Moorehead chronicles the women’s roles in victories and defeats, their narrow escapes and their capture at the hands of French police eager to assist their Nazi overseers to deport Jews, resisters, Communists and others.

Postering and graffiti grew into sabotage and armed attacks, and the Nazis responded with vicious acts of mass reprisal – which in turn led to the Resistance coalescing and developing. Based on interviews with the few remaining survivors, together with extensive research in French and Polish archives, A Train in Winter is an essential historical document told with the clarity and impact of a great novel.Ĭaroline Moorehead follows the women from the beginning, starting with the disorganized, youthful and high-spirited activists who came together with the Occupation, and chronicling their links with the underground intellectual newspapers and Communist cells that formed soon afterwards. In this vitally important book, Caroline Moorehead tells the whole story of the 230 women on the train, for the first time. Only forty-nine of the Convoi des 31000 would return from the camps in the east within ten years, a third of these survivors would be dead too, broken by what they had lived through. With immense courage they had taken up arms against a brutal occupying force now their friendship would give them strength as they experienced unimaginable horrors. They were members of the French Resistance, ranging in age from teenagers to the elderly, women who before the war had been doctors, farmers’ wives, secretaries, biochemists, schoolgirls. On January 24, 1943, 230 women were placed in four cattle trucks on a train in Compiegne, in northeastern France, and the doors bolted shut for the journey to Auschwitz. “This is not a world I wish her to grow up in.” “It is because I have a child that I do it,” replied Cecile. “How can you do this work if you have a child?” asked her mother.

A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead