A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France [Hardcover]

Caroline Moorehead (Author)

Book Description

Release date: November 8, 2011

In January 1943, 230 women of the French Resistance weresent to the death camps by the Nazis who had invaded and occupied theircountry. This is their story, told in full for the first time—a searing andunforgettable chronicle of terror, courage, defiance, survival, and the powerof friendship. Caroline Moorehead, a distinguishedbiographer, human rights journalist, and the author of Dancing to the Precipiceand Human Cargo, brings to life an extraordinary story that readers ofMitchell Zuckoff’s Lost in Shangri-La, ErikLarson’s In the Garden of Beasts, and Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbrokenwill find an essential addition to our retelling of the history of WorldWar II—a riveting, rediscovered story of courageous women who sacrificedeverything to combat the march of evil across the world.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“By turns heartbreaking and inspiring.” (Caroline Weber, New York Times Book Review )

“[A] moving novelistic portrait. . . . An inspiring and fascinating read.” (Meredith Maran, People (3½ stars) )

“An extremely moving and intensely personal history of the Auschwitz universe as experienced by these women. . . . A powerful and moving book.” (Natasha Lehrer, Times Literary Supplement (UK) )

“[Moorehead] traces the lives and deaths of all her subjects with unswerving candor and compassion. . . . In Moorehead’s telling, neither evil nor good is banal; and if the latter doesn’t always triumph, it certainly inspires.” (Elysa Gardner, USA Today )

“As chronicled by Moorehead with unblinking accuracy, their agonies are appalling to contemplate, their stories of survival and friendship under duress enthralling to hear.” (More magazine )

“Haunting account of bravery, friendship, and endurance.” (Marie Claire )

“Compelling . . . Moorehead weaves into her suspenseful, detailed narrative myriad personal stories of friendship, courage, and heartbreak.” (Kirkus Reviews )

“Heightened by electrifying, and staggering, detail, Moorehead’s riveting history stands as a luminous testament to the indomitable will to survive and the unbreakable bonds of friendship.” (Booklist (starred review) )

“Even history’s darkest moments can be illuminated by spectacular courage, such as courage that Caroline Moorehead movingly celebrates in A Train in Winter. . . . Moorehead has created a somber account, sensitively rendered, of yet another grim legacy of war.” (Judith Chettle, Richmond Times-Dispatch )

“The first complete account of these extraordinary women and, incredibly, over 60 years later we are still learning new and terrible truths about the Holocaust. . . . An important new perspective. . . . Careful research and sensitive retelling.” (Buzzy Jackson, Boston Sunday Globe )

“A necessary book. . . . Compelling and moving. . . . The literature of wartime France and the Holocaust is by now so vast as to confound the imagination, but when a book as good as this comes along, we are reminded that there is always room for something new.” (Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post )

“As Moorehead delves deeply into the women’s fight for survival, her narrative seamlessly comes together in order to share a significant part of history whose time has come to be heard.” (Meganne Fabrega, Christian Science Monitor )

“A miraculous story about friendship and the will to overcome extraordinary cruelty, heartache and loss.” (The Jewish Journal, "Best Books of 2011" )

From the Back Cover

They were teachers, students, chemists, writers, and housewives; a singer at the Paris Opera, a midwife, a dental surgeon. They distributed anti-Nazi leaflets, printed subversive newspapers, hid resisters, secreted Jews to safety, transported weapons, and conveyed clandestine messages. The youngest was a schoolgirl of fifteen who scrawled "V" for victory on the walls of her lycée; the eldest, a farmer's wife in her sixties who harbored escaped Allied airmen. Strangers to each other, hailing from villages and cities from across France, these brave women were united in hatred and defiance of their Nazi occupiers.

Eventually, the Gestapo hunted down 230 of these women and imprisoned them in a fort outside Paris. Separated from home and loved ones, these disparate individuals turned to one another, their common experience conquering divisions of age, education, profession, and class, as they found solace and strength in their deep affection and camaraderie.

In January 1943, they were sent to their final destination: Auschwitz. Only forty-nine would return to France.

A Train in Winter draws on interviews with these women and their families; German, French, and Polish archives; and documents held by World War II resistance organizations to uncover a dark chapter of history that offers an inspiring portrait of ordinary people, of bravery and survival—and of the remarkable, enduring power of female friendship.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Harper; Book Club Edition edition (November 8, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061650706
• ISBN-13: 978-0061650703
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (172 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #187,413 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

166 of 180 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars As biography, heart-rending and inspirational. As history, problematic October 16, 2011

By Maine Colonial TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

This is the story of the "31,000 Convoi," a reference to the numerical series tattooed on the arms of 230 French women who arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau in January, 1942. These women were of all ages from 17 to 67 and from all walks of life and villages and cities all over France. All had been arrested for actions detrimental to the Nazi occupiers or the Vichy government. Many were members of organized resistance groups, but some made spontaneous gestures as minor as writing a pro-British slogan on a wall, and some never knew why they'd been arrested.

The women were held for months in a French prison, where they formed a tight bond, before they were transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and put on a detail that promised extermination by work. After just two and a half months, 150 of their number were dead from cold, exhaustion, beatings, selection to the gas chambers and, most often, from dysentery and typhus. But then a form of luck kicked in. Spring arrived, some of the 80 surviving women were sent on an easier work detail and the rest were moved to Ravensbruck which, while brutal, was not designed to be an extermination camp. These breaks meant that the appalling death rate slackened, and 49 of the women survived until liberation two years later.

Author Moorehead spends the first half of the book identifying the women and describing the events that led to their arrests. With so many people and events being described, it's easy to feel overwhelmed by detail and not get a strong sense of them as people. This changes once the story moves onto the women's imprisonment. With the women all together, the focus changes to their personalities and relationships with each other.

Moorehead's predominant theme is that the women who survived owed their lives to the close bonds they forged and maintained even through the worst brutality and deprivation. She gives many touching examples of how they supported each other and helped each other survive the darkest days and nights. I was taken with the idea that the bonds the women forged during their French imprisonment enabled them to retain their humanity and community through the worst conditions in the German camps. I've read a lot of histories of the camps and I know how well the Nazis were able to break people and pit them against each other in a fight for survival. I would have liked it if Moorehead had spent more time exploring this theme; perhaps comparing it to some other cases in which groups spent significant time together in occupied-country camps before being moved to Germany.

Though I found the French women's story compelling, I question some of Moorehead's presentation. She gives the impression that the French Resistance was a communist movement, which is far from accurate. Certainly, there were numerous communist Resistance groups. However, networks were from all political political parties, as well as all classes and religions. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that French communists were a little late to the Resistance movement. At the time France fell in June, 1940, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany was in force and Stalin's line was that communists were to remain antiwar. It wasn't until after Germany invaded the Soviet Union a year after the fall of France that French communists became very active in the Resistance.

Moorehead repeatedly brings up the fact that most of these women were communist and claims that the survivors' strong political beliefs were instrumental in keeping them alive. But she offers no evidence for this claim or comparisons to survival rates among the politically uncommitted. Similarly, her statement that the French women in Ravensbruck were more cohesive and looked after each more than other nationalities is unsupported by any cited evidence. It makes a compelling story that the caring relationships these women shared and the cause they believed in saved them, but it might be just as attributable to the change in their conditions.

At the end of the book, Moorehead makes it clear that she relied almost entirely on information from the survivors as sources for the book. Naturally that would be the case, given that the book is essentially a mass biography, and presumably some of the survivors told her the things I mention in the preceding paragraph. Given the historical importance of the subject, though, I was expecting the story to be supported as well by considerable additional research and authorities. Moorehead may well have done that research, but she has very few cited authorities. Also, the book has no real index and includes only scanty notes that do not use standard citations. Because of my interest in the history of the period, I was disappointed in these weaknesses and in the lack of rigor in Moorehead's approach to her subject.

In the end, I found the book a compelling personal story, but anyone looking for a historical approach to the subject will need to look elsewhere.

Most of my prior reading about women in the French resistance has been about women who were agents of Britain's Special Operations Executive and who were parachuted into France to assist the Resistance and to radio intelligence back to Britain. If you are interested in that subject, here are some books you might want to check out:

Leo Marks: Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's War, 1941-1945
Shrabani Basu: Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan
Peter FitzSimons: Nancy Wake Biography
R. J. Minney: CARVE HER NAME WITH PRIDE (Pen & Sword Military Classics)
Madeleine Masson: Christine : SOE Agent & Churchill's Favourite Spy
Sarah Helm: A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of WWII
Rita Kramer: Flames in the Field: The Story of Four SOE Agents in Occupied France
Lucie Aubrac: Outwitting the Gestapo

The definitive book on the subject is M.R.D. Foot's SOE in France: An Account of the Work of the British Special Operations Executive in France, 1940-1944 (Government Official History). A book coming out in January that I'm very much looking forward to is: SOE and The Resistance: As told in Times Obituaries. If, like me, you can't wait until then, the book will be published in the UK on November 1.

48 of 51 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars "Keeping alive, remaining me" October 4, 2011

By E. Crowley VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

The horrors of the Holocaust have been documented with minute details. The Nazi domination of Europe required the killing of all lesser peoples, those who would pollute the Master Race. The Jews and the Roma of Europe were two of the first groups to be hounded and rounded up by the Gestapo and the SS. The Jews were to be destroyed because they were Jewish, the Roma and the people of the countries of eastern Europe were to be killed or were to become slaves in order to provide Lebensraum for the spread of the Master Race. With both groups, the Nazi machine was successful.

Far less has been written about the people of western Europe, the people of the occupied countries who also had much to fear from the various branches of the Nazi propaganda machine. A TRAIN IN WINTER is the extraordinary story of a group of French women who were imprisoned and then transferred to Auschwitz because they published leaflets encouraging Parisians not to cooperate with the occupiers.

Europe was not a peaceful place from 1918 until the invasion of Poland in 1939, the event that began World War II. A brutal civil war was fought in Spain from July 1936 and April, 1939. The Nationalists were led by General Francisco Franco and its adherents were referred to as Francoists or Fascists. They were vehemently anti-communist. Franco's Fascists won the support of the Italians and the Germans who adopted the term "fascism" to denote a form of government in which country was more important than any individual, group, or guaranteed liberty. Millions of Spaniards were killed on each side and as Franco and the Fascists emerged as the victors, Spanish communists went to France to get support for their group. By 1940, when the Germans invaded, there were many French who considered themselves communists although their form of communism was not connected to what was happening in the Soviet Union.

In the first part of A TRAIN IN WINTER, the author introduces an enormous cast of characters whose names are difficult to remember because there are so many but which must be remembered because it is the telling of their story that is the purpose of the book. Many young people, including some who were still children, became propagandists, carrying anti-German flyers and newsletters encouraging quiet rebellion against the occupying forces. When Germany invaded Russia, French communists joined the resistance and were very effective in thwarting German plans. Most of the women in A TRAIN IN WINTER identified themselves as communists. Others joined in an attempt to protect French Jews from being transported to Germany. The Resistance, which acquired mythic status during and after the war, began with small acts of retaliation for indignities imposed on the family next door. Moorehead brings the term "resistance" down from the term with an upper-case "R" to "resistant", impeding the motion of an opposing force. The women who were resistants did it one day, one act at a time.

Girls as young as fifteen and women in their sixties did what they could to resist the laws imposed on them by the Germans. Some of the women hid guns in their laundry, some escorted Jews out of the occupied zone, some took in downed Allied airmen; all knew the risks they ran but their hatred of the Nazis and their determination to defy the SS, the Gestapo, and the police of Paris who collaborated with the occupying forces made them willing to take the risk. Many were women with young children whose husbands were already dead or were in the hands of the Germans. They gave their children to relatives and took the chance they would survive to return to their children.

The Germans decided to make an example of the women resisters. There was a belief that the women would not be treated like the men, that they would not have to fear facing firing squads. The Germans wanted to let the people of Paris know that gender didn't play a role in determining punishment. Two hundred and thirty women were arrested for their activities in the Resistance. They represented all strata of life in France. They were teachers, students, chemists, writers, housewives, musicians and professional singers, a midwife, and a dentist. They were strangers to each other. They came from cities, towns, and villages all over France. They were ordinary women who were extraordinary. As a group they realized that their only hope of surviving was in their solidarity. No woman could ever be alone; each must know, must feel the support of the others. Each woman brought something unique to the group that would keep the group grounded in the reality of their individuality. They gave each other lessons in foreign languages, in mathematics, in cooking. They put on plays for themselves and the other prisoners and the jailers were invited too. They recited poetry and the learned how to pass information from one cell to another. They learned that their men when there as well and they figured a way to make contact with them. And as each of the women learned she was a widow, the others understood and bolstered them. They had a rule for the survival of the group: everything had to be shared equally. In their intuitive understanding of the things upon which their survival depended, they survived. None died despite the cold, the hunger, the illnesses.

Then in January 1943, the Germans loaded the 230 women on to a cattle car and sent them to Poland. "There own particular skills as women, caring for others and being practical, made them, they told themselves, less vulnerable than men to harsh conditions and despair. Adaptibility was crucial, resignation fatal. The inability to undo a visison of life as it should be and not cope with what it was, led, as they had observed, to apathy and the condition of musulmans, those more dead than alive. They did their best to stay clean, to wash their faces in the snow or icy brooks, believing that it made them both healthier and more dignified. And they wanted, passionately, to live , to survive the war, and to describe to the world exactly what they had been through and what they had witnessed."

A TRAIN IN WINTER is not an easy book to read. It is not a book one can read from cover to cover in one sitting. There are places in the narrative where one has to stop, not because of vivid descriptions of the atrocities committed by the Germans but to think about and appreciate the women, the strength born out of the will to live. This is a book that should be read so that we, who can't really can't imagine what they went through, can glimpse in ourselves some of their resourcefulness in the lives we live.

The train took 230 women to Auschwitz in January, 1943. When the camp was liberated in April, 1945, 49 were still alive. Their goal was "keeping alive, remaining me." Remembering to "remain me" is a goal we all should try to meet.

49 of 55 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Poignant, heartbreaking story but a choppy narrative September 5, 2011

By S. McGee TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

I know that Caroline Moorehead can write an incredibly compelling book -- I've read her bio of Lucie de la Tour du Pin, Dancing to the Precipice: Lucy de la Tour du Pin and the French Revolution, one of those rare 5-star-plus books. But in that book, Moorehead's challenge was to tell the story of an era through the life of a single woman; in this book, she's tackling something altogether trickier, the saga of 230 women of very diverse background and experiences, brought together by their work for (different branches of) the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation, their subsequent deportation to Auschwitz and beyond. Her decision to try to do justice to each of those women may be laudable, but it makes the book a choppy and unfocused narrative.

Don't misunderstand me. Moorehead does a superlative job of capturing the details of each woman's resistance activities, the prison environment in which they meet and their traumatic experiences in the death camps of Nazi Germany. It's a heartbreaking reminder of what happen when human beings lose their humanity and treat other humans as they might some kind of insect life. The book packs an emotional wallop.

But it was too often a frustrating book to read. Packing the basic details of the lives of even several dozen of the 230 deportees (only 49 of whom would survive) is still a challenge to a writer trying to craft a compelling narrative. As Moorehead points out, some were workers, some ran bars, some were typographers, others were intellectuals. Some had been very active in the resistance; one woman had simply written a letter to her brother hoping for an end to Nazi rule. They were of all ages, and a variety of political and religious convictions, ranging from Catholicism and Judaism to atheism. A few do stand out, and I got the sense that a few more -- like Mai Politzer -- might have been very interesting in their own right. But in the interest of making the reader familiar with more of the women, some of them slipped into the background, and I ended up often wishing the author had chosen to focus only on a handful of the women to tell the story of the group. (There is a listing of the women at the back of the review copy I received, but I don't suggest you consult it unless you want to know who dies, when and how, and who survives.) The book is at its best when Moorehead shows us examples of the deportees banding together to survive, and provides evidence that they did so to a greater extent than other groups in the concentration camps. But I'm not sure she proves her broader point; that that communal action ensured their survival. Indeed, she notes one piece of serendipity that probably saved several dozen lives of the Auschwitz inhabitants in mid 1943 that came from outside the ranks of the women.

I applaud Moorehead's quest to bring this overlooked story to life, and it's a powerful one. But it's not as powerful as it could or should have been, particularly in the earlier stages of the book. I'm giving it 3.5 stars, and reluctantly rounding it up, only because rounding down would be curmudgeonly, and because the topic/theme is such an emotion-packed one that I'm sure it will find many readers. I found it constantly interesting and certainly very moving, but for a similar group biography that packs an even bigger punch because it doesn't try to over-reach to the same degree, I'd urge you to seek out The Girls of Room 28: Friendship, Hope, and Survival in Theresienstadt by Hannelore Brenner. It's the story of another group, this time of young Jewish girls who occupied one room in a Theresienstadt girls' home, their lives and experiences and those of their families, and their fates. More limited in focus, it feels less like the chronicle that Moorehead's book sometimes came across as being, and provided similar insights with even more emotional power. That was a five-star book for me.