Susan N. reviewed A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France (P.S.) on + 99 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 4
I've read numerous books about the holocaust but I think this one more than the others forced me to stop reading and ponder how horrific and inhumane the captured were treated. After reading this paragraph I was feeling pretty sick: The question was how to kill great numbers of people without a blood bath, which upset the executioners? And how to dispose of their bodies? Mass machine-gunning and toxic injections to the heart by phenol were messy and unreliable. Something aseptic and impersonal was needed. It's hard to give a rating to this book, I give it 5 stars but that doesn't mean I love it because how could I?
Maura (maura853) -
Helpful Score: 1
An impressive work of scholarship, which still manages to be compulsively readable, and have a deep emotional core.
Of the 230 French women who were arrested by the Gestapo, and their French collaborator helpers, and put on a train to Auschwitz in early 1943-- grandmothers, and schoolgirls, homemakers and working women, Communists and devout Catholics -- only 47 returned alive at the end of the war. Morehead tells the stories of the 230, to the best of her ability learning about their lives, how they came to be arrested, and how they lived (or, sadly, more likely died) in Auschwitz or one of the other camps of the Nazi death machine.
The accounts are truly humbling. As the women are rounded up by the French police, who were either actively Nazi sympathizers or survivors, anxious to be useful to the occupying force to save themselves, I had to ask myself, would I have put myself in mortal danger in the way that they did? And once they were in one of the death camps, would I have found the strength to survive? (The stark answer is, probably, no: the 230 ranged in age between the early 70s and late teens. Of the 47 survivors, not one was over 44, or under 20. The older women didn't have the physical strength, and the younger girls didn't have the emotional resilience to survive the privations and cruelty. I'm 64.)
If, like me, you like to read some of the one- and two-star reviews, to get an idea of what you might be letting yourself in for, be warned. This is a work of scholarship, not a romance about plucky heroines. However, I would say that it is very well-written, and accessible. Given that Morehead's objective is to chronicle the heroism of 230 women -- to read it into the record, so to speak, and ensure that the details that made each individual special is never forgotten -- the detail can be overwhelming at times, and I gave myself permission to skim some of the first half of the book, as the 230 are rounded up -- where they were hiding, who was stalking them, how they were arrested.
In the end, I decided that, what is important is that the detail is there, on the record, and for us as readers to be able to take from it what we need to make ourselves aware of the heroism shown by a group of very unique, very ordinary women.
Of the 230 French women who were arrested by the Gestapo, and their French collaborator helpers, and put on a train to Auschwitz in early 1943-- grandmothers, and schoolgirls, homemakers and working women, Communists and devout Catholics -- only 47 returned alive at the end of the war. Morehead tells the stories of the 230, to the best of her ability learning about their lives, how they came to be arrested, and how they lived (or, sadly, more likely died) in Auschwitz or one of the other camps of the Nazi death machine.
The accounts are truly humbling. As the women are rounded up by the French police, who were either actively Nazi sympathizers or survivors, anxious to be useful to the occupying force to save themselves, I had to ask myself, would I have put myself in mortal danger in the way that they did? And once they were in one of the death camps, would I have found the strength to survive? (The stark answer is, probably, no: the 230 ranged in age between the early 70s and late teens. Of the 47 survivors, not one was over 44, or under 20. The older women didn't have the physical strength, and the younger girls didn't have the emotional resilience to survive the privations and cruelty. I'm 64.)
If, like me, you like to read some of the one- and two-star reviews, to get an idea of what you might be letting yourself in for, be warned. This is a work of scholarship, not a romance about plucky heroines. However, I would say that it is very well-written, and accessible. Given that Morehead's objective is to chronicle the heroism of 230 women -- to read it into the record, so to speak, and ensure that the details that made each individual special is never forgotten -- the detail can be overwhelming at times, and I gave myself permission to skim some of the first half of the book, as the 230 are rounded up -- where they were hiding, who was stalking them, how they were arrested.
In the end, I decided that, what is important is that the detail is there, on the record, and for us as readers to be able to take from it what we need to make ourselves aware of the heroism shown by a group of very unique, very ordinary women.
