A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France
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About this ebook
In January 1943, 230 women of the French Resistance were sent to the death camps by the Nazis who had invaded and occupied their country. This is their story, told in full for the first time—a searing and unforgettable chronicle of terror, courage, defiance, survival, and the power of friendship. Caroline Moorehead, a distinguished biographer, human rights journalist, and the author of Dancing to the Precipice and Human Cargo, brings to life an extraordinary story that readers of Mitchell Zuckoff’s Lost in Shangri-La, Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts, and Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken will find an essential addition to our retelling of the history of World War II—a riveting, rediscovered story of courageous women who sacrificed everything to combat the march of evil across the world.
Caroline Moorehead
Caroline Moorehead is the New York Times bestselling author of the Resistance Quartet, which includes A Bold and Dangerous Family, Village of Secrets, and A Train in Winter, as well as Human Cargo, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. An acclaimed biographer, she has written for the New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and The Independent. She lives in London and Italy.
Read more from Caroline Moorehead
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A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A House in the Mountains: The Women Who Liberated Italy from Fascism Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
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Reviews for A Train in Winter
218 ratings31 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Nazi occupation of France during WWII was fraught with complicity, complacency and rebellion against the occupiers. But it is historically relevant to know that it was not just the French men who stepped-up to revolt or act against the German presence. In varying ways -- defying Nazi occupiers -- French women took part in the resistance by printing and distributing anti-German fliers and news of the Allied advances, smuggling, sabotage and espionage. Many French women avoid capture. Some were killed during operations. And many other French women were either captured or arrested turned-in by French citizens and police working complicit with the Nazi's. These women were sent to work/extermination camps such as Birkenbau and Auschwitz. There, more of them died or endured cruelty. Others survived to bear witness to the horror. During that time, the Marseillaise (the French anthem) remained a consistent theme of defiance and reliance of support. Those that survived struggled with the guilt of survival and the consequences of the cruel circumstances (health and aging). This is that story.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Not an easy book to read but an important one. It is the story of a group of French women resistors in WWII who suffer through years in concentration camps. Their story is told from survivor recollections , diaries, papers and recollections from family members. This book pulls no punches in telling of the horrors these women endured.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This was an absolute brutal story. The number of survivors of the Holocaust is mind boggling. Really, how can anyone survive the unthinkable? It is a true testament of strong spirit and determination.
The reason for the 3 stars is because this read more like a High School History book. It was not an easy read. I am very glad to have read it though because I knew nothing of the 'convoy'. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is not an easy book to read. We know before we even begin that there are few happy endings. I've read a lot about the conditions in the Nazi labor camps and extermination camps, but the true story of these women brings it clearly and closely to life. This is an account of a couple hundred women arrested for their involvement in the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation. After being jailed in France, later in the war they were moved to Eastern Europe, with the intention of leaving their fate unknown to their families, friends, and associates. Their experiences have been well-researched and are vividly recounted -- so vividly, in fact, that it his hard to read. Only a handful of these women survived.I didn't rate this higher because the book starts so slowly. I know that the explanations of who each woman is, and what she was doing that led to her arrest, is important to their stories. But it's not the main point of the book, and I think it was too long.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5The idea and history behind this book is very interesting. The woman written about in this book truly believed in their cause and purpose, and many managed to survive a horrific situation. However, I wish the author would have focused on a smaller group of women to illustrate her point. The volume of women written about was hard to follow. I couldn't remember who was who and why they did what they did. There were so many people to keep track of I found myself wishing for a program.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Part two of this book is why you would read this tale. It is there that you witness the strength of relationships and the horrors of Holocaust and what happens after liberation. Part one is intended to serve as the foundation for the relationships that form the central focus of the second part, but because there are 230 women on the Le convoi de 31,000, it is sometimes difficult to keep any narrative thread through this section of the book. In fact, there were times when it just felt like a list. Having said that, I am glad that I pushed through to the second part, because I found myself unable to put it down at that point. I am not a historian, and so not qualified to comment on questions of accuracy, but the author compellingly draws the terror, disbelief, and tenacity that the women experienced. Definitely worth a read.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Maybe I've just read to many WWII history books in the last year but I am having a lot of trouble getting into this one. It is dull and dry. I have learned new facts. Yes, the NAZI occupiers were ruthless rulers, who were supported by at least half the country in rounding up the Jews. Yes, many French risk and lost their lives as part of the Resistance.This book is specifically about the French Communist women who were perfectly willing to forgive and admire Stalin while he and Hitler divided up Poland and murdered thousands. No problem with Stalin or the USSR when it took the Baltic States as part of the deal with the NAZIs. Of course these patriot women fought against foreign invaders. Good for them. Who wouldn't? Well half of France wouldn't.But after looking at the 20th century in hindsight and knowing about the 100 million people murdered by Communist police states. I have trouble caring about the French communist movement. It's kind of like hearing about a child molester who is killed by the local MS13 gang. I know I should care but I just can't be bothered.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5About a group of women who were involved in the resistance against Nazi regime, who were captured and sent to concentration camps, and endured through the atrocity and crime against humanity by having formed a bond of friendships and the will to survive; which only 49 of the 230 member returned to France and to their families. Book is not for faint of hearts or for children.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The train is heading for Birkenau in the early years of WWII. The passengers include 230 women of the French Resistance. This was an incredible audio of a horrific experience. Part One was about living in France and taking part in the Resistance. Struggling with the Vichy government as well as the resident German troops was bad enough but nothing in comparison to life in the camps as detailed in Part Two. These women watched as many of their number were beaten and tortured or died of deprivation, exposure, starvation and disease (typhus was common). And yet, they developed a bond that was incredibly durable. As Moorehead relates at the end of the narrative:”They had learnt, they would say, the full meaning of friendship, a commitment to each other that went far deeper than individual liking or disliking; and they now felt wiser, in some indefinable way, because they had understood the depths to which human beings can sink and equally the heights to which it is possible to rise.”A devastating portrait of an inconceivable experience.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5In January 1943 two hundred and thirty women who had bravely fought as a part of the French Resistance were sent to Auschwitz. These were women who spanned many occupations and age groups, who fought for many different reasons. Yet, they all had one thing in common… They wanted to free their country from German rule. A Train in Winter is the story that illustrates just what these women endured.The book starts out a bit slow, but Moorehead does a great job of setting the stage for the reader and introducing many of the players involved. Regardless of the opening, the book really starts to set its hooks into you after the first few chapters. It is nearly impossible to set the book down once you start to read about what these women sacrificed for their cause, the fear they overcame in order to do what they felt was necessary.Moorehead does not shy away from the cruel or the heartbreaking. Having met with a few of the survivors still alive, the families of survivors who have since passed, and much research into the topic, she paints a brutally honest picture of the events surrounding the capture and subsequent encampment of these women. What they had to undergo is not something that’s easy to digest, but then the story wouldn’t mean nearly as much without being so true to what she learned about their experiences.If the stories from the survivors didn’t make the book real enough, the pictures included in the book certainly serve to make the story that much more real and unforgettable. You are able to put faces to names and picture the torturous conditions all the more clearly. When you learn that only forty-nine of the two hundred and thirty women are able to make it out of the camps alive it really hits home.A Train in Winter is not a book you are going to read and forget about, it is a book that is going to stay with you and make you realize just what we are capable of even in the worst possible conditions. This is the story of women who were stronger than most people will ever have to be and who supported each other in an attempt to survive the cruelest conditions a person could find themselves in. In one sentence, this is a book that everyone should read.** I received a copy of this book from the publisher as a part of TLC Book Tours in exchange for an honest review.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A powerful read! New York Times Bestseller 2011"A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France": World War II, France, German occupation of France, without French resistance towards this takeover of their country...thus this story begins.Many French were appalled at this atrocity that was happening to their country, yet it happened. Those who wanted to fight against the occupation, to resist the Germans, did so from behind the Gestapo, the Nazi, and the French occupying government. This well-written, detailed book is of French women and men who did resist in many ways. The story centers around 230 women who were part of the French Resistance Movements and Communists. These women (and men) transported (tried to transport) Jews to safe havens, hid resisters, wrote pamphlets/leaflets against the Nazis, sabotaged Nazi trains or the industrial complexes, printed subversive newspapers, carried weapons and secret messages to other resisters.Over a short period of time, they were captured for their words and actions against the Nazis, and were swept into a prison camp. Of 230 women, ranging in age from 16 to 60s, who were taken from Paris in January, 1943 on a train to the first of many prison camps, only 49 return. They were eventually taken to places such as Auschwitz and Birkenau. This is their story. It is a hard read due to the emotions that leap off page after page, but it is from a side of WWII that I have not dealt with before, but am thankful to know now.The NY Times said: "And it was their devotion to one another that enabled 49 of them, during what would turn out to be a two-and-a-half-year season in hell, to defy one official’s prediction: “You’re going to a camp from which you’ll never return.” "Moorehead meticulously traces the fates of 230 Frenchwomen sent to Auschwitz as political prisoners of the Reich."This book is about friendship, caring, love, and honor. It is also about degradation, inhumanity against humanity, and the inescapable horrors of the death/extermination camps, and manual labor done by those who were healthier than most, but ended up near to death or died working for the German war efforts.My feelings as I come away from this book is, as many have hoped before me: that we should NEVER experience this again. Sad to say though, our world as we look around has terrible inhumanity to man and woman in far too many places of this world.Reading Level: Adult NonfictionAuthor: Caroline Moorehead was born in 1944 in London, England. She is a proclaimed biographer, has written columns on human rights, has made a series of TV programs on human rights for the BBC (1990-2000). She has also written the history of the International Committee of the Red Cross (1998) and has helped to set up a Legal Advice Centre for refugees in Cairo, where she has started schools and a nursery. She works as a volunteer on the legal team for the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, while also continuing to review and write on human rights in many different papers.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France Not for the faint hearted this one.
Personally anything to do with the extermination camps deeply disturbs me. This one extends that to the actions of a populace i.e. the French. The roundup of the Jews was initiated by the Vichy government and manages by the French themselves. The Germans were impressed with French efficiency and brutality in this inhuman undertaking. When the Germans asked the French to deliver thousands of Jews, the French used cattle cars. The Germans had never thought of that themselves. Bah!This story centres on the thousands of women and girls who did the leg work for the French Resistance. Delivering pamphlets, posters, supplies and weapons from one resistance cell to another. Knowing fully the consequences if caught, they just carried on regardless. Using that innate efficiency that women can bring to any task they were lubrication that kept the resistance machine going.This story takes a while to get going but eventually centres on a group of women who are "disappeared". The process the Germans used to destroy the morale of other resistance members, having previously found out that executing them turned them into heroes. This consisted of simply moving them away without notifying anyone of their eventual destination or even the fact that they were gone.These women had no idea where they were headed when they boarded a series of cattle trucks one night. Their destination was Auschwitz.A harrowing story of heroism, bravery, imagination, courage and determination against all odds. By turns heartbreaking, moving and disgusting. The horrors of day to day existence in those places which to this day we can only imagine the half of it. Descriptions that will turn your stomach and your heart.The book itself is reasonably well written. The first chunk is just a series of names and dates and incidents. In reality this is building the context in which everything coalesces to the main grist. In the end I really liked it but could remember how I nearly put it down several times at the beginning. (Later: see the 1 star reviews for more on that)A nice intro into some of the history of WW2 especially the French part and their collaboration with the Nazis. Interesting to read yet again how widely the Jews were hated well before WW2 itself. Amen, may they all rest in peace.Well worth the effort. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5During 1942, women of the French Resistance were rounded up in a variety of police stings. This is the story of the 230 women who were sent from France to Nazi concentration camps. I do wish that this book was written as a story rather than a recitation of facts. This greatly slowed the story down and took away from the stories of these women. The book was very heartbreaking at times, and a story format would have greatly enhanced this. Overall, a decent book.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/536. A Train in Winter: A Story of Resistance, Friendship, and Survival (Audio) by Caroline Moorehead, read by Wanda McCaddon (2011, 384 pages in written form, Listened June 6-18)This left me emotionally raw.Read terrifically by Wanda McCaddon, who I felt added to the experience, this is a more-or-less straight-forward overview of the French resistance during WWII and then of 230 French woman arrested, at different times and places, as part of the resistance. They were found and arrested by French Vichy police, imprisoned, mistreated, and then sent together on one train to Auschwitz.The book starts off as a fascinating history of the build up of the French resistance, which at first, after France's defeat by Germany, was notable for the lack of resistance. Then it begins to cover various stories of the different woman and the men they worked with. Moorehead goes into detail into the different ways they contributed, and into the careful observations made by the French investigators, who not only collaborated with the Germans, but went the extra mile (extra KM?) and put in painstaking effort to trace as many resistors as they could. The arrests come in bunches as one person with a list leads to several others and so on. The men are tortured brutally, often to death or near death, again by French investigators. Then any man arrested was likely to end up executed in retaliation for resistance activities. The Germans would execute them a 100 at a time over the course of the war, an act of terror that proved counter-productive as it resulted in popular anger and fed a build-up in the resistance.This is pretty discouraging all around, as we watch these proud woman each eventually get caught and then suffer in prison. But that in no way prepares the reader for what comes next. Entering Auschwitz, in January 1943, is such a shock that many of these French woman were to die shortly after of no apparent cause. The experience is beyond anything I can say here, and is presented by Moorehead with incredible power. I've read and seen enough about Auschwitz to have a sense of what to expect when it is talked about again. But this is a different angle and it brings up an entirely new way of looking at this. Somehow it seemed even more terrible here. For the rest of the book I never fully got over the shock of their introduction to Auschwitz, I still haven't.The experience in Auschwitz will leave 52 of these woman alive, a number extraordinary for how high it was. Unlike most people sent to these camps, these French woman felt proud about what they had done to get them here. They also bonded closely together, helping each other in every way they could. As a group they were stronger.A mistaken death notice leads to public questioning in France of what became of these woman. As a result of this, most of the survivors were sent from Auschwitz, an extermination camp, to a labor camp. Death was still constant, and there were still gas chambers, but any women strong enough were treated such as to be kept alive for their labor. Only a few more would die.With liberation came disappointment. A large percentage of survivors from the various German camps would die within the next several years. These woman were broken, often unable to come to terms with a post-war France determined to rebuild, limit punishments and move forward. Many were communists and were discouraged to find so many communist leaders dead and to find the French government generally unwilling to work with communists. They also had difficulty reacquainting themselves with their families and children who did not recognize them. And it seems it was only on repatriation that they were finally able to deal with the deaths they had witnessed, including the many husbands who were executed.This is a stunning book, made only better in audio by the excellent reader. It's difficult to read but highly recommended.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This was a hard book to read, but it should be - the Holocaust was an atrocity millions did not survive, and reading about it should never be easy. But I believe we owe the survivors the dignity and honor of telling their stories, in whatever way they feel those stories should be told. That is why I continue to read books like this, that are not easy, that make me feel shock and sadness. Because the survivors deserve to be heard, and those who did not survive deserve to be remembered.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I think I’d have enjoyed reading this book no matter what but I was particularly happy to read it with my reading buddy Diane, and glad that she wanted to read slowly through the book; it made the reading experiencing really fun, if I can use that word, and absorbing and thinking about the information more interesting. I’ve read extensively about the Holocaust, but I learned so much from this book. I knew little of the treatment of French women Communists and other Nazi resistors. I’m fascinated with this history. I must admit as I read about what befell these women in various places at various times, I found myself thinking about the Jews, and the times, places, events, ways they were being murdered on a parallel timeline with the events in this book.I was riveted to the account from the start, though the list of names was long and, as I predicted, I sometimes lost track of details about particular people. I resisted taking notes though, and that’s where my buddy came in handy, sometimes interjecting information such as: these two women had been friends before the war and providing the page number. I did enjoy that but was too lazy to try to remember all the details. Even without them, I feel as though I got to know these women, and particularly their friendship, which was a character itself. It’s really a book about the friendship among the group of women, how they were a unit of sorts. While I often forget connections and pre-war activities, I remained engrossed in the book and felt I got more than the gist. I was thrilled with the two maps and all the photographs. I wised for even more. Those included really enhanced the reading experience for me.I found myself wanting to know each of the women’s fates and my reading buddy Diane alerted me to one page in the back of the book that listed surviving women who were still alive and were interviewed or their family members interviewed for the book, and that’s when I found the complete list: those women, in alphabetical order the women who survived and then in alphabetical order the women who did not survive. I wanted to find out and to bear witness, so I pretty much stopped reading the book proper and, even though I knew I’d forget specifics and have to refer back to names as I read about them in the book, I read the lists. It was highly disturbing, even reading the fates of the survivors left me feeling extremely sad. Real life horror show! I knew how what the Nazis did have affected more than that one generation but it was powerful to see it spelled out in simple list form. It was hard to avoid using profanity when trying to absorb the facts. I’m really glad that the fates, with a bit of detail, of all the women were revealed. Even though I wasn’t willing to create it, in addition to the lists of women at the end, I wouldn’t have minded lists at the beginning, showing why the women were arrested, who knew who before capture, etc.I know in some cases it wasn’t possible to tell more of certain women because of the lack of information and for those women I’m grateful their existence was noted, but for those women who had a lot known about them, I longed for more detailed information about their pre-war and post-war lives. However; the entity of them as a group, of the friendship as the main character was powerful. The juxtaposition of how different people and groups dealt with Nazi occupation was told effectively and I find the subject fascinating. I was amazed at how brave most of these women were. Because they were not Jewish (known Jews) almost all could have avoided concentration camps, and once they were imprisoned I was so impressed with the big, unexpected, all kinds of kindnesses, often at their own peril and/or deprivation, and often even at risk of saving their own lives. Talk about true friendship!Whenever reading about the Nazis I always admired the resistors but this time around I kept wondering if mothers of young children really should have been so boldly participating. I am in awe of what they did but a part of me wanted anyone who could stay safe (and hopefully still do some good) to do so.These French women went through a lot of the almost unimaginable suffering that the targeted groups (Jews, Gypsies, mentally ill, developmentally disabled, homosexual, etc.) did. I’m still glad that at the end, when summing up, the Jews were mentioned and the reader saw how they fared re return rate, and re France’s collaboration and the prevalent anti-Semitism, re overall how they fared worse, and given how these women fared, that was very, very badly. I respect this account even more for all it tried to cover.I felt so sad to read the fates of the women, not only those who didn’t survive, but also those who did survive. I kept wondering what if they’d had modern day post traumatic stress treatments in 1945 whether some could have greatly benefited, even though I have no illusions that they would be anything other than horribly damaged in many ways. So horrifying what humans can do to others!I really enjoyed this book but I was left profoundly sad, and also profoundly impressed, and very angry about what happened to these women. I think it’s an important story and I’m very glad that it’s now down on paper. I might have given it 5 stars had I gotten to know at least some of the women better than I did. These sorts of accounts always have me soul searching about just how brave I’d be, just how altruistic I’d be, just how ethically I’d behave given similar dire circumstances.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Very conflicted on how many stars to give as there are some structural problems early on and some less than stellar writing toward the end; however, the stories of these women are the heart of the book and Moorehead does them justice, I think.
This was a chilling, horrifying read, and it made me despair for the way I was taught history back in the 80s. I should probably say that this helped contextualize and humanize the political policies described in a dry-as-dust history of the pre-war period I've been reading. It also helped greatly to dispel the false image of the French Resistance as all male, rifle-wielding, beret-sporting Maquis. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I found this to be a very difficult book to read; in fact, at one point I had to put it aside and read something a bit lighter. The first section of the book introduces us to some of the women we are to follow along on this adventure. The second section introduces us to the work of men & women who resisted the German occupiers of France. Moorehead also covers the complicity of the Vichy Government including their part in rounding up French Jews and shipping them to concentration camps.How the women are discovered or snitched on is explained and then we follow them to French prisons where they are tortured and abused. Eventually they are shipped by train to Auschwitz in Poland where the real terror begins. Stripped, hair cut off, dressed in flimsy striped dresses and then put in drafty, barren buildings, they witness the abuse and death of their new home. Soon they are working the cold with few clothes and little food plagued by lice, fleas and disease. Soon they are watching their friends die but they come up with plans to help one another survive. Only a few made it through the ordeal. Moorehead interviewed a few of the survivors. At the back of the book, she lists all the French women who were transported to Auschwitz and what eventually happened to them.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I give this book 2 1/2 stars, but between pages 151-293 I'd give it 4 stars, the problem is getting there. Too many characters to keep track of, too many individual stories get in the way of the flow of the story. I would have focused on a few of the main characters and let them drive the story. The other tact would have been to make a bunch of short stories that could have worked in many characters.The story got interesting right before they left for the concentration camps. What happened before the pages mentioned above was very tedious and hard to get through, in some cases boring. In some places there is not enough information but a name and crime committed and not much else.It was an interesting story, but I feel it should have been handled differently.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5"When we tell people...who will believe us?"I have never read or witnessed such solidarity, friendship, and sisterhood that crossed all socio-economic, religious, and political lines like those described in A Train in Winter. These women were in the very belly of hell on earth. What began as resistance quickly transitioned into surviving against the worst of odds."Maybe we didn't pray enough?"Pockets of resistance were forming all over France as a response to the German occupation. Intellectuals, political activists, and regular citizens all were making their mark in the Resistance movement. Women, men, and teenagers were fighting for a common goal which was to bring about a "rebirth of a pure and free France." German occupiers were determined to breakup and infiltrate the resistance networks."Some days,...I think I have reached the limits of horror."As the war wore on many of the resisters were sent to prison and released and others were executed or tortured to death. On August 1, 1942, 230 Resistance women began a journey that they would never forget. After brief stays at two prisons these women found their final destinations in concentration camps such as Birkenau and Auschwitz. What keep them alive were the friendships they formed while in those prisons. None of these women were over 44.Moorehead gave so much background and minor details about these women (and men) until I became so invested in their lives and had to keep reading. There were moments that I had to reflect on the fact that these were real people who had to endure suffering that my mind could not even comprehend. It was to point where one women said that, "The grotesque had become normal." When freedom came all were somewhat numb and soon found they would never really be free again.Among the women there were two that I paid close attention to: Danielle Casanova and Adelaide Hautvale. Adelaide seen and had to assist with human experimentation at the hand of some of the infamous Nazi doctors. Her reports were devastating. Danielle Casanova was a young dentist and a true fighter.There were two non-human characters that were ever present, hunger and The Marseillaise. The hunger was persistent. The description of the hunger that these women and men had to endure jumped off the pages. Just when you thought these women and men were broken there would be a breakout into the singing of The Marseillaise. It was their motivational song that marked each journey.A Train in Winter is packed full of details and at times read like a textbook. There were so many names until they became overwhelming early on. By the end, I was saying, "I don't know how they made it." Moorehead wrote about these women with a certain dignity that they all deserved. What was even more remarkable to me more so than their friendship was how the Arts always seemed to bring up their spirits. Many times putting on plays and playing music seemed to even calm the Nazi beasts all around them. I am so happy that Moorehead told these women's stories and may their names always rang throughout history. They should never be forgotten.Disclaimer: A copy of this book was provided by the publisher. The views and opinions shared are my own.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I'm starting off 2017 with a remarkable book about women who were active in the French Resistance during the German occupation of France in WWII. These women were arrested for varied acts of resistance against the German occupiers such as transporting Jews to the free zone, hiding people wanted by the Germans, writing political pamphlets, secretly sending letters, printing fliers, denouncing German occupation, and, for some, simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Most of the politically active women were Communist. After being arrested, the women were held in camps in France. In January of 1943, 230 French women, most labeled as political activists, were put on a train and sent to Birkenau in Auschwitz. Here they faced hardship and humiliation that is impossible to describe. Those that ended up surviving were mainly in their mid 20s or early 30s, healthy to start, and found strength through each other. Most of the survivors stressed that their womanly qualities of caring for each other and their organizational skills pulled them through the ordeal. They could not have survived alone. They pooled meager food, hid the sick and wounded, and supported each others spirits. Upon returning home, they found a wounded France, dead family members, and the inability to talk about their experience to people who largely didn't want to hear about it. Only 49 of the 230 women survived and about a third of those died within a decade of their return. Many stayed in touch, finding that only around each other could they find some modicum of peace. Besides the obvious horrors committed by those who had clear roles as torturers and sadists, Moorehead points out the gray areas. What about all the French people who denounced their fellow countrymen and women to the Germans? Or those who saw and did nothing? This permeated every level of French society and largely it was decided that what the country needed was to move on after convicting those who committed the worst crimes. But these politically active women came home to a France where they felt that the strongest and smartest men who should have been leading their country had been killed in the war and they were left with those who had no business being in power. Some stayed active in their Communist parties, some left for other countries, and some withdrew from life altogether. A particularly moving part of this book is the final pages, where Moorehead lists every single one of the 230 women: their names, where they were from, why they were initially arrested, if they had children, and where/when/how they died or survived. This is a sad book, a moving book when describing the tight bonds that drew these women together, and a book that will make you question humanity. Definitely recommended.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5“A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France”, is a well researched and documented account of the beginnings of the resistance movement in Paris in 1940. In particular it tells of the role of women in the resistance. It follows them through the streets of Paris as they printed and distributed subversive newspapers, transported weapons, and conveyed clandestine messages. The French Police arrested school girls, grandmothers, teachers, housewives, chemists in 1942 and incarcerated them in prisons in Paris. In January, 1943, the 230 French women were sent by train to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Forty-nine women returned in 1945. Caroline Moorhead’s work follows the women through their entire ordeal and return to ‘normal‘ life in France. She puts faces on the women, shows their personalities and how as a group of disparate women and as individuals, they support each other, carry each other through unbelievable situations and enable forty-nine to survive. I highly recommend this book.A “New York Times” Notable Book.A “Toronto Star” Best Book.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Obviously, I don't read too much nonfiction these days, still not recovered from the glut of required readings for my history major and also unable to resist the page-turning allure of fiction. Still, there are a few subjects that can tempt me into some scholarly reading, one of which is World War II. For whatever reason, I have always been drawn to everything about both WWI and WWII. As such, when I had the opportunity to review this, I jumped at it.
Very few history books read as smoothly as fiction, or as quickly. Moorehead's reads like history, and not like a story, but her prose is still beautiful and much less dry than most of the history texts I've encountered. Her phrasing also reads as delightfully un-American, very suited to the French women she's describing. I intended to just sit down and read this the way I do my fiction books, but ended up reading it in fits and starts, because it just went down better in small gulps, giving me time to mull things over, rather than frustrate myself by trying to read speedily.
Although the focus of this on the surface is a train, the train that took 230 female members of the resistance in France to Auschwitz, about half of the book focuses on how they got caught. Moorehead met with many of the still-living survivors as part of her research, and she obviously knew more about these women and the ones they were close to then some of the others. She doesn't tell the stories of all 230, of course, but she gives a nice picture of life in Occupied France, and the various roles women played in the resistance. This was an area I knew little of, so I was thrilled to expand my knowledge.
Sent to the Auschwitz, these women endure all the hardships there, most of which are probably quite familiar, as the horror of the Holocaust is already well-known. Moorehead's central thesis is that the reason so many of them (49/230) managed to survive was because of the kinship between these women. The friendships they developed and the way they supported one another in the camp greatly heightened their odds of survival.
These French women did their best to keep their minds active, reciting snippets of remembered poems and holding classes. They shared their food voluntarily, giving the largest portions to those most in need. At the freezing roll calls, they propped up those who could not stand. They secreted women who would otherwise be taken to the gas chambers away. They made each other Christmas presents from odds and ends they managed to steal. In short, the camps were still hell, but they were just slightly better with friends, serving as evidence that not all humankind is so evil and incapable of feeling.
One of my favorite things about A Train in Winter, I must admit at the risk of sounding childish, were the pictures. Okay, okay, hear me out. Many history texts include photos of the important figures, but they're often sectioned off into the middle so the photos can be glossy, which is nice, except that, by the time you get to that section you don't remember who most of them are. Moorehead located many pictures of the women, including ones taken in some of the camps. Seeing the change in the women once incarcerated is astonishing. Even more horrifying is the picture of some of the Auschwitz guards, presumably on some holiday, smiling and looking like any young, healthy folks out for a good time in the 40s, not like abusive killers.
Moorhead touches on so much, and I find reviewing history books a bit difficult. I thought her book quite well done, and would recommend it to those interested in studying the Holocaust or the French Resistance, whether for fun or for school. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Wow, an extraordinary story indeed! During the German occupation of France, the French police rounded up women from all over the country who were believed to be involved with the Resistance. The women included a dentist, a midwife, chemists, office workers, innkeepers, cafe owners, farm wives, school girls, and an opera singer. They were interred together in the fort at Romainville, where they grew to know and protect one another. In January 1943, these 240 women were sent together on a train to Auschwitz/Birkenau, where their friendship and solidarity helped them survive. All but one were later transferred to Ravensbruck. An amazing 49 were liberated and lived to return home. The book begins with a look at how French resistance to the German occupation began and how women were involved from the very beginning. Because of their work in offices, many women were able to write, print, and distribute anti-Nazi leaflets. French women were able to hide resisters in their cafes, inns, and homes, as well as escort them across the demarcation line. Chemists made materials for bombs, others were able to make or procure medicines. Some even transported arms and participated in sabotage. And neither the French police nor the Gestapo suspected women of taking these sorts of risks, so for a while they operated in the open without being suspected. But a meticulous and patient French policeman named Fernand David began a system of surveillance in the Paris region where every suspected member of the resistance, especially communists, were followed and notes were taken on their appearance, movements, and those of everyone with whom they spoke. Although it was a slow process, the day came when he had dossiers on everyone as well as their relationships. It began with the Phase Pican, in which 19 people were arrested, nine of them women. Later sweeps would bring in a hundred suspects at a time, all linked through networks. Whereas the men were tortured, executed, or held as hostages to be executed in retaliation for a German death (at rates as high as 100 Frenchmen for one German), the women were not, as a rule. tortured or executed, but imprisoned at Romainville.It is while imprisoned that most of the women met for the first time, although a few already knew each other through their networks. Here they bonded and began to think of group survival as more important than individual survival. It was this group unity and friendship that sustained them in the camps. Their experiences were horrible, and few survived, but more would have died if it weren't for their group mentality. When the survivors returned, they spoke of missing the camaraderie that had sustained them for so long. Especially since the French population was not keen to listen to their stories. Most French, encouraged by De Gaulle, were ready to move on, rebuild, and to think of the French Resistance as a national movement that was heroic and liberated a proud country. These sad, sick, and bedraggled women were not what the country wanted for symbols of the Resistance, and the women's attempts to confront their betrayers, the collaborators, and those who joined the Resistance in the final hour, were thwarted. No one wanted to dwell on the collaboration, they wanted to look to the future, something many of the survivors found depressingly hard to do.In addition to extensive research, the author interviewed six of the survivors and spoke with the families of many more, often being allowed to read diaries, letters, and see photographs. She tracked down the names, fates, and characteristics of all but a couple of the women. Although the book focuses more heavily on a few women, it is a collective narrative. I learned a great deal about the beginnings of the Resistance and the role women played. I was stunned by many of the things I learned in the book. But a couple of things stand out. First, the role French policeman played in the capture, torture, and execution of their own countrymen. I hadn't realized how large a role they played in collaboration with the Gestapo and other Nazi organizations. Second, I had been ignorant of this unique group of 230 women, the only ones to be deported to the camps from France. Finally, it's astonishing how the ties of friendship between these women allowed them to fight and survive at higher rates longer than other demographics in the camps. This camaraderie assisted by the strong ideology of the communists in the group is unique among my reading, at least, and is astonishingly inspiring.I highly recommend this book.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Incredible book - devastating and inspiring all at the same time. I wept at the horrors these women went through and wept for their strength and camaraderie in the face of evil.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The writing, I'm afraid, is costing this a star: it was very hard to keep track of the cast of dozens, it's frequently unclear which of the several "Charlotte's" or "Germaine's" is being referred to. At one point, she interrupted the narration of 1944 to go back to 1943, but it wasn't clear why, and it wasn't clear when she was going back to 1944. So it did feel like a bit of a confused mess.But the story is compelling. And I appreciated Moorehead's decision to spend so much time on the re-integration period: so many stories of WWII leave off at liberation, as if being free suddenly made everything all right. Overall, I would still recommend it.Beyond that, I only just finished reading it, and I suspect it will be awhile before of the thoughts it provoked have settled.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Having just put down this book it's difficult for me to marshal my thoughts for a considered review simply because of the impact this harrowing account has had on me emotionally and psychologically. It has left me weeping for the unimaginable cruelty humans are capable of wreaking on their fellows, and my heart full for the extraordinary sacrifices and selfless kind acts that others have been prepared to make in the face of such barbarity even while victims themselves, imprisoned in a man-made hell.My World War II reading has been patchy, and I'd read nothing in any detail about the occupation of France or the Resistance before opening Caroline Moorhead's book. I was astonished, in the first section, to learn of the degree of collaboration the Germans had from the French, especially the police and the petty authorities, not only in Vichy but across the country. Was it fear, or is evil so easily transferable, people so culpable and corruptible? Surely not just fear judging by the relish for violence and denunciation that comes through these early chapters.And yet what risks the resisters were prepared to take in their struggle against the Nazis. Moorhead acknowledges that most of the women who became involved - whether as disseminators of resistance literature, 'passeurs' for the escapees, hiders of weapons or even directly as sabouteurs and guerrillas - were terrified; but they carried on through all their fears without reward. The majority were part of a family of resisters and many saw husbands, fathers, brothers deported or shot for their own acts of defiance, but they carried on regardless, even redoubling their own efforts as if to make up the loss. Inevitably they were caught themselves, or denounced by neighbours, and bundled onto the transports heading east to the concentration camps along with Jews, homosexuals, criminals, and some who had nothing to do with the Resistance at all, but who may have made the mistake of passing an opinion unfavourable to their occupiers, or been maliciously denounced by a jealous neighbour or business competitor.If conditions in occupied France were dreadful, nothing could have prepared them (or us) for what they encountered in the camp at Auschwitz. Moorhead spares no detail in her descriptions of the filth, the crowding, the denial of life's basics, the unrelieved and pointless labour in the bedraggled cold, and above all the unending cruelty, inhuman violence and savage murder that led to a litter of disregarded corpses, the miasma of death and a growing swamp of mass graves. What makes the account heartbreakingly poignant as well as horrifying is that we follow named women among the 200-odd French contingent of 'Le Convoi des 31000' and watch many of them sink and die, others mutilated or brutally murdered, and steadily the band decreases.What saves us from utter despair is exactly what saved some of the women - the individual selfless acts and the support network they provided for each other. Early on the indomitable members of the French group persuaded the others that 'everyone for themselves' could end only in the elimination of all. Instead they looked out for each other, often taking the same risks as they did in France, protecting and hiding the weaker members from the guards and saving them from execution or the gas chamber, sharing food, nursing them through the worst of their illnesses. With this combination of friendship, comfort and help, rather than through luck or miracle, some of the women survived - 42 of the original group.The book has no fairytale ending. Most of the survivors came back to find that husbands and other family members had been shot or perished in their own camp travails. Many of the women had illnesses that dogged them for the rest of their lives, and several died early. Only seven were still alive when work started on the book in 2008, and only four on its completion. Some were given credit and honours by the post-war French government, but there was surprising indifference to their stories for the most part, and a general unwillingness to dwell on this dark chapter of human history. The majority of the women, who had lived only for the dream of returning home, reported a flatness and a continuing unhappiness after they did. An appendix summarises not only what happened to the survivors after the war, but also records as far as possible how each of the women who did not make it met her end. It's a sad, sad catalogue, but a valuable record. Equally important, some of the women have written their own accounts and memoirs of their time in the camps and after. Caroline Moorhead has drawn on these extensively and acknowledges the fact along with a long list of helpers throughout her painstaking research. I have not read the first-hand accounts of the survivors, but I'm sure that this powerful account is faithful to their memories, and stands as a hugely important testament in its own right. The final message I will take from this fine book is an optimistic one - that even in the midst of hideous cruelty there is to be found compassion, kindness and courage.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A very tough book to read and even begin to try and absorb. I kept expressing my feelings aloud as I read and I had to put the book down every now and then to just stop the flood of pictures the author provided. I was so appreciative of the last chapter---an end that was no end at all, just a continuing background nightmare for anyone who survived. And of course, the horror of the fact that no only did no one really want to listen but that there were sceptics....as in the trial...'how can you look so healthy one year later if what you describe is true?" About midway I almost didn't want to continue reading but I felt that I had to. Man's inhumanity to man.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5A Train in Winter tells the fascinating story of the French resistance during World War II. The author, Caroline Moorland, focuses her book on the women of the French resistance. These women might not wield guns or plant bombs, but they do house refugees in their hotels, print papers in their basements, and hand out flyers in the streets. These women chose to risk their lives rather than run to safety or simply endure. The women are grandmothers, mothers, daughters, and children, and all are drawn into the fight for different reasons. Some women fight for their children’s futures. Others fight for those who are being oppressed. Others still fight because they wish to continue the work of their arrested husbands, brothers, and fathers. A Train in Winter follows these women as they endure arrests at the hands of both the French and Nazis, torture and starvation in the death camps, and watching as all those they hold dear die around them. Reading the introduction and book jacket, I expected something entirely different from A Train in Winter. I expected the author to focus more on the personal experiences of the women in the resistance and less on the overarching, historical events. Unfortunately, there are a minimum of fifty women mentioned in A Train in Winter, making it impossible for the reader to connect with any of the women. I would have much preferred Moorland to focus on several women rather than including everyone. The book would have been much better if she had alternated between chapters with background information and chapters with selections from her interviews. As it was, I couldn’t keep anyone straight and felt no connection to the women or their stories. The book lacked a sense of purpose and strength because of this excess of information. It became merely a dry, history book about an interesting topic, instead of the celebration of women and the friendships that kept them alive.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A powerful and intense read covering the Nazi takeover of France and the early days of the French Resistance and underground communism movement. Although it is always difficult to read any book covering the Nazi atrocities and this book is no exception, it is also so much more. There is generosity in the face of adversity, self sacrifice and friendships that help many of the woman get through their imprisonment at Auschwitz. Although way to many died, still more than average lived, the care these woman took of each other was awe inspiring. This book deserves to be widely read and these women deserve to be remembered.
Book preview
A Train in Winter - Caroline Moorehead
Preface
On 5 January 1942, a French police inspector named Rondeaux, stationed in the 10th arrondissement of Paris, caught sight of a man he believed to be a wanted member of the French Resistance. André Pican was a teacher, and he was indeed the head of the Front National of the Resistance in the Seine-Inférieure; there was a price of 30,000 francs on his head for the derailing of a train carrying requisitioned goods and war materiel to Germany.
Rondeaux’s superior, a zealous anti-communist Frenchman and active collaborator of the Gestapo called Lucien Rottée, thought that Pican might lead them to other members of the Resistance. Eleven inspectors were detailed to follow, but not to arrest, him.
Over the next two weeks, they searched the streets of Paris in vain. Then, on 21 January, an inspector carrying out a surveillance of the Café du Rond near the Porte d’Orléans thought he saw a man answering to Pican’s description. He followed him and watched as he stopped to talk to a thickset man in his thirties, with a bony face and a large moustache. Rottée’s men stayed close. On 11 February, Pican was seen standing outside a shop window, then, at ‘15.50’ entering a shop in the company of a woman ‘28–30 years of age, 1.70m high, slender, with brown hair curling at the ends’; she was wearing a ‘Prussian blue coat, with a black belt and light grey woollen stockings, sans élégance’. The policeman, not knowing who she was, christened her ‘Femme Buisson-St-Louis’ after a nearby métro station; Pican became ‘Buisson’. After watching a film in Le Palais des Glaces cinema, Pican and Femme Buisson were seen to buy biscuits and oysters before parting on the rue Saint-Maur.
In the following days, Pican met ‘Motte Piquet’, ‘Porte Souleau’ and ‘Femme No. 1 de Balard’. Not knowing who they were, the police officers gave them the names of the places where they were first seen.
On 12 February, Femme Buisson was seen to enter the Café au Balcon, where she was handed a small suitcase by ‘Merilmontant’ —a short woman in her mid-thirties, ‘c. 1.55m, dark brown hair in a net, black coat, chic fauve leather bag, red belt’. By now, Pican had also met and exchanged packets with ‘Femme Brunet St Lazare’ (‘34, 1.60m, very dark, pointed nose, beige coat, hood lined in a patterned red, yellow and green material’), and with ‘Femme Claude Tillier’ (‘1.65m, 33, dark, somewhat corpulent, bulky cardigan and woollen socks’). ‘Femme Vincennes’ (‘1.60m, 32, fair hair, glasses, brown sheepskin fur coat, beige wool stockings’) was seen talking to ‘Femme Jenna’ and ‘Femme Dorian’. One of the French police officers, Inspector Deprez, was particularly meticulous in his descriptions of the women he followed, noting on the buff rectangular report cards which each inspector filled out every evening that ‘Femme République’ had a small red mark on her right nostril and that her grey dress was made of angora wool.
By the middle of February, Pican and his contacts had become visibly nervous, constantly looking over their shoulders to see if they were being followed. Rottée began to fear that they might be planning to flee. The police inspectors themselves had also become uneasy, for by the spring of 1942 Paris was full of posters put up by the Resistance saying that the French police were no better than the German Gestapo, and should be shot in legitimate self-defence. On 14 February, Pican and Femme Brunet were seen buying tickets at the Gare Montparnasse for a train the following morning to Le Mans, and then arranging for three large suitcases to travel with them in the goods wagon. Rottée decided that the moment had come to move. At three o’clock on the morning of 15 February, sixty police inspectors set out across Paris to make their arrests.
Over the next forty-eight hours they banged on doors, forced their way into houses, shops, offices and storerooms, searched cellars and attics, pigsties and garden sheds, larders and cupboards. They came away with notebooks, addresses, false IDs, explosives, revolvers, tracts, expertly forged ration books and birth certificates, typewriters, blueprints for attacks on trains and dozens of torn postcards, train timetables and tickets, the missing halves destined to act as passwords when matched with those held by people whose names were in the notebooks. When Pican was picked up, he tried to swallow a piece of paper with a list of names; in his shoes were found addresses, an anti-German flyer and 5,000 francs. Others, when confronted by Rottée’s men, shouted for help, struggled, and tried to run off; two women bit the inspectors.
As the days passed, each arrest led to others. The police picked up journalists and university lecturers, farmers and shopkeepers, concierges and electricians, chemists and postmen and teachers and secretaries. From Paris, the net widened, to take in Cherbourg, Tours, Nantes, Evreux, Saintes, Poitiers, Ruffec and Angoulême. Rottée’s inspectors pulled in Pican’s wife, Germaine, also a teacher and the mother of two small daughters; she was the liaison officer for the Communist Party in Rouen. They arrested Georges Politzer, a distinguished Hungarian philosopher who taught at the Sorbonne, and his wife Maï, ‘Vincennes’, a strikingly pretty midwife, who had dyed her blond hair black as a disguise for her work as courier and typist for the Underground, and not long afterwards, Charlotte Delbo, assistant to the well-known actor-manager Louis Jouvet.
Then there was Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, ‘Femme Tricanet’, niece of the creator of the Babar stories and contributor to the clandestine edition of L’Humanité, and Danielle Casanova, ‘Femme No. 1 de Balard’, a dental surgeon from Corsica, a robust, forceful woman in her thirties, with bushy black eyebrows and a strong chin. Maï, Marie-Claude and Danielle were old friends.
When taken to Paris’s central Prefecture and questioned, some of those arrested refused to speak, others were defiant, others scornful. They told their interrogators that they had no interest in politics, that they knew nothing about the Resistance, that they had been given packets and parcels by total strangers. Husbands said that they had no idea what their wives did all day, mothers that they had not seen their sons in months.
Day after day, Rottée and his men questioned the prisoners, brought them together in ones and twos, wrote their reports and then set out to arrest others. What they did not put down on paper was that the little they were able to discover was often the result of torture, of slapping around, punching, kicking, beating about the head and ears, and threats to families, particularly children. The detainees should be treated, read one note written in the margin of a report, avec égard, with consideration. The words were followed by a series of exclamation marks. Torture had become a joke.
When, towards the end of March, what was now known as l’affaire Pican was closed down, Rottée announced that the French police had dealt a ‘decisive’ blow to the Resistance. Their haul included three million anti-German and anti-Vichy tracts, three tons of paper, two typewriters, eight roneo machines, 1,000 stencils, 100 kilos of ink and 300,000 francs. One hundred and thirteen people were in detention, thirty-five of them women. The youngest of these was a 16-year-old schoolgirl called Rosa Floch, who was picked up as she was writing ‘Vive les Anglais!’ on the walls of her lycée. The eldest was a 44-year-old farmer’s wife, Madeleine Normand, who told the police that the 39,500 francs in her handbag were there because she had recently sold a horse.
Nine months later on the snowy morning of 24 January 1943, thirty of these women joined two hundred others, arrested like them from all parts of occupied France, on the only train, during the entire four years of German occupation, to take women from the French Resistance to the Nazi death camps.
In the early 1960s, Charlotte Delbo, who had been one of the women on the train, sat down to write a play. She thought of herself as a messenger, bearing the story of her former companions. Twenty-three women, dressed in identical striped dresses, are talking about life in a Nazi camp. They are barely distinguishable one from another, all equally grey in their ragged and shapeless clothes, their hair and features purposefully unmemorable. ‘The faces,’ Delbo wrote in her stage instructions, ‘do not count’; what counted was their common experience. As in a Greek tragedy, the violence is reported but not seen.
‘There must be one of us who returns,’ says one of the women. ‘You or another, it doesn’t matter. We have to fight, to stay alive, because we are fighters… Those who return will have won.’ A second woman speaks up. ‘What of those we’ll leave behind?’ Another replies: ‘We won’t leave them. We’ll take them away with us.’ And then someone asks: ‘Why should you believe these stories of ghosts, ghosts who come back and who are not able to explain how?’
In 2008, I decide to go in search of the women who had left Paris, that freezing January dawn sixty-five years earlier. I wonder if any are still alive, to tell the story of what drew them into the Resistance, of how they came to fall into the hands of Rottée’s men, and what battles they and their companions fought to survive, then and later.
Charlotte Delbo, I discover, died of cancer in 1985. But seven of the women are still alive. I find Betty Langlois, at 95 an emaciated but steely woman of immense charm, with the same sharp shining brown eyes that look quizzically out of her early photographs, living in a darkened flat in the centre of Paris, full of potted plants and mahogany furniture. She gives me brightly coloured macaroons to eat and a present of a small stuffed tortoiseshell toy cat, curled up in a brown cardboard box. Though she does not have a cat herself, she loves the way this one looks so lifelike and she gives them as presents to all her friends.
Betty sends me to Cécile Charua, in Guingamp in Brittany, who laughs at my formal French, and teaches me many words of bawdy slang. At 93, Cécile is sturdy, humorous and uncomplaining. I visit them both several times, and on each occasion they talk and talk, recounting scenes and episodes that seem too fresh and real in their minds to have taken place over half a century before. Neither one of them, in all this time, has spoken much about what happened to them. It is Cécile who tells me about Madeleine Dissoubray, 91 and a retired teacher of mathematics, living on her own in a little flat on the edge of Paris, surrounded by books; and later, at the annual gathering of survivors held every 24 January, I hear Madeleine, an angular, upright woman, with a firm, carrying voice, describe to a crowd of onlookers what surviving has meant. She is unsmiling and totally contained.
I have trouble finding Poupette Alizon, who has drifted away from the others and is estranged from her daughters. But then a lucky turn takes me to Rennes, where I trace her to a silent, elegant, impeccably furnished flat, full of paintings, overlooking a deserted park and some gardens. Poupette, at 83 somewhat younger than the others and in her long flowing lilac coat as elegant as her surroundings, seems troubled and a bit defiant. Poupette, too, talks and talks. She is lonely and life has not worked out well for her.
Lulu Thévenin, Gilberte Tamisé and Geneviève Pakula, all three alive in 2008, I cannot see: they are too frail to welcome visitors. But I meet Lulu’s son Paul and her younger sister Christiane.
Betty dies, soon after my third visit, in the summer of 2009. She has had pancreatic cancer for seven years, and no one survives this kind of cancer for so long. The last time I see her, she tells me, in tones of pleasure and pride, that she has mystified all her doctors. Surviving, she says, is something that she is very good at.
Having spent many hours talking to the four surviving women, I decide to go in search of the families of those who did not return from the Nazi camps or who have since died. I find Madeleine Zani’s son Pierre in a village near Metz; Germaine Renaudin’s son Tony in a comfortable and pretty house in Termes d’Armagnac, not far from Bordeaux; Annette Epaud’s son Claude convalescing from an operation in a nursing home in Charente; Raymonde Sergent’s daughter Gisèle in Saint-Martin-le-Beau, the village near Tours in which her mother grew up. I meet Aminthe Guillon’s grandson in a cafe in Paris. Each tells me their family stories and introduces me to other families. I travel up and down France, to remote farmhouses, retirement homes and apartment blocks, to villages and to the suburbs of France’s principal cities. The children, some now in their seventies, produce letters, photographs, diaries. They talk about their mothers with admiration and a slight air of puzzlement, that they had been so brave and so little vainglorious about their own achievements. It makes these now elderly sons and daughters miss them all the more. When we talk about the past, their eyes sometimes fill with tears.
This is a book about friendship between women, and the importance that they attach to intimacy and to looking after each other, and about how, under conditions of acute hardship and danger, such mutual dependency can make the difference between living and dying. It is about courage, facing and surviving the worst that life can offer, with dignity and an unassailable determination not to be destroyed. Those who came back to France in 1945 owed their lives principally to chance, but they owed it too in no small measure to the tenacity with which they clung to one another, though separated by every division of class, age, religion, occupation, politics and education. They did not all, of course, like each other equally: some were far closer friends than others. But each watched out for the others with the same degree of attention and concern and minded every death with anguish. And what they all went through, month after month, lay at the very outer limits of human endurance.
This is their story, that of Cécile, Betty, Poupette, Madeleine and the 226 other women who were with them on what became known as Le Convoi des 31000.
Part One
CHAPTER ONE
An enormous toy full of subtleties
What surprised the Parisians, standing in little groups along the Champs-Elysées to watch the German soldiers take over their city in the early hours of 14 June 1940, was how youthful and healthy they looked. Tall, fair, clean shaven, the young men marching to the sounds of a military band to the Arc de Triomphe were observed to be wearing uniforms of good cloth and gleaming boots made of real leather. The coats of the horses pulling the cannons glowed. It seemed not an invasion but a spectacle. Paris itself was calm and almost totally silent. Other than the steady waves of tanks, motorised infantry and troops, nothing moved. Though it had rained hard on the 13th, the unseasonal great heat of early June had returned.
And when they had stopped staring, the Parisians returned to their homes and waited to see what would happen. A spirit of attentisme, of holding on, doing nothing, watching, settled over the city.
The speed of the German victory—the Panzers into Luxembourg on 10 May, the Dutch forces annihilated, the Meuse crossed on 13 May, the French army and airforce proved obsolete, ill-equipped, badly led and fossilised by tradition, the British Expeditionary Force obliged to fall back at Dunkirk, Paris bombed on 3 June—had been shocking. Few had been able to take in the fact that a nation whose military valour was epitomised by the battle of Verdun in the First World War and whose defences had been guaranteed by the supposedly impregnable Maginot line, had been reduced, in just six weeks, to a stage of vassalage. Just what the consequences would be were impossible to see; but they were not long in coming.
By midday on the 14th, General Sturnitz, military commandant of Paris, had set up his headquarters in the Hotel Crillon. Since Paris had been declared an open city there was no destruction. A German flag was hoisted over the Arc de Triomphe, and swastikas raised over the Hôtel de Ville, the Chamber of Deputies, the Senate and the various ministries. Edith Thomas, a young Marxist historian and novelist, said they made her think of ‘huge spiders, glutted with blood’. The Grand Palais was turned into a garage for German lorries, the École Polytechnique into a barracks. The Luftwaffe took over the Grand Hotel in the Place de l’Opéra. French signposts came down; German ones went up. French time was advanced by one hour, to bring it into line with Berlin. The German mark was fixed at almost twice its pre-war level. In the hours after the arrival of the occupiers, sixteen people committed suicide, the best known of them Thierry de Martel, inventor in France of neurosurgery, who had fought at Gallipoli.
The first signs of German behaviour were, however, reassuring. All property was to be respected, providing people were obedient to German demands for law and order. Germans were to take control of the telephone exchange and, in due course, of the railways, but the utilities would remain in French hands. The burning of sackfuls of state archives and papers in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, carried out as the Germans arrived, was inconvenient, but not excessively so, as much had been salvaged. General von Brauchtisch, commander-in-chief of the German troops, ordered his men to behave with ‘perfect correctness’. When it became apparent that the Parisians were planning no revolt, the curfew, originally set for forty-eight hours, was lifted. The French, who had feared the savagery that had accompanied the invasion of Poland, were relieved. They handed in their weapons, as instructed, accepted that they would henceforth only be able to hunt rabbits with terriers or stoats, and registered their much-loved carrier pigeons. The Germans, for their part, were astonished by the French passivity.
When, over the next days and weeks, those who had fled south in a river of cars, bicycles, hay wagons, furniture vans, ice-cream carts, hearses and horse-drawn drays, dragging behind them prams, wheelbarrows and herds of animals, returned, they were amazed by how civilised the conquerors seemed to be. There was something a little shaming about this chain reaction of terror, so reminiscent of the Grand Peur that had driven the French from their homes in the early days of the revolution of 1797. In 1940 it was not, after all, so very terrible. The French were accustomed to occupation; they had endured it, after all, in 1814, 1870 and 1914, and then there had been chaos and looting. Now they found German soldiers in the newly reopened Galeries Lafayette, buying stockings and shoes and scent for which they scrupulously paid, sightseeing in Notre Dame, giving chocolates to small children and offering their seats to elderly women on the métro.
Soup kitchens had been set up by the Germans in various parts of Paris, and under the flowering chestnut trees in the Jardin des Tuileries, military bands played Beethoven. Paris remained eerily silent, not least because the oily black cloud that had enveloped the city after the bombing of the huge petrol dumps in the Seine estuary had wiped out most of the bird population. Hitler, who paid a lightning visit on 28 June, was photographed slapping his knee in delight under the Eiffel Tower. As the painter and photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue remarked, the German conquerors were behaving as if they had just been presented with a wonderful new toy, ‘an enormous toy full of subtleties which they do not suspect’.
On 16 June, Paul Reynaud, the Prime Minister who had presided over the French government’s flight from Paris to Tours and then to Bordeaux, resigned, handing power to the much-loved hero of Verdun, Marshal Pétain. At 12.30 on the 17th, Pétain, his thin, crackling voice reminding Arthur Koestler of a ‘skeleton with a chill’, announced over the radio that he had agreed to head a new government and that he was asking Germany for an armistice. The French people, he said, were to ‘cease fighting’ and to co-operate with the German authorities. ‘Have confidence in the German soldier!’ read posters that soon appeared on every wall.
The terms of the armistice, signed after twenty-seven hours of negotiation in the clearing at Rethondes in the forest of Compiègne in which the German military defeat had been signed at the end of the First World War, twenty-two years before, were brutal. The geography of France was redrawn. Forty-nine of France’s eighty-seven mainland departments—three-fifths of the country—were to be occupied by Germany. Alsace and Lorraine were to be annexed. The Germans would control the Atlantic and Channel coasts and all areas of important heavy industry, and have the right to large portions of French raw materials. A heavily guarded 1,200-kilometre demarcation line, cutting France in half and running from close to Geneva in the east, west to near Tours, then south to the Spanish border, was to separate the occupied zone in the north from the ‘free zone’ in the south, and there would be a ‘forbidden zone’ in the north and east, ruled by the German High Command in Brussels. An exorbitant daily sum was to be paid over by the French to cover the costs of occupation. Policing of a demilitarised zone along the Italian border was to be given to the Italians—who, not wishing to miss out on the spoils, had declared war on France on 10 June.
The French government came to rest in Vichy, a fashionable spa on the right bank of the river Allier in the Auvergne. Here, Pétain and his chief minister, the appeaser and pro-German Pierre Laval, set about putting in place a new French state. On paper at least, it was not a German puppet but a legal, sovereign state with diplomatic relations. During the rapid German advance, some 100,000 French soldiers had been killed in action, 200,000 wounded and 1.8 million others were now making their way into captivity in prisoner-of-war camps in Austria and Germany, but a new France was to rise out of the ashes of the old. ‘Follow me,’ declared Pétain: ‘keep your faith in La France Eternelle’. Pétain was 84 years old. Those who preferred not to follow him scrambled to leave France—over the border into Spain and Switzerland or across the Channel—and began to group together as the Free French with French nationals from the African colonies who had argued against a negotiated surrender to Germany.
In this France envisaged by Pétain and his Catholic, conservative, authoritarian and often anti-Semitic followers, the country would be purged and purified, returned to a mythical golden age before the French revolution introduced perilous ideas about equality. The new French were to respect their superiors and the values of discipline, hard work and sacrifice and they were to shun the decadent individualism that had, together with Jews, Freemasons, trade unionists, immigrants, gypsies and communists, contributed to the military defeat of the country.
Returning from meeting Hitler at Montoire on 24 October, Pétain declared: ‘With honour, and to maintain French unity… I am embarking today on the path of collaboration’. Relieved that they would not have to fight, disgusted by the British bombing of the French fleet at anchor in the Algerian port of Mers-el-Kebir, warmed by the thought of their heroic fatherly leader, most French people were happy to join him. But not, as it soon turned out, all of them.
Long before they reached Paris, the Germans had been preparing for the occupation of France. There would be no gauleiter—as in the newly annexed Alsace-Lorraine—but there would be military rule of a minute and highly bureaucratic kind. Everything from the censorship of the press to the running of the postal services was to be under tight German control. A thousand railway officials arrived to supervise the running of the trains. France was to be regarded as an enemy kept in faiblesse inférieure, a state of dependent weakness, and cut off from the reaches of all Allied forces. It was against this background of collaboration and occupation that the early Resistance began to take shape.
A former scoutmaster and reorganiser of the Luftwaffe, Otto von Stülpnagel, a disciplinarian Prussian with a monocle, was named chief of the Franco-German Armistice Commission. Moving into the Hotel Majestic, he set about organising the civilian administration of occupied France, with the assistance of German civil servants, rapidly drafted in from Berlin. Von Stülpnagel’s powers included both the provisioning and security of the German soldiers and the direction of the French economy. Not far away, in the Hotel Crillon in the rue de Rivoli, General von Sturnitz was busy overseeing day to day life in the capital. In requisitioned hotels and town houses, men in gleaming boots were assisted by young German women secretaries, soon known to the French as ‘little grey mice’.
There was, however, another side to the occupation, which was neither as straightforward, nor as reasonable; and nor was it as tightly under the German military command as von Stülpnagel and his men would have liked. This was the whole apparatus of the secret service, with its different branches across the military and the police.
After the protests of a number of his generals about the behaviour of the Gestapo in Poland, Hitler had agreed that no SS security police would accompany the invading troops into France. Police powers would be placed in the hands of the military administration alone. However Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, the myopic, thin-lipped 40-year-old Chief of the German Police, who had long dreamt of breeding a master race of Nordic Ayrans, did not wish to see his black-shirted SS excluded. He decided to dispatch to Paris a bridgehead of his own, which he could later use to send in more of his men. Himmler ordered his deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, the cold-blooded head of the Geheime Staatspolizei or Gestapo, which he had built up into an instrument of terror, to include a small group of twenty men, wearing the uniform of the Abwehr’s secret military police, and driving vehicles with military plates.
In charge of this party was a 30-year-old journalist with a doctorate in philosophy, called Helmut Knochen. Knochen was a specialist in Jewish repression and spoke some French. After commandeering a house on the avenue Foch with his team of experts in anti-terrorism and Jewish affairs, he called on the Paris Prefecture, where he demanded to be given the dossiers on all German émigrés, all Jews, and all known anti-Nazis. Asked by the military what he was doing, he said he was conducting research into dissidents.
Knochen and his men soon became extremely skilful at infiltration, the recruitment of informers and as interrogators. Under him, the German secret services would turn into the most feared German organisation in France, permeating every corner of the Nazi system.
Knochen was not, however, alone in his desire to police France. There were also the counter-terrorism men of the Abwehr, who reported back to Admiral Canaris in Berlin; the Einsatzstab Rosenberg which ferreted out Masonic lodges and secret societies and looted valuable art to be sent off to Germany, and Goebbels’s propaganda specialists. Von Ribbentrop, the Minister for Foreign Affairs in Berlin, had also persuaded Hitler to let him send one of his own men to Paris, Otto Abetz, a Francophile who had courted the French during the 1930s with plans for Franco-German co-operation. Abetz was 37, a genial, somewhat stout man, who had once been an art master, and though recognised to be charming and to love France, was viewed by both French and Germans with suspicion, not least because his somewhat ambiguous instructions made him ‘responsible for political questions in both occupied and unoccupied France’. From his sumptuous embassy in the rue de Lille, Abetz embarked on collaboration ‘with a light touch’. Paris, as he saw it, was to become once again the cité de lumière, and at the same time would serve as the perfect place of delight and pleasure for its German conquerors. Not long after visiting Paris, Hitler had declared that every German soldier would be entitled to a visit to the city.
Despite the fact that all these separate forces were, in theory, subordinated to the German military command, in practice they had every intention of operating independently. And, when dissent and resistance began to grow, so the military command was increasingly happy to let the unofficial bodies of repression deal with any signs of rebellion. Paris would eventually become a little Berlin, with all the rivalries and clans and divisions of the Fatherland, the difference being that they shared a common goal: that of dominating, ruling, exploiting and spying on the country they were occupying.
Though the French police—of which there were some 100,000 throughout France in the summer of 1940—had at first been ordered to surrender their weapons, they were soon instructed to take them back, as it was immediately clear that the Germans were desperately short of policemen. The 15,000 men originally working for the Paris police were told to resume their jobs, shadowed by men of the Feldkommandatur. A few resigned; most chose not to think, but just to obey orders; but there were others for whom the German occupation would prove a step to rapid promotion.
The only German police presence that the military were tacitly prepared to accept as independent of their control was that of the anti-Jewish service, sent by Eichmann, under a tall, thin, 27-year-old Bavarian called Theo Dannecker. By the end of September, Dannecker had also set himself up in the avenue Foch and was making plans for what would become the Institut d’Etudes des Questions Juives. His job was made infinitely easier when it became clear that Pétain and the Vichy government were eager to anticipate his wishes. At this stage in the war, the Germans were less interested in arresting the Jews in the occupied zone than in getting rid of them by sending them to the free zone, though Pétain was no less determined not to have them. According to a new census, there were around 330,000 Jews living in France in 1940, of which only half were French nationals, the others having arrived as a result of waves of persecution across Europe.
At the time of the 1789 revolution, France had been the first country to emancipate and integrate its Jews as French citizens. All through the 1920s and 1930s the country had never distinguished between its citizens on the basis of race or religion. Within weeks of the German invasion, posters were seen on Parisian walls with the words ‘Our enemy is the Jew’. Since the Germans felt that it was important to maintain the illusion—if illusion it was—that anti-Jewish measures were the result of direct orders by the Vichy government and stemmed from innate French anti-Semitism, Dannecker began by merely ‘prompting’ a number of ‘spontaneous’ anti-Jewish demonstrations. ‘Young guards’ were secretly recruited to hang about in front of Jewish shops to scare customers away. In early August, they ransacked a number of Jewish shops. On the 20th, a grande action saw the windows of Jewish shops in the Champs-Elysées stoned. One of the Rothschilds’ châteaux was stripped of its art, which gave Göring six Matisses, five Renoirs, twenty Braques, two Delacroix and twenty-one Picassos to add to his growing collection of looted paintings.
But it was not only the Jews who attracted the interest of von Stülpnagel and his men. France had rightly been proud of the welcome given to successive waves of refugees fleeing civil wars, political repression or acute poverty. Poles in particular had been coming to France since the eighteenth century, and the 1920s had brought thousands of men to replace the shortage of manpower caused by the immense French losses in the First World War. Many had become coal miners, settling in the north and east. More recently had come the German refugees, arriving in response to every Nazi crackdown, 35,000 of them in 1933 alone; Austrians escaping the Anschluss; Czechs in the wake of Munich; Italians, who had opposed Mussolini. Then there were the Spanish republicans, fleeing Franco at the end of the civil war, of whom some 100,000 were still in France, many of them living in appalling hardship behind barbed wire in camps near the Spanish border.
To these refugees the French had been generous, at least until the economic reversals of the 1930s pushed up unemployment and Prime Minister Daladier drafted measures to curtail their numbers and keep checks on ‘spies and agitators’ while opening camps for ‘undesirable aliens’. France, under Daladier, had been the only Western democracy not to condemn Kristallnacht. The extreme right-wing leader of L’Action Française, Charles Maurras, spoke of ‘these pathogenic political, social and moral microbes’. Watching a train of refugees leave France not long before the war, the writer Saint-Exupéry had remarked that they had become ‘no more than half human beings, shunted from one end of Europe to the other by economic interests’. Despite the growing xenophobia, many foreigners remained in France; but now, in an atmosphere of uncertainty and hostility, they were stateless, without protection and extremely vulnerable. By late September 1940, many were on their way to internment camps, the German refugees among them branded ‘enemies of the Reich’ and handed over by the very French who not so long before had granted them asylum.
The treatment of the political exiles caused little protest. The French had other things on their mind. Initial relief at the politeness of the German occupiers was rapidly giving way to unease and a growing uncertainty about how, given that the war showed no signs of ending, they were going to survive economically. As more Germans arrived to run France, they commandeered houses, hotels, schools, even entire streets. They requisitioned furniture, cars, tyres, sheets, glasses and petrol, closed some restaurants and cinemas to all but German personnel, and reserved whole sections of hospitals for German patients. Charcuterie vanished from the shops, as Germans helped themselves to pigs, sheep and cattle.
What they had no immediate use for, they sent back to Germany, and packed goods wagons were soon to be seen leaving from the eastern Parisian stations, laden down with looted goods, along with raw materials and anything that might be useful to Germany’s war effort. ‘I dream of looting, and thoroughly,’ wrote Göring to the military command in France. Just as Napoleon had once looted the territories he occupied of their art, now Germany was helping itself to everything that took the fancy of the occupiers. Soon, dressmakers in Paris were closing, because there was no cloth for them to work with; shoemakers were shutting, because there was no leather. Safe-deposit boxes and bank accounts were scrutinised and, if they were Jewish, plundered. Rapidly, French factories found themselves making planes, spare parts, ammunition, cars, tractors and radios for Germany.
In September 1940, the French were issued with ration books and told that in restaurants they could have no more than one hors d’oeuvre, one main dish, one vegetable and one piece of cheese. Coupons were needed for bread, soap, school supplies and meat, the quantities calculated according to the age and needs of the individual. Parisians were advised not to eat rats, which began emerging, starving, from the sewers, ‘armies of enormous, long-whiskered, dark-coated, red-eyed rats’, though cat fur, especially black, white and ginger, became popular to line winter clothes, since coal had disappeared and houses remained unheated. From November, a powerful black market in food, writing paper, electric wire, buttons and cigarettes operated in Les Halles.
The French were becoming resourceful. Everyone made do, mended, improvised. The word ‘ersatz’ entered the everyday vocabulary of Paris, housewives exchanging tips and recipes as they queued interminably for ever-dwindling supplies. They told each other how to make gazogène, fuel, out of wood and charcoal, how to crush grape pips for oil, and roll cigarettes from a mixture of scarce tobacco, Jerusalem artichokes, sunflowers and maize. As raw materials ceased to reach France from its colonies, and supplies of linen, cotton, wool, silk and jute dried up, women dyed their legs with iodine and wore ankle socks and carried handbags made of cloth. Soon, Paris clattered to the sound of clogs and horse-drawn carts. Vegetables were planted in the Tuileries and in window boxes. A first wind of resistance was beginning to blow. When the ashes of Napoleon’s son, l’Aiglon, were returned from exile in Vienna on 15 December 1940 in a huge fanfare of military splendour to be buried again in Les Invalides in Paris, posters were seen with the words: ‘Take back your little eagle, give us back our pigs’.
Nor was it easy to learn much about the outside world. On 25 June, a Presse-Gruppe had been set up to hold twice-weekly press briefings for those newspapers which, like Le Matin and Paris Soir, had been allowed to reappear. In theory, the Germans were to draw up the ‘themes’, while individual journalists decided on the actual content. In practice, editors had been issued with a long list of words and topics to avoid, from ‘Anglo-Americans’ to Alsace-Lorraine, while the words Austria, Poland, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia were never to be used at all, since as countries they no longer existed. Abetz had appointed a Dr Epding to ‘diffuse German culture’. Publishers, meanwhile, had been given an ‘Otto’ list of banned books, which included anything written by a Jew, a communist, an Anglo-Saxon writer or a Freemason, the better to create a ‘healthier attitude’. Malraux, Maurois and Aragon vanished from the bookshops, along with Heine, Freud, Einstein and H.G. Wells. In time, 2,242 tons of books would be pulped. By contrast, Au Pilori, a violently anti-Semitic paper based on Julius Streicher’s Stürmer, was to be found all over the city.
Occupation, for the French, was turning out to be a miserable affair.
CHAPTER TWO
The flame of French resistance
Not many people living in France heard the celebrated call to arms of a relatively unknown French general, Charles de Gaulle, transmitted by the BBC on 18 June—four days after the fall of Paris. Some eight million of them were still on the roads to the south, though by now the traffic was crawling the other way, back towards their homes in the north. But the BBC had agreed to give the Free French a slot each evening, five minutes of it in French, and after his first appel to the French, de Gaulle spoke to them again, on the 19th, 22nd, 24th, 26th and 28th. With each day that passed, his stern, measured voice gained authority. His message did not vary. It was a crime, he said, for French men and women in occupied France to submit to their occupiers; it was an honour to defy them. One sentence in particular struck a chord with his listeners. ‘Somewhere,’ said de Gaulle, ‘must shine and burn the flame of French resistance.’
Soon, the idea that it was actually possible not to give in to the Germans became an echo, picked up and repeated,