You can't make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic.
One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be.
If you can live in Paris, maybe you should.
And, with much of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany, and Mussolini's armies in Albania, on the Greek frontier, one wasn't sure what came next. So, don't trust the telephone. Or the newspapers. Or the radio. Or tomorrow.
I don't really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.
I expect that my readers have been to Europe, I expect them to have some feeling for a foreign language, I expect them to have read books - there are a lot of people like that! That's my audience.