A Train in Winter

I can't really classify this as pleasure reading, but Caroline Moorehead's A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France (HarperCollins, 2011) certainly lives up to its subtitle. 

Ever since I was a child, I've periodically gone through phases where I read a lot about World War II and the Holocaust.  Mostly that's centered around the Jewish experience (though I'm not Jewish) and the American/British side of things, though I did give myself a political-military introduction with William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich way-back-when.  But I can't say I knew much about either the experiences of the French during the Occupation or the experience of non-Jews in concentration camps.  Moorehead's book remedies this, in spades.

The first half of the book gives an overview of life in Occupied France and something of life under the Vichy regime, with a special focus on the growing Resistance and the women who became involved in it.  This is fascinating stuff in its own right, but the real highlight, so to speak, is the second half of the book, in which 230 women -- members of the Resistance and others caught up in the Nazi net -- are shipped from France to Auschwitz-Birkenau.  Only forty-nine would survive the resulting ordeal.

For the horrific details of how deadly a concentration camp could be even towards political prisoners who were not being deliberately exterminated, read the book.  It's educational, and adds to my sick incomprehension of how any group of human beings could do such things to any other.  But what I took away from it was not just the brutality of the experience, how hard it was to survive, or the degree toward which banding together in a group could raise the odds of survival, though all of these were grippng reading, but the extent to which chance played a role, and how much any individual's survival depended upon luck as well as effort and how helpless even this tight-knit, organized, and relatively privileged group of prisoners could be in the face of camp conditions (including lack of clothing, icy temperatures, poor food, and disease) that slaughtered inmates by the thousands.

There's nothing fun about this book, and I was in tears more than once, but it's valuable, valuable reading.  I can't recommend it enough.

Read for youself: