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Hello and welcome to the witness history podcast on the BBC World Service

with me Mike Lanchin and today we go back to the summer of 1962 when

hundreds of thousands of French people who've been of in France. It was during the violent last days of Algeria's struggle for

independence and was one of the largest mass migration seen in Europe since the

end of the Second World War. I've been hearing from one woman about her family's experience.

Michelle Hensellele was just a small child when her family arrived in France, fleeing the violence of the civil war in Algeria.

But it wasn't long before the little girl encountered hostility from her new classmates.

When I was about five years, I was about five or six years old and we moved to the Pyrenees where I live now, to a little village,

I used to come home from school with lots of questions because the other kids used to hit me and call me a dirty peenoir and I didn't understand what they meant. I was always asking my parents, why am I not like them?

That was a question that for a long time was left unanswered.

Pienois, literally Blackfoot, is the term that was applied to people of French origin

who were born in Algeria during French rule, prior to its independence from France in 1962.

Many were second or third generation settlers originally from France, like

Michel's family. Her mother and maternal grandparents had been born in France before moving

to Algeria in the 1930s.

These European Algerians, as they were also known, typically kept close links with mainland France.

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