Caroline Moorehead's moving non-fiction book, A Train in Winter, has been garnering a lot of praise including from Kayleigh who talked about it at our book buzz in New Orleans. Recently Booklist hopped on the train (unintentional pun that I've decided not to edit) with a starred review:
* A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France.
They came from all walks of life, and from all over France. Professionals and housewives, grandmothers and teenagers, they were drawn to or drawn into the Resistance, perhaps by a heightened sense of moral outrage, or just because their husbands, lovers, brothers needed their assistance. Ultimately, they would all come together in Nazi concentration camps, where the petty harassment they once endured as furtive members of undercover cells would wither in comparison to unimaginable horrors. As the war escalated, so did the savagery of their captors. Two hundred and thirty women began the journey into Hitler’s hell at the death camps at Birkenau and Auschwitz; by the time the Allies arrived to liberate them at Mauthausen, only 49 were left. Through primary interviews with the seven survivorsand other groundbreaking research, distinguished English journalist and biographer Moorehead (Martha Gellhorn, Lucie de la Tour du Pin) potently demonstrates how this disparate group of valiant women withstood the atrocities of the Nazi regime through their abiding devotion to each other. Heightened by electrifying and staggering detail, Moorehead’s riveting history stands as a luminous testament to the indomitable will to survive, and the unbreakable bonds of friendship. — Carol Haggas
We here in libraryland definitely recommend checking it out.
– Annie