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. 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.”Īrrested 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). 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. 26, 1943, by their internment at Birkenau, the main women’s camp at Auschwitz. 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.īlond 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. 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.

A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead