Here is the story of these women - told for the first time. Of the group, only 49 survivors would return to France. On an icy 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. A moving and extraordinary book about courage and survival, friendship and endurance - a portrait of ordinary women who faced the horror of the holocaust together. About the Author:īook Description Paperback. Only forty-nine would return to France.Ī 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. In January 1943, they were sent to their final destination: Auschwitz. 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. 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.Įventually, the Gestapo hunted down 230 of these women and imprisoned them in a fort outside Paris. 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. They distributed anti-Nazi leaflets, printed subversive newspapers, hid resisters, secreted Jews to safety, transported weapons, and conveyed clandestine messages. They were teachers, students, chemists, writers, and housewives a singer at the Paris Opera, a midwife, a dental surgeon.

A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead