May 1940: The Exodus (aka the greatest population movement of the 20th century)

French refugees on the road of the Exodus, 19 June 1940, near
Gien, France. CC-BY-SA 3.0.
This photo was taken by a German soldier.

     So after Lillian was born, and as soon as we could move – I didn’t have any car at the time, so I rented a taxi cab – and in the taxi cab, big taxi cab: Roma and myself and the baby Lillian, a few days old, and my father and my mother, and Felicie who was like family, and in addition the cab driver and his wife and a child, were all squeezed in one big taxi cab. We started escaping from Brussels. 

     Well, you couldn’t do more than ten miles a day at most, because the highway was crowded and millions of people who remembered the war – the first World War, 1914 to 18 ... So they wanted to escape and be on part of France where the front would never arrive.  So millions of them were moving; including fire trucks with people on it. And including ambulances with people on it; etcetera, etcetera. Completely packed by millions of people. And English and French and Belgian troops couldn’t move because of the civilians packing the highways.

     It was pathetic.

--Arthur Lubinski, Oral Testimony, 1988

Source: https://www.odomez.fr/
Note the mixture of cars, bikes, and pedestrians

    In 1988, Grandpa said, "Ten miles a day at most." Ten miles is about 16km, and the route that I think they took (which is admittedly a guess), from Brussels to the coast, and then along the coast to Montreuil-sur-Mer, France, taking them right past Dunkirk and Calais, was 290 km. They hoped to reach safety in France, and, I think they also hoped to make it to England, so a coastal route made sense. He also said:

 And we arrived at the North Sea. In the … you would say “state.” In French, it is département, department – but that means state if you want – of Pas-de-Calais on the English Channel. 

    The "North Sea" comment also suggests a coastal route. I'm not certain if they stopped in the city of Calais or just the region of Pas-de-Calais, but at the time I recorded him in 1988, I got the impression he meant both, although I'm not entirely sure.

The route my grandparents might have followed during the Exodus of 1940
Interactive Google Maps Link

    The problem is that if they traveled only 10 miles a day, then the dates don't work - it would have taken them 18 days to arrive in Montreuil, which is where they stopped for several weeks.  However, they would have encountered many of the places after they had fallen to the Germans, whereas his story as a whole suggests that they met Germans only toward the end of the trip.

    So, I started researching the Exodus to see how far people typically traveled in a day:

• On foot:  6-12 miles per day (10-20 km). This was the majority of the refugees.
• Bicycle or horse-drawn cart: 12-18 miles per day (20-30 km)
• Car: Up to 20 miles per day (32 km).  Autos were less common, there were serious fuel shortages to contend with, and many cars were abandoned after they ran out of gasoline. 

    I also have the sense that the trip took less than 2 weeks, probably about 10 days, based on their departure date (May 15), the length of time they spent in Montreuil (3 weeks), and the approximate date they returned to Brussels (after the cease-fire went into effect in France on June 25, 1940).    In those days, cars traveled nearly as quickly as they do today, and under normal conditions, they would have made that drive in about 3 hours.

    It's hard to capture what the Exodus in 1940 was like, and hell, it's hard to even imagine it. There was a heatwave, and millions of people were on the road, on foot, in cars, or on bicycles for weeks on end, with a lack of food, water, fuel, sleeping arrangements, and even safety. The smells must have been intense, given the heat of the summer, the lack of bathing or toilet facilities, and people packed closely together with dogs and horses and auto exhaust, all while stuck in a traffic jam from hell. Children were occasionally separated from their parents (sometimes permanently), and people were under constant threat of strafing by the Luftwaffe and their dreaded Stuka dive bombers.   

    The road was populated with angels of mercy who did everything they could for the travelers, but also with war profiteers who made you pay to take a sip of water and charged a week's wages for a simple sandwich.

    Now, imagine making this trip with a newborn baby, and you have my grandmother's experience.   

Bibliography:

• https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exode_de_1940_en_France (in French, but if you set your browser to translate, it's a good read).
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exodus_(1940)
• https://webdoc.france24.com/exodus-france-german-invasion-war-1940/
• https://www.france24.com/en/20200304-eighty-years-after-millions-fled-the-german-army-revisiting-the-paris-exodus