Customer Reviews

Night Trains

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I have loved every book I have read by Barbara Wood, which now includes Night Trains. Each book has been completely different in plot, although each one so far has some element of medicine involved.

Night Trains is based on actual events that occurred in Poland during WWII. In this fictionalized version, Polish doctors Jan Szukalski and Maria Duszynska perpetrate a grand-scale hoax to protect the Polish town of Sofia from the Nazis. Their resistance does not include any killing; rather,they inject all who complain of any illness with a vaccine that gives the appearance of a positive typhus reading. This leads to the Nazis' quarantine of the town and the surrounding region, which protects the citizens from further harassment, executions, and deportations to death camps.

Meanwhile, a group of Jewish and Polish resistance fighters are devising a plan to ambush a German train to retrieve the ammunitions it carries, and to rescue a train's human freight headed for death camps in order to obtain more fighters for their cause. These heroes put themselves in great danger, and despite their efforts, do not reap the success that the doctors do with their hoax.

The book is continually suspenseful, with public executions, descriptions of tortures, death camp atrocities, and Nazis always on the watch for suspicious behavior.

I searched the internet to find the historical basis for this book and discovered that a documentary is currently being filmed about it, called "A Private War"; the true hero's name is Dr. Lazowski. Night Trains has many details obviously similar to true events. For those interested, related web sites are:

http://www.stjoenj.net/lazowski/lazowski.html
http://www.claytonentertainment.com/privatewar.htm

This is based on a true story of ordinary people placed in an extraordinary circumstance. These people not only escaped annihilation, but saved an entire town. It's an incridible story that only actual life could produce.

We selected this for a book club discussion. There have been a lot of novels written about the Holocaust and the various countries involved fighting the Nazi's but this one differed insofar as the plot plan. Occupied Poland, a little town called Sofia has two doctors working on effecting a "fake" epidemic of typhus, as it is well known that the Nazi's are very fearful of it. One of them has come up with a test for a "false positive" and they put this epidemic in place to keep the Nazi's out of their community. It also has a little bit or romance and enough historical detail to keep us turning those pages.

It is suspenseful and well-written. One of Ms. Wood's older books but a good one for either gender. Moves along at a good and gripping pace and does not give us an overkill on the graphics relating to the extermination of the people by the Nazi army. We liked it.