
On an icy dawn morning in Paris in January 1943, a group of 230 French women resisters were rounded up from the Gestapo detention camps & sent on a train to Auschwitz
- the only train, in the four years of German occupation, to take women of the resistance to a death camp. The youngest was a schoolgirl of 15, the eldest a farmer's wife of 68; there were among them teachers, biochemists, sales girls, secretaries, housewives & university lecturers. The women turned to one another, finding solace & strength in friendship & shared experience. They supported & cared for one another, worked together, & faced the horror together. Friendship, almost as much as luck, dictated survival. Forty-nine of them came home. Caroline Moorehead's breathtaking new book is the story of these women
- the first time it has been told. It is about who they were, how & why they joined the resistance, how they were captured by the French police & the Gestapo, their journey to Auschwitz & their daily life in the death camps
- & about what it was like for the survivors when they returned to France.A Train in Winter covers a harrowing part of our history but is, ultimately, a portrait of ordinary people, of bravery & endurance, & of friendship.