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Paperback edition of Moorehead's book which tells the story of 230 French women resisters who were rounded up by the Gestapo in 1943 and sent on a train to Auschwitz. 49 of them survived, and this is a portrait not just of a harrowing part of history but of ordinary people, bravery & endurance. From the author of "Betrand Russell" and "Martha Gellhorn". 'A story of stunning courage, generosity and hope.' Kathryn Hughes, "Mail On Sunday"
Synopsis
On an icy dawn morning in Paris in January 1943, a group of 230 French women resisters were rounded up from the Gestapo detention camps and sent on a train to Auschwitz - the only train, in the four years of German occupation, to take women of the resistance to a death camp. This title presents the story of these women.
Book Details
Publisher:
VINTAGE
Publication Date:
06-Sep-2012
ISBN:
9780099523895
Guardian review
A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead - review
the guardian Tue 09 October 2012
In January 1943, 230 Frenchwomen were deported from occupied France to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the only women from the French Resistance to suffer this fate. Only 49 survived. In this impeccably researched and compelling history, Caroline Moorehead examines their lives, how they joined the Resistance, how they came to be discovered and arrested and how they suffered starvation, slave labour, disease and, in most cases, death. They were mainly professional women, communists and intellectuals, including the writer Charlotte Delbo, author of Auschwitz and After. Moorehead's theme is "friendship between women", and in her view it was the survivors' devotion to each other and a sense of "mutual dependency" sisterhood that made "the difference between living and dying". She has interviewed four of the survivors and talked to the families of those who did not return, their lives and deaths summarised in a moving appendix. Sadly, of the survivors, "Few, very few, found the life of happiness they had dreamt about."
