Book description
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. The youngest was a schoolgirl of 15, the eldest a farmer's wife
of 68; there were among them teachers, biochemists, sales girls,
secretaries, housewives and university lecturers.
The women turned to one another, finding solace and strength in
friendship and shared experience. They supported and cared for one
another, worked together, and faced the horror together. Friendship,
almost as much as luck, dictated survival. Forty-nine of them came home.
Caroline Moorehead's breathtaking new book is the story of these
women - the first time it has been told. It is about who they were,
how and why they joined the resistance, how they were captured by the
French police and the Gestapo, their journey to Auschwitz and their
daily life in the death camps - and about what it was like for the
survivors when they returned to France. A Train in Winter
covers a harrowing part of our history but is, ultimately, a portrait
of ordinary people, of bravery and endurance, and of friendship.
Caroline Moorehead is the biographer of Bertrand Russell, Freya
Stark, Iris Origo and Martha Gellhorn. Well known for her work in human
rights, she has published a history of the Red Cross and a book about
refugees,
Human Cargo.
Her most recent book,
Dancing to the Precipice
, a biography of Lucie de la Tour du Pin, was shortlisted for the Costa
Biography Award in 2009. Caroline lives in London.
