 His friend Leon Osterreicher came to visit him and instructed him to escape by climbing under the camp's fence.While living with distant relatives nearby, he was sent to an assigned residence in Cauterets, France, near the Pyrenees Mountains, where he stayed for eight to ten months until on August 26, 1941, when the deportation began from this town.Upon a warning from the mayor of Luchon, he hid with his uncle overnight in the Pyrenees, returning the next day to find half of the ghetto's population deported.