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  • A Train in Winter

  • An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship and Survival in World War Two
  • Written by: Caroline Moorehead
  • Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon
  • Length: 11 hrs and 56 mins
  • 4.4 out of 5 stars (14 ratings)

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A Train in Winter cover art

A Train in Winter

Written by: Caroline Moorehead
Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon
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Publisher's Summary

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. Based on interviews with the few remaining survivors, together with extensive research in French and Polish archives, A Train in Winter is an essential historical document told with the clarity and impact of a great novel.

Caroline Moorehead follows the women from the beginning, starting with the disorganized, youthful, and high-spirited activists who came together with the Occupation and chronicling their links with the underground intellectual newspapers and Communist cells that formed soon afterward. Postering and graffiti grew into sabotage and armed attacks, and the Nazis responded with vicious acts of mass reprisal - which in turn led to the Resistance coalescing and developing. Moorehead chronicles the women's roles in victories and defeats, their narrow escapes and their capture at the hands of French police eager to assist their Nazi overseers to deport Jews, resisters, Communists, and others. Their story moves inevitably through to its horrifying last chapters in Auschwitz: murder, starvation, disease, and the desperate struggle to survive. But, as Moorehead notes, even in the most inhuman of places, the women of the Convoi could find moments of human grace in their companionship: "So close did each of the women feel to the others, that to die oneself would be no worse than to see one of the others die."

Uncovering a story that has hitherto never been told, Caroline Moorehead exhibits the skills that have made her an acclaimed biographer and historian. In this book she places the listener utterly in the world of wartime France, casting light on what it was like to experience horrific terrors and face impossible moral dilemmas. Through the sensitive interviews on which the book is based, she tells personal and individual stories of courage, solace, and companionship. In this way, A Train in Winter ultimately becomes a valuable memorial to a unique group of heroines and a testimony to the particular power of women's friendship even in the worst places on Earth.

©2017 Caroline Moorehead (P)2017 Penguin Random House Canada

What the critics say

"Compelling and moving." ( The Washington Post)
"Delivers fresh insights into a little explored and unexpected area of Second World War history.... A serious and heartfelt book." ( The Sunday Times)

What listeners say about A Train in Winter

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    4 out of 5 stars
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Important Read

The narrator told an account of the woman in a factual, historical, and human account. it was not monotone. Rather, she did not make this account too dramatic. Otherwise, I may not have been able to finish the novel. Heartbreaking, relevant, and a reminder how deep and wide the holocaust reached - beyond borders, and through the generations.

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    2 out of 5 stars
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Reads like a very long news article

I thought this was going to be more of a historical fiction novel but instead it was read like a very long and hard to follow news article. Not for me. Probably my misunderstanding but just not for me…

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