On the morning of Jan. 24, 1943, German soldiers and French policemen herded 230 women aboard a train bound for a destination about which these passengers knew nothing. About half of them were communists who in one way or another had aided — or been charged with aiding — the French Resistance. “The majority,” Caroline Moorehead writes, “came from every part and region of France, from Paris, Bordeaux, Brittany, Normandy, Aquitaine and along the banks of the Loire. They had sheltered resisters, written and copied out anti-German pamphlets, hidden weapons in shopping bags, helped carry out acts of sabotage.” Among them were a doctor, a dentist, four chemists, “farmers, shopkeepers, women who had worked in factories and in the post office, teachers, and secretaries,” as well as dressmakers, students and housewives.
When the train finally stopped, after a cold and singularly unpleasant journey, the women found themselves in “a vast white snowy landscape, deserted, flat and frozen.” They were marched across this landscape, under a sign that read “Arbeit Macht Frei” and into an immense camp. “Had they heard the words Auschwitz or Birkenau, they would have meant nothing to them.” They stayed there for two years, until the end of the war. Forty-nine of them survived, and, given the unspeakable conditions into which they were thrust, it is a miracle that this many made it to freedom. They made it because they had developed formidable survival skills and for two overriding reasons: “They had lived because each of them had been incredibly lucky, and because of the friendship between them, which had protected them and made it easier to withstand the barbarity.”
(Harper) - ’A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France’ by Caroline Moorhead
Their story, as Moorehead tells it in this compelling and moving book, is more of survival than of triumph. Some of them managed to return to lives that suggested normality — marriage or remarriage, children, high honors from the French government and others — and incredibly, four of them were still alive as “A Train in Winter” went to press. But virtually all of them were haunted by what they had undergone, in particular by memories of the friends who had perished in Heinrich Himmler’s hell on Earth, and some of them by recurrent dreams that made the Holocaust a living presence in their lives.
Moorehead obviously likes and admires these women, especially those who lived long enough to talk to her about their experiences before, during and after the death camp, but she does not romanticize them; they are real people, with shortcomings as well as strengths, and some of them are so fully portrayed as to become vivid presences. Moorehead has a soft spot for the French communists — they were “resilient, energetic and prepared to sacrifice themselves,” and “it was no accident that all but a few of the survivors had been active politically, committed to shared beliefs in a better future, and accustomed to hardship and discipline” — but she indulges this only a few times, and it does not seriously affect her narrative. What matters is that she is generally as tough-minded as were the women themselves, sparing the reader little in describing the cruelties in France during the Occupation (many of them inflicted by the French themselves) and the far greater ones of Auschwitz and Birkenau.
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