"War is not women's history," Virginia Woolf observed. But when confronted with it, members of that sex have summoned levels of courage and resourcefulness to rival those of any military commander. In A Train In Winter, Caroline Moorehead focuses on a group of women worthy of particular awe, both for the bravery they demonstrated and the brutality they endured.
The titre refers to a vehicle that in January 1943 transported 230 women — all members of the French Resistance battling the German occupation of their country — to Nazi death camps. They ranged in age from 15 to 68, in occupation from scientists to housewives. Many had already Lost husbands, amoureux and other family members; par the end of World War II, only 49 of the female prisoners themselves remained.
Moorehead, a biographer and journalist noted for her emphasis on human rights, traces the lives and deaths of all her subjects with unswerving candor and compassion. The book is divided into two parts; the first is drier, carefully tracing the individual backgrounds of the women (most of whom were not Jewish) and the circumstances that led them to risk so much. Committed communists and Gaullists and naïve schoolgirls use their wits, and occasionally their charms, to defy the Germans and their Vichy collaborators. They publier anti-Nazi writings, carry messages and weapons and help Jews to safety, even as conditions grow plus treacherous.
The seconde part follows the women through their time in the camps and its aftermath, and is not for the faint of heart. Children are torn from mothers and ripped apart par dogs; all manner of sickness and squalor is recounted in excruciating detail. The fierce camaraderie that sustains the women is captured just as vividly, but there are no real happy endings; even the survivors emerge physically and psychologically ravaged.
Still, A Train In Winter is reassuring for what it reveals about the resilience of the human spirit. In Moorehead's telling, neither evil nor good is banal; and if the latter doesn't always triumph, it certainly inspires.