It’s possible that the tune that Seydou is playing is one that my great-grandmother heard Seydou’s great-grandfather play on the same accordion.

That would be incredible
But it’s not impossible!

My relative was quite a woman!
She was one of the first female engineers in France.

Can you believe that it took the war and the mass call-up of men for the universities to accept female students.

She studied at the Institut Electrotechnique of Nancy.
She was the only woman in her class!

More importantly, sickened by the horrors of the First World War,
she got involved in pacifist movements during the mid-1920s. 

She had a very similar vision to those who wanted to create a new Europe and avoid conflict on the continent.
This was the time of the Locarno Treaties and the Kellogg-Briand Pact.

She was even a member of a local League of Nations committee.

However, following the economic crisis of 1929, she had to turn her back on political activism to devote herself to her engineering career.

From the 1920s onwards, authoritarian regimes were beginning to establish in several European countries.
Some of them represented a real threat to democratic states.

Fate sometimes plays cruel tricks. The company for which she worked as a secretary was involved in building the Maginot Line!

It was the same story everywhere – in Belgium and Luxembourg, bunkers were under construction all along the border;
in Germany, Hitler ordered the Siegfried Line to be built.

In the space of a few years, Europe went from hoping for a lasting peace
to fearing a new conflict.

However, if you think she threw in the towel at this point,
well, you’d be getting her all wrong.

In 1939, with the general mobilization and the evacuation of civilians underway, she decided to play her part once again. 

She joined up as a volunteer nurse, based near Sedan in the Ardennes,
on the border with Belgium.
That’s right, there was a first battle of the Ardennes took place, in 1940.

My name is Juliette, Juliette Bloch. I’m back to being a war-time nurse again. Casualities are mounting up and it’s hard to keep up with the workload, looking after people night and day, everyday, without a break. People are afraid, they’re terrified at the thought of the German advance.

They’re fleeing on foot, on horse, by cart, bringing with them the bare necessities, whatever they need to live on, or rather, survive on for a few days or a few weeks. Tens of thousands of people are on the move.