A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship and Survival in World War Two in Around the World in 80 Books

Aug 02, 2014 Kay rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction, world_war_ii, harrowing-tales, audiobooks

I am something of a connoisseur of survivor tales, avidly reading of survivors of shipwrecks, doomed polar expeditions, harrowing wilderness treks, calamitous military missions, devastating illnesses, and all-encompassing wars. A well-written tale of survival successfully steers away from being overly sensational, melodramatic, or sentimental but also offers something beyond the mere fact of survival. It's a tightrope walk between lapsing into "moral-of-the-story" tropes and succumbing to a blea I am something of a connoisseur of survivor tales, avidly reading of survivors of shipwrecks, doomed polar expeditions, harrowing wilderness treks, calamitous military missions, devastating illnesses, and all-encompassing wars. A well-written tale of survival successfully steers away from being overly sensational, melodramatic, or sentimental but also offers something beyond the mere fact of survival. It's a tightrope walk between lapsing into "moral-of-the-story" tropes and succumbing to a bleak sense of powerlessness. Survivors should do more than survive, yet if their ordeal is distilled into the merely inspirational, we (or I, at any rate) distrust it.

A Train in Winter has a great deal more to offer than a tale of mere survival, yet it also nimbly circumvents the inspiration trap. First I should add that there are very few survivors, and their survival is often more a matter of luck than courage or fortitude. The hardest thing in listening to this book comes as the reader learns of the death of women whom the author has brought to life, whether they be plucky young resistance members or hard-bitten older women. There is little redeeming in their deaths, and though many die nobly, they leave not only their fellow internees bereft but something of a gap in the narrative as well.

In fact, the biggest problem for me was that there are simply so many women's stories. Their fates are interwoven, and certainly the author does an admirable job of making the narrative as clear as possible, but as a listener it is a daunting job to keep them all straight. (Had I a book at hand, of course, I could probably have done so more easily.) I wished at times that she had narrowed her scope a bit, perhaps relating the stories of fewer women. As it is, it can be a bit overwhelming to take in.

What impressed me most was Moorehead's stern judgement on the people who betrayed the women. They were, for the most part, all fellow Frenchmen. For the collaborators she has nothing but scorn, and the French police in particular seemed reprehensible. I confess to knowing not as much as I had supposed about the German occupation of France and how the Vichy government operated. This book shed a great deal of light on both how the Resistance operated and how the Germans managed to co-opt local authorities to do their dirty work.

But in counterbalance to this bleak realpolitik, the behavior of the women prisoners stands in stark contrast. They forged strong bonds of friendship and commitment, despite of or sometimes perhaps because of differences. They were clever, persistent, and determined to come out alive if only to tell their story. Only 49 of the original 230 survived, and while Moorehead gives factors such as luck their due, she makes a fairly strong case that it was a sense of camaraderie and allegiance that kept some of the women alive.

The survivors' ordeals were not confined to what they experienced in the death camps, for those who returned found that they were, in a sense, a painful reminder to neighbors and family, and a number found that telling their story proved to be extremely painful or impossible. That a few did doggedly bear witness to the fate of the 230 is perhaps the most heroic action of all.

A note on the narrator: I thoroughly enjoyed Wanda McCaddon's reading of the book. She sailed through the French, German, and Russian names and terms with elan and parsed sentences well, making them easier to understand. She has a sympathetic but matter-of-fact voice that meshed well with this narrative. I give her five stars.

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