A Train in Winter Quotes

“I had to hold fast to the end, and die of living.”
― Caroline Moorehead, A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France

“Retreat into the depths of thought and morality’ but do not, whatever else you do, ‘descend into the servitude of imbeciles.”
― Caroline Moorehead, A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France

“To resist, is already to preserve one’s heart and one’s brain. But above all, it must be to act, to do something concrete, to perform reasoned and useful actions.’ There was only one goal, Vildé declared, a goal to be shared by all resisters, regardless of their political beliefs, and that was to bring about the ‘rebirth of a pure and free France’. Here and there, as the freezing winter began to ease, the first acts of armed resistance, of the sabotage of trains and the blowing up of German depots, were being planned. What the occupiers most feared, the transformation of isolated and spontaneous gestures of rebellion into concerted acts of hostility, was just about to start.”
― Caroline Moorehead, A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France

“I live alongside it. Auschwitz is there, unalterable, precise, but enveloped in the skin of memory.’ (Moorehead, 2011, 316)”
― Caroline Moorehead, A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France

“The Allied Forces, on their way across France during 1944 and 1945, had consumed scarce food, vandalized, looted and raped, and their destructiveness and rapaciousness was everywhere compared to that of the German soldiers. (Moorehead, 2011, 306)”
― Caroline Moorehead, A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France

“Neither de Gaulle nor anyone else was keen to admit that much of France had not only tolerated anti-Semitism and xenophobia but actually anticipated German wishes in identifying and deporting Jews. (Moorehead, 2011, 305)”
― Caroline Moorehead, A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France

“Look at me, because in my eyes you will see hundreds of thousands of eyes staring at you, and in my voice you will hear hundreds of thousands of voices accusing you.’ (Moorehead, 2011, 300)”
― Caroline Moorehead, A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France

“The wrong which we seek to condemn and punish,’ said Taylor, ‘have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating that civilisation cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive it being repeated.’ (Moorehead, 2011, 299)”
― Caroline Moorehead, A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France

“We weren’t victims,’ Madeleine Dissoubray would later say. ‘It wasn’t like the Jews or the gypsies. We saw the German posters, we read about the penalties, we heard about the torture. We knew what we were doing. It was our choice, and this gave us a strong emotional link.’ (Moorehead, 2011, 161)”
― Caroline Moorehead, A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France

“This is a book about friendship between women, and the importance that they attach to intimacy and to looking after each other, and about how, under conditions of acute hardship and danger, such mutual dependency can make the difference between living and dying. It is about courage, facing and surviving the worst that life can offer, with dignity and an unassailable determination not to be destroyed.”
― Caroline Moorehead, A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France

“PCF”
― Caroline Moorehead, A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France

“Voltaire… A true Aryan must be blond like Hitler, slender like Göring, tall like Goebbels, young like Pétain, and honest like Laval.”
― Caroline Moorehead, A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France