With the two girls in tow, and accompanied by the OSE lady, we boarded a rickety bus in Valence for the ride into the Cévennes mountain range.

Valence
April 1943. Valence—St. Peray—Cévennes.

The bus crossed the bridge over the Rhône River into Saint-Peray, right smack into a roadblock.

We sat in the last row of the bus; a couple of armed fellows, in black uniforms, no doubt the dreaded and hated Milice, boarded the bus and checked I.D. papers, they gave up before they came to us.

The OSE lady, who was most probably not on her first trip on this stretch of road, had obviously made us sit in the back of the bus in order to avoid, with a little luck, a close examination of the amateurishly-doctored travel-documents of the two Mauricet brothers, who were wanted, just for being alive.

It was then off towards the Cévennes Mountains, a wild land of goats, chestnuts and bramble, the famous "maquis"—which gave its name to the WWII French underground fighting groups, the Maquisards, and where Germans and their local minions, the French equivalent of the dreaded Gestapo, the Milice, rarely ventured.

It would seem that the Mauricet boys could now begin to breathe easier; they were soon to be out of reach of the thugs with obviously sick minds, who were hunting them down, and wanted to do them in, for the simple reason that these little boys were breathing the same air as everyone else, on this planet Earth.