Review by New York Times Review
IN his poem "Death Fugue," written in 1944-45, the Romanian Jewish writer and labor camp survivor Paul Celan draws a stark opposition between two women: "Your golden hair Margareta/your ashen hair Shulamith." With this juxtaposition of putatively Aryan and Jewish tresses (and names: Margareta is a long form of "Gretchen," the name of the bonny blond Fräulein in. Goethe's "Faust"; Shulamith is the "black and comely" princess in the Song of Songs), he evokes the facile yet deadly racism of the "Third Reich. By contrast, the 230 heroines of "A Train in Winter" transcended precisely such differences - and many more besides - to make common cause against the Nazis. Blond and brunet, Christian and Jewish, aristocratic and working class, young and old, these courageous women were united first by their shared commitment to the French Resistance and second, beginning on Jan. 26, 1943, by their internment at Birkenau, the main women's camp at Auschwitz. Sent there as political prisoners of the Reich, the women quickly determined that if they were to survive, they would have to work as a team. According to the biographer and human-rights journalist Caroline Moorehead, whose reconstruction of their story is by turns heartbreaking and inspiring, it was the group's sense of "mutual dependency" that made "the difference between living and dying," 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." Arrested and captured as Resistance members, most of the women served time together even before they were sent to Poland, in French prisons aptly nicknamed châteaux de la mort lente (castles of slow death). This experience gave them a foretaste of Nazi brutality, as they were subjected to extreme cold, chronic hunger, the constant threat of torture or execution, the death of friends and loved ones. It also, Moorehead argues, bonded them in a way that made them "stronger and better able to cope. Already they were conscious that the nature of women's close friendships would shield them in the weeks to come, and that the men . . . were often not bound to each other by similar ties." Nothing, however, could have prepared them for Auschwitz. Their clothes stripped from them, their belongings confiscated, their heads and pubic hair shorn, their arms tattooed, they joined the ranks of 15,000 emaciated "stumbling corpses" (as Primo Levi would later describe the camp's women) upon whom the Nazi guards inflicted unthinkable torments. On Feb. 10, 1943, all the inmates were marshaled out into the prison yard at 3 in the morning, then required to stand - their prison-issue rags useless against the snow, ice and freezing wind - until day broke, and night fell. By the time they were, finally ordered to return to the barracks, a thousand women had dropped dead. Identifying the French friends by their first names (full names and short biographies appear in an appendix), Moorehead writes of the scene: "It made Marie-Claude think of a battlefield strewn with corpses. The snow, as far as the eye could see, was spotted with diarrhea. Simone's bare feet refused to move and Madeleine took hold of her and pulled her forward. Later, Simone would remember that, unable to speak, her body paralyzed, she had kept repeating to herself: 'I will get through this. I will.' ... In the barracks, there was a desperate count. 'Who is back? Where is Viva? Is Charlotte here?' They counted again and again: 14 were missing. . . . Later, looking at all the bodies piled up outside Block 25, trying to find their friends, the women saw rats, the size of cats, digging among the frozen corpses." Such appalling episodes were, the Frenchwomen would soon learn, par for the course at Birkenau. But they did their best to withstand them - together. When unrelieved thirst threatened to drive one of them, Charlotte Delbo, insane (she had taken to lapping up mud from the marshes around the camp), they pooled together their own meager rations to get her a whole bucket of water. After another, Aimée Doridat, had a gangrenous leg amputated, they kept her hidden during their captors' periodic searches for infirm extermination candidates. And "when Germaine Pican found a dead crow in the marshes, even the mouthful she shared with the others gave them a sense of achievement." Time and again, sisterhood trumped selfishness. "Knowing that the fate of each depended on the others," Moorehead writes, "Poupette would say that all individual egotism seemed to vanish and that, stripped back to the bare edge of survival, each rose to behavior few would have believed themselves capable of." At times, Moorehead's fulsome praise for the "friendship between women, and the importance that they attach to intimacy and to looking after each other," can sound overwrought - especially given that one of the surviving Frenchwomen, Cécile Charua, specifies to Moorehead that the group's bond "wasn't so much friendship as solidarity." Charlotte Delbo, who also survived, wrote a three-volume memoir in which she describes the terrible selfishness that Birkenau sometimes brought out in her. When she felt she was dying of thirst, for instance, she knew her 19-year-old compatriot Aurore Pica was suffering from a similar affliction. But when Charlotte found water to drink, she didn't share it with the girl: "She is waiting. Her eyes beg and I do not look at her. I feel upon me her thirsty gaze, the pain in her eyes when I hook my tin cup back on my belt. Life returns to me and I feel shame. And each morning I remain insensitive to the supplication of her eyes, her lips discolored by thirst, and each morning I feel ashamed after drinking." Although she draws extensively from Delbo's memoirs in her account of the bucket affair, and throughout her book, Moorehead does not cite this passage. (She does, however, note in the appendix that Aurore Pica died of thirst in April 1943.) That said, Delbo is a particularly tough critic - of her own behavior and, understandably, of such warm-and-fuzzy emotional constructs as "friendship" itself. In her memoir, she explains that for people who haven't lived through what she did, "words do not necessarily have the same meaning. . . . They say, I'm going to visit friends. Friends. . . . People at whose house you have dinner, or with whom you play bridge. What do they know about friendship? All their words are frivolous. All their words are false." "A Train in Winter" does not quote these lines either. However, it does conclude with another of Delbo's harsh assertions: "Looking at me, one would think that I'm alive. . . . I'm not alive. I died in Auschwitz, but no one knows it." By ending on this somber note, Moorehead appears to concede that when one has suffered as much as the women of Birkenau did, even friendship isn't enough. Charlotte Delbo and another of the 230, in prison in France before deportation. In 1943, 230 Frenchwomen arrested as Resistance members were sent to Birkenau; 49 survived. Caroline Weber is a frequent contributor to the Boofe Review.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 13, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* They came from all walks of life, and from all over France. Professionals and housewives, grandmothers and teenagers, they were drawn to or drawn into the Resistance, perhaps by a heightened sense of moral outrage, or just because their husbands, lovers, brothers needed their assistance. Ultimately, they would all come together in Nazi concentration camps, where the petty harassment they once endured as furtive members of undercover cells would wither in comparison to unimaginable horrors. As the war escalated, so did the savagery of their captors. Two hundred and thirty women began the journey into Hitler's hell at the death camps at Birkenau and Auschwitz; by the time the Allies arrived to liberate them at Mauthausen, only 49 were left. Through primary interviews with the 7 survivors and other groundbreaking research, distinguished English journalist and biographer Moorehead (Martha Gellhorn, Lucie de la Tour du Pin) potently demonstrates how this disparate group of valiant women withstood the atrocities of the Nazi regime through their abiding devotion to each other. Heightened by electrifying, and staggering, detail, Moorehead's riveting history stands as a luminous testament to the indomitable will to survive and the unbreakable bonds of friendship.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In an unfocused account, Moorehead relates the story of 230 women accused of being members of the French Resistance who were sent on one train to Auschwitz in January 1943; fewer than 50 survived the war. In fact, only some of the 230 were involved in actual Resistance activities. The youngest prisoner, 16-year-old Rosa Floch, caught writing "Vive les Anglais!" on her school's walls, died of typhus in Birkenau. Alsatian psychiatrist Adelaide Hautval was arrested after exhorting German soldiers to stop mistreating a Jewish family; she survived the war, but committed suicide after recording the horrors she saw when forced to participate in Josef Mengele's medical experiments at Auschwitz. Moorehead (Human Cargo) wants to recount how these women supported one another and to honor women of the Resistance, but she tries to tell too many stories about a highly diverse group of women, many of them not Resistance members. Though moving, the lack of focus may leave readers confused. Photos. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The winter of 1942-43 encompassed some of the darkest days of World War II, not least for the French Resistance. Moorehead (Gellhorn) uses as her lens the lesser-known January 1943 transport of 230 women of the Resistance to the Auschwitz death camp. She conducted interviews with several of the 49 surviving women or their families and incorporates information from their published and unpublished works about the experiences they endured during their incarceration. Taking us from the early days of the Resistance and these women's roles to the postwar period of disillusionment and unhappiness, Moorehead finds inspiration in the way they assisted and protected one another, sometimes ensuring another's survival to the detriment of themselves. -VERDICT Readers will get a good overview of the historical context and the sacrifices made by women whose motivation was to provide a better world for their country. Although at times difficult to read (the descriptions of Auschwitz offer nothing new but reiterate the horror endured), this book rightfully gives these women-survivors and nonsurvivors alike-their place in our historical memory. For a memoir by a woman in the Resistance not transported with this group, see Agnes Humbert's Resistance. [See Prepub Alert, 5/16/11.]-Maria C. Bagshaw, West Dundee, IL (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Compelling stories of a group of brave French women in Nazi-occupied France.Of the so-called Convoi des 31,000, including 230 women political prisoners sent to Auschwitz in January 1943, only a handful survived to tell the horrendous tale of their plight. Biographer Moorehead (Dancing to the Precipice: The Life of Lucie de la Tour du Pin, Eyewitness to an Era, 2009, etc.) interviewed survivors of the convoy and tracked down family and stories of numerous others to reconstruct a fraught period in French history when collaboration was assumed the norm, while underneath seethed a current of active subversion. After the shock of the arrival of the Nazis in Paris in June 1940, the Vichy government advised the French citizens to cooperate with the Germans. While most French didn't protest the treatment of exiles and Jews, some did, especially idealistic youth who had been radicalized in the '30s by the Spanish Civil War. One of the women, a dentist named Danielle Casanova, was the leader of a youth wing of the French Communist Party who recruited other young women secretaries and office workers as couriers of underground literature. With the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, resistance against the Nazis was ratcheted up and acts of sabotage were endorsed by the various factions of the Resistance. Unfortunately, the German spy network, aided by French police, grew more alert, and after attacks at the metro and in Rouen, Nantes and Bordeaux, traps were set and a sweep of "terrorists" netted by March 1942. The prisoners, both women and men, were first sent to La Sant, in Paris, where they were interrogated and tortured, then to the military fort of Romainville, before deportation to Auschwitz. Moorehead weaves into her suspenseful, detailed narrative myriad personal stories of friendship, courage and heartbreak.A sound study of research and extensive interviewing.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
