, "because there is a local community in France, a country that suffered under German occupation, naming a street after a German anti-Fascist.