In June or July 1940 Gertrud Isolani and her daughter were among those whose escaped from Camp Gurs. They managed to link up with her husband and it seems to have been as a threesome that they lived "underground" in Vichy France. Living underground meant not being registered with the townhall for the district where they were. During the two years 1940 - 1942 the circumscribed autonomy allowed by the German authorities to the puppet government under Maréchal Pétain diminished progressively. In November 1942 German forces occupied southern France in force, partially as a response to the arrival of American forces in French North Africa. By this time the French gendarmes in towns and, especially, major cities were increasingly being accompanied or replaced by uniformed Gestapo officers. 1942 was also the year in which large scale deportation of German Jews in France began: urgent grapevine reports indicated that those found and captured were being sent by train to German death camps in the east. The danger to German Jews (and other German "political" exiles) living hidden in southern France were increased by the growing danger from the authorities to any French citizen helping them. On 11 November 1942, with her (by this time badly traumatised) daughter, and after two failed attempts to cross the border, Ursula Isolani succeeded in crossing the border into Switzerland. Sources are largely silent on Isolani's whereabouts and activities between her escape from Camp Gurs and her arrival in Switzerland, and that silence extends to the modalities of their escape from occupied France. In 1969 Isolani told an interviewer that her survival had been the result of "lucky coincidences, cunning, and, most especially, thanks to the help of many good people".