They found themselves stuck in Paris. On 3 September 1939 France and Britain declared war on Nazi Germany: on the streets of Paris and London eerily little changed, as the governments in those cities waited to see what Chancellor Hitler would do next. The answer arrived on 10 May 1940 when the Geman army invaded and quickly overran the northern half of France. A month later they reached Paris, which was formally surrendered on 14 June 1940. The German high command installed themselves in the Hotel George V. It was necessary for hotel guests to find alternative accommodation. Soca and her mother moved to the Grand Ritz Hotel in the Place Vendôme at the city's heart. However, by now it was becoming clear that they would not be returning to Uruguay any tome soon, and they subsequently took an apartment in the affluent Passy quarter. Sources are largely silent as to how, in Paris, Susana Soca spent the war years themselves. It is clear that she began to write poetry in Spanish. As she would later explain in the foreword to her 1959 poetry collection "En un país de la memoria", this provided a route by which she was able to find her personal identity and her homeland in the Spanish language. Sources also suggest that well before 1945 she was already working on plans for the launch and operation of her own literary journal. After the war Susana Soca founded Cahiers de La Licorne ("literally, "notebooks of the unicorn""), a French conceived transatlantic literary journal designed and presented as a twice yearly periodical-anthology. The first edition, published in Paris, appeared in March 1947. The cover featured a unicorn based drawing by Valentine Hugo which referenced the Monoceros (unicorn) constellation. Inside many of the various features also benefited from characteristically stylised illustrations by Hugo, who also contributed a number of pictures of Soca herself and of Luisa Blanco Acevedo de Soca, Susana's mother. A second edition appeared in December 1947 and a third in Autumn/Fall 1948. It provided a publication space for European authors who had been silent during the war or whose works had been overlooked. Some of the first French authors features were Paul Éluard, Maurice Blanchot, Roger Caillois, René Char, René Daumal and Jean Paulhan. Soca published literary texts, essays and poems from some of the twentieth century's most important writers and intellectuals. She also contributed numerous literary essays of her own, notably about European authors and artists.