Review of A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead

*A Train in Winter* by Carolina Moorehead (2011). Published by Harper.

As someone who loves books and has worked as a writer, professionally publishing since I was almost sixteen, I have a lot of ways of getting books. For new ones, I try to read them at my local library whenever possible—as I do more research about consumption and people’s buying habits, I don’t want to contribute even more to environmental problems.

That’s not something I personally want to be involved with, and why I stopped being involved with the fashion industry.

Anyways, when I read books new, I have a tendency to try and wait until they appear at a thrift store. Going to my local thrift store chains, like Savers and Goodwill, have been one of my greatest joys in the past few years. When they say one person’s trash is another person’s treasure, it’s me and the book sections in these stores.

It was in Savers when I found A Train in Winter. They have a deal where if you buy four books, you get one free, and I was looking for my fifth book. I had discovered someone had unloaded their entire Asian literature collection, and I wanted to pick up something a little different.

Lo and behold, this book was waiting for me in the nonfiction section. World War II and the stories of women within it is a subject I’m really interested about, so when I read the synopsis, I knew this was right up my alley. I bought it, and devoured the book in about two days.

Here’s my review!

The story of women resisting in France during World War II, and the deadly consequences of it.

This is a book that tells the story of 230 women, many of whom were involved with the French Resistance in World War II. Others were caught up in the perfect storm, offending a German or French officer, or did something that was not seen favorably in the eyes of someone somewhere.

However, this would be a dictionary of a book if we focused on each of the women. We hear about most of them, but the focus purely isn’t on each woman. There is an index at the back of the book explaining briefly who each woman was, their nationality, and their fate at the end of this tragedy.

Before then, we learn about what got them there. This is a book that largely goes in chronological order, except for the introduction that sets us up for the tales to come.

For a lot of women, they were involved in complicated resistance networks. Some worked with printing newspapers that were heavily against the Nazis, or passed information to help bolster the efforts of the resistance. Others were hiding Jews inside of their homes, defying the laws that stated they had to give them up.

There’s a mix of people from all classes too. There are rich women, middle class, and lower incomes that were doing everything they could to survive themselves. There are also a wide mix of ages—we see how this comes into play as the dominoes fall and the women were slowly rounded up.

Eventually, this story converges in the prison where the women were held. They didn’t immediately go to the prison camps, but when they did, things get really awful in this books. Not a lot of people died in the first prison they were held, which was a place they stayed for months.

It was when they arrived in Auschwitz things began to get really ugly quickly. Some of the stories contained within this book are horrifying, lining up with many of the other accounts we see about the Holocaust. One of the most striking themes throughout all of this though was how the women helped each other as much as they could, even when they had nothing themselves.

What was also really striking to me was what came after: a lot of the survivors did not live a normal life at all when they returned home. Some came to decimated homes and towns, but almost all were traumatized for the rest of their lives.

Overall Thoughts

I’d say this is a must read for anyone interested in this kind of history, especially through the lens of gender. When we talk about World War II certain historical notes always come up, but we tend to forget as well that it wasn’t just Jewish people who were being straight up murdered.

I knew a little bit about these women and their stories, but I was not prepared for what I was reading in this book. It was horrifying, as are most stories that emerge about the camps during this time.

Pick this one up if you have not already. I’ll be looking up Moorehead’s other books in the mean time.

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