Hello and thank you for downloading witness from the BBC World Service.

I'm Louise Adagow and today we go back to June 1940

when German forces having swept across Belgium and Holland into France

were closing in on Paris. In the face of the rapid German advance,

millions of French, Dutch and Belgians had taken to the roads in one of the biggest

exodices of people the world had ever seen.

I've been talking to a young English girl whose family was among them. It's June 1940,

June 14. It's June 1940, It's June 1940, almost a month,

since Nazi Germany began its lightning advance across Western Europe.

The German army invaded Holland and Belgium early this morning by land and by landings from parachutes.

I hear standing on the Franco-Belgian frontier.

We're watching long columns of British troops and transports and supplies and guns

coming through...

Yepra-Fou! supplies and guns coming through. But the enthusiasm of the people in this part of Belgium makes a sharp contrast with the sufferings of the refugees from such places as Leage.

We saw several lorry loads of these unhappy people, old men and women and children,

their few pathetic belongings strapped on their back or carried in cheap suitcases in their hands.

Daphne Wall was a young English girl living in Paris in 1940 with her parents.

I don't think many people accepted right to the end that Paris or the French would not prevail.

There was just a feeling of complete disbelief somehow.

All the world knows that Norway and Holland were so quickly conquered by being stabbed in the back.

Britain and France are taking steps to meet that danger now.

The crowds are out as usual in the cafes of Paris.

...