A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship and Survival in World War Two [Audiobook]

On January 24, 1943, 230 women were placed in four cattle trucks on a train in Compiegne, in Northeastern France, and the doors bolted shut for the journey to Auschwitz. They were members of the French Resistance, ranging in age from teenagers to the elderly, women who before the war had been doctors, farmers' wives, secretaries, biochemists, schoolgirls. With immense courage they had taken up arms against a brutal occupying force; now their friendship would give them strength as they experienced unimaginable horrors. Only 49 of the Convoi des 31000 would return from the camps in the east; within 10 years, a third of these survivors would be dead, too, broken by what they had lived through. In this vitally important book, Caroline Moorehead tells the whole story of the 230 women on the train, for the first time.