On an icy dawn morning in Paris in January 1943, a group of 230 French women resisters were rounded up from the Gestapo detention camps and sent on a train to Auschwitz - the only train, in the four years of German occupation, to take women of the resistance to a death camp. Of the group, 49 survivors would return to France.
Here is the story of these women - told for the first time. A Train in Winter is a portrait of ordinary people, of their bravery and endurance, and of the friendships that kept so many of them alive.
Longlisted for the 2012 Orwell Prize.
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This serious and heartfelt book does deliver on its promise of a tale of how female friendship 'can make the difference between living and dying'... Profound - Sunday Times
A harrowing but also uplifting shared story of friendship, courage and endurance - Independent
A story of stunning courage, generosity and hope. They risked their lives to defeat Fascism, by printing subversive literature, hiding Jewish friends or, in the case of one girl, simply insulting a French youth because he had decided to co-operate with the Nazis. The price they paid for their bravery was terrible. A Train in Winter could have been a sad, almost morbid book. In Moorehead's expert hands it is a triumphant one - Mail on Sunday
Compassionate, meticulous and compulsively enthralling... This book is essential reading. The litany of names at the end, with their brief biographies (Yolande, Cecile, Poupette, Mitzy, Lucie...) reminds us weeping is not enough. It bears witness - and warns - Daily Mail
Moorehead tells her appalling story in measured prose that sets off perfectly the reader's growing sense of wonder that such heroism is possible - Guardian
A remarkable and deeply affecting book - Oxford Times
A boom which contains a wealth of historical information as well as some brilliant if horrific storytelling - Spectator
A pitch-perfect study of human depravity, and of the heroism it can inspire - Intelligent Life
With A Train in Winter [Caroline Moorehead] has managed to pay tribute and tell the women's compelling story' - Scotsman
A multiple biography and a detailed anatomy of the nature of friendship... A Train in Winter is a powerful and moving book; its significance is in bringing to a wider, non-French readership the particular and terrible fate of a group of women whose only crime was to love their country and to wish to do something to defend it, at a time when its government chose craven obedience to the occupier, with terrible consequences for so many of its people - Times Literary Supplement
This is a clear-sighted, distressing and unforgettable book - The Lady
A harrowing but also uplifting story of shared story of friendship, courage and endurance - Independent, Books of the Year
It is an exceptional achievement on the author's part to have reconstructed these obscure lives that so often ended in sordid misery and to have restored their dignity and honour - Literary Review
An outstanding and important book, compelling and deeply troubling - Country Life
A hybrid of history and multiple biography, movingly chronicles the women's ordeal... [it] bears eloquent witness to the moral and material ruin of collaborationist in France - Seven
A remarkable achievement of biographical and oral research and with a brilliant narrative and description - History Today
Caroline Moorehead is the biographer of Bertrand Russell, Freya Stark, Iris Origo and Martha Gellhorn. Well known for her work in human rights, she has published a history of the Red Cross and a book about refugees, Human Cargo. Her most recent book, Dancing to the Precipice, a biography of Lucie de la Tour du Pin, was shorlisted for the Costa Biography Award in 2009. Caroline lives in London.
