Some of them managed to return to lives that suggested normality - marriage or remarriage, children, high honors from the French government and others - and incredibly, four of them were still alive as “ A Train in Winter” went to press. Their story, as Moorehead tells it in this compelling and moving book, is more of survival than of triumph. They made it because they had developed formidable survival skills and for two overriding reasons: “They had lived because each of them had been incredibly lucky, and because of the friendship between them, which had protected them and made it easier to withstand the barbarity.”

Forty-nine of them survived, and, given the unspeakable conditions into which they were thrust, it is a miracle that this many made it to freedom. “Had they heard the words Auschwitz or Birkenau, they would have meant nothing to them.” They stayed there for two years, until the end of the war. When the train finally stopped, after a cold and singularly unpleasant journey, the women found themselves in “a vast white snowy landscape, deserted, flat and frozen.” They were marched across this landscape, under a sign that read “ Arbeit Macht Frei” and into an immense camp. They had sheltered resisters, written and copied out anti-German pamphlets, hidden weapons in shopping bags, helped carry out acts of sabotage.” Among them were a doctor, a dentist, four chemists, “farmers, shopkeepers, women who had worked in factories and in the post office, teachers, and secretaries,” as well as dressmakers, students and housewives. “The majority,” Caroline Moorehead writes, “came from every part and region of France, from Paris, Bordeaux, Brittany, Normandy, Aquitaine and along the banks of the Loire. About half of them were communists who in one way or another had aided - or been charged with aiding - the French Resistance. 24, 1943, German soldiers and French policemen herded 230 women aboard a train bound for a destination about which these passengers knew nothing.

A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead