Bajo el puente Mirabeau

One morning in May 1940, a woman has just given birth. She is a first-time mother, and the joy of this miracle fills her: how beautiful it would be to surrender to this newfound peace. Outside, however, the siege of reality continues unabated: "serial bombings and salvos of fire, impacts that mingle, blur together, and everything is amplified, becomes chaotic, and seems sustained by the intense, rhythmic wail of sirens." Indeed, the Nazis are invading her country, Belgium, and she must join the millions of exiles traveling the roads toward France: women, children, and the elderly flee the war, escape enemy troops, and leave behind deserted towns and cities. The postpartum hemorrhage, her weakness, somehow diminishes, stifles, what she experiences during this exodus. But they neither lessen nor stifle the need to protect her newborn daughter: all her attention, all her will, are directed toward that goal. The French soldiers, the inhabitants of the villages where they spend the night, her fellow sufferers: from all of them—fearful and often selfish beings, but also sensitive and compassionate, united by the same helplessness in the face of injustice, violence, and pain—she receives help. It is not, in any case, the first time she has undertaken this journey: in each town, at each stop, the images evoke, as in a dream, another escape, that of her childhood, in August 1914, with her parents…