To our disappointment, our parents did not travel half-way through France to pick us up.

Te Deum

Well-meaning Madame Sabatier, of the OSE, entrusted us to a boy named Egon, of Austrian origin, who had been the goatherd at a nearby farm. A year earlier, aged 17, Egon had disappeared into the underground and Alfred took over Egon's goat-herding duties.

Egon accompanied us as far as the large city of Lyon, where he delivered us to a huge hall—a triage station for lost souls attempting to regain their bearings and to make contact with their loved ones.

A volunteer took pity on us, children amongst all these adults, and took us out for a walk through the old section of the city.

The floor of the hall was strewn with old smelly mattresses on which people sat, slept, ate, prayed, made love, guarded their meager valuables, in short, spent most of their time awaiting a future.

We stayed there long enough for our journey onward to be determined, no mean task given the chaos which reigned in this newly-freed country, attempting to reinvent and reorganize itself.