No Times de hoje #148 (1940)

On May 27 1940, foreign affairs editor Hamilton Fish Armstrong wrote an article for the New York Times about the dramatic refugee situation in France. Eighteen days before the fall of Paris to Hitler, thousands of jews were fleeing to the south of France running from fierce battles in the north. Many came from Belgium and the Netherlands, both occupied by the nazis since May 10, with everything they owned and could carry.
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(...) Since this ferocious struggle began in Belgium and Flanders, civilian refugees have been flooding down across the country, making every crossroads, every village and every railway junction a station of misery. They arrive in boxcars, bundled in the straw. They come by road in every conceivable sort of vehicle.

In the Bordeaux* region three days ago I saw two fire engines that had come through from Brussels. Baby carriages, a sewing machine and bundles of every shape were piled on one. Ten or fifteen persons were packed into the other. The women, with children and babies on their laps, their heads covered with pieces of oilcloth to keep off the rain.

Thousands are on bicycles with everything they own in the world strapped on the handlebars. Many of them have now been on the road for twelve or fourteen days. (...)
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*Armstrong, an American citizen, and thousands of other names (mostly refugees), appear on Aristides Sousa Mendes' transit-visa list. At great personal cost, he Portuguese consul of Bordeaux saved many from certain death between May and June of 1940.