Amelda Menouti died in her thirties of what was almost certainly rheumatic heart disease — a familiar early-twentieth-century arc, in which a childhood case of streptococcal rheumatic fever scarred the heart valves enough to take its host two or three decades later. The same arc had a generic name in the medicine of her time: “weak heart.”
Her death broke the family. Her husband Achilles Cichinelli left after she died, leaving their daughter Ines (later Ines Valda Jeannopoulos, the French Resistance survivor) to carry her own past largely alone for the rest of her life. “She was very secretive about her past,” Aline Pepe — Ines’s daughter, Amelda’s granddaughter — wrote in May 2026, “I believe her father left at that point. My impression was that she hated him.”
Amelda’s maiden name was Menouti; her name surfaced in May 2026 through Aline. Almost everything else about her — exact dates, birthplace, her own parents — remains to be researched.