A Train In Winter

Download or read book A Train in Winter written by Caroline Moorehead and published by Random House Canada. This book was released on 2011-11-01 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “How can you do this work if you have a child?” asked her mother. “It is because I have a child that I do it,” replied Cecile. “This is not a world I wish her to grow up in.” On January 24, 1943, 230 women were placed in four cattle trucks on a train in Compiegne, in northeastern France, and the doors bolted shut for the journey to Auschwitz. They were members of the French Resistance, ranging in age from teenagers to the elderly, women who before the war had been doctors, farmers’ wives, secretaries, biochemists, schoolgirls. With immense courage they had taken up arms against a brutal occupying force; now their friendship would give them strength as they experienced unimaginable horrors. Only forty-nine of the Convoi des 31000 would return from the camps in the east; within ten years, a third of these survivors would be dead too, broken by what they had lived through. In this vitally important book, Caroline Moorehead tells the whole story of the 230 women on the train, for the first time. Based on interviews with the few remaining survivors, together with extensive research in French and Polish archives, A Train in Winter is an essential historical document told with the clarity and impact of a great novel. Caroline Moorehead follows the women from the beginning, starting with the disorganized, youthful and high-spirited activists who came together with the Occupation, and chronicling their links with the underground intellectual newspapers and Communist cells that formed soon afterwards. Postering and graffiti grew into sabotage and armed attacks, and the Nazis responded with vicious acts of mass reprisal – which in turn led to the Resistance coalescing and developing. Moorehead chronicles the women’s roles in victories and defeats, their narrow escapes and their capture at the hands of French police eager to assist their Nazi overseers to deport Jews, resisters, Communists and others. Their story moves inevitably through to its horrifying last chapters in Auschwitz: murder, starvation, disease and the desperate struggle to survive. But, as Moorehead notes, even in the most inhuman of places, the women of the Convoi could find moments of human grace in their companionship: “So close did each of the women feel to the others, that to die oneself would be no worse than to see one of the others die.” Uncovering a story that has hitherto never been told, Caroline Moorehead exhibits the skills that have made her an acclaimed biographer and historian. In this book she places the reader utterly in the world of wartime France, casting light on what it was like to experience horrific terrors and face impossible moral dilemmas. Through the sensitive interviews on which the book is based, she tells personal and individual stories of courage, solace and companionship. In this way, A Train in Winter ultimately becomes a valuable memorial to a unique group of heroines, and a testimony to the particular power of women’s friendship even in the worst places on earth.

Download or read book A Train in Winter written by Caroline Moorehead and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-09-06 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A moving and extraordinary book about courage and survival, friendship and endurance – a portrait of ordinary women who faced the horror of the holocaust together. On an icy morning in Paris in January 1943, a group of 230 French women resisters were rounded up from the Gestapo detention camps and sent on a train to Auschwitz – the only train, in the four years of German occupation, to take women of the resistance to a death camp. Of the group, only 49 survivors would return to France. Here is the story of these women – told for the first time. A Train in Winter is a portrait of ordinary people, of their bravery and endurance, and of the friendships that kept so many of them alive. ‘A story of stunning courage, generosity and hope’ Mail on Sunday ‘Serious and heartfelt...profound’ Sunday Times

Download or read book The Winter Train written by Susanna Isern and published by Cuento de Luz. This book was released on 2014-10-20 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winter has arrived and it’s time for the animals to set off to warmer lands. Hop on the Winter Train and start a magical journey about friendship and cooperation! Winter is drawing near, and as they do every year around this time, the cold-natured animals in the forest will catch the train that will take them to warmer lands. Most of them will start to pack their bags, checking if they missed something. Saying goodbye to their friends who’ll stay to spend the winter there will be difficult, but they will meet again soon when summer arrives. It’s time! The train is leaving! Southern Forest, here they go! The trip is going smoothly, but hey, where is Squirrel? A delightful tale of friendship and solidarity, The Winter Train takes young readers on a touching journey that brings out the very best in everyone.

Download or read book The Girl From the Train written by Irma Joubert and published by Thomas Nelson. This book was released on 2015-11-03 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Six-year-old Gretl Schmidt is on a train bound for Auschwitz. Jakób Kowalski is planting a bomb on the tracks. As World War II draws to a close, Jakób fights with the Polish resistance against the crushing forces of Germany and Russia. They intend to destroy a German troop transport, but Gretl’s unscheduled train reaches the bomb first. Gretl is the only survivor. Though spared from the concentration camp, the orphaned German Jew finds herself lost in a country hostile to her people. When Jakób discovers her, guilt and fatherly compassion prompt him to take her in. For three years, the young man and little girl form a bond over the secrets they must hide from his Catholic family. But she can’t stay with him forever. Jakób sends Gretl to South Africa, where German war orphans are promised bright futures with adoptive Protestant families—so long as Gretl’s Jewish roots, Catholic education, and connections to communist Poland are never discovered. Separated by continents, politics, religion, language, and years, Jakób and Gretl will likely never see each other again. But the events they have both survived and their belief that the human spirit can triumph over the ravages of war have formed a bond of love that no circumstances can overcome. Praise for The Girl from the Train: “A riveting read with an endearing, courageous protagonist . . . takes us from war-torn Poland to the veldt of South Africa in a story rich in love, loss, and the survival of the human spirit.” —Anne Easter Smith, author of A Rose for the Crown Full-length World War II historical novel International bestseller Includes a glossary

Download or read book A House in the Mountains written by Caroline Moorehead and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-01-28 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Dramatic, heartbreaking and sweeping in scope." —Wall Street Journal The acclaimed author of A Train in Winter returns with the "moving finale" (The Economist) of her Resistance Quartet—the powerful and inspiring true story of the women of the partisan resistance who fought against Italy’s fascist regime during World War II. In the late summer of 1943, when Italy broke with the Germans and joined the Allies after suffering catastrophic military losses, an Italian Resistance was born. Four young Piedmontese women—Ada, Frida, Silvia and Bianca—living secretly in the mountains surrounding Turin, risked their lives to overthrow Italy’s authoritarian government. They were among the thousands of Italians who joined the Partisan effort to help the Allies liberate their country from the German invaders and their Fascist collaborators. What made this partisan war all the more extraordinary was the number of women—like this brave quartet—who swelled its ranks. The bloody civil war that ensued pitted neighbor against neighbor, and revealed the best and worst in Italian society. The courage shown by the partisans was exemplary, and eventually bound them together into a coherent fighting force. But the death rattle of Mussolini’s two decades of Fascist rule—with its corruption, greed, and anti-Semitism—was unrelentingly violent and brutal. Drawing on a rich cache of previously untranslated sources, prize-winning historian Caroline Moorehead illuminates the experiences of Ada, Frida, Silvia, and Bianca to tell the little-known story of the women of the Italian partisan movement fighting for freedom against fascism in all its forms, while Europe collapsed in smoldering ruins around them.

Download or read book The Circus in Winter written by Cathy Day and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2005-07-06 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over a half century, a small Indiana town hosts a circus troupe during the off-seasons in linked stories “as graceful as any acrobat’s high-wire act” (San Francisco Chronicle). A Story Prize Finalist From 1884 to 1939, the Great Porter Circus made the unlikely choice to winter in an Indiana town called Lima, a place that feels as classic as Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, and as wondrous as a first trip to the Big Top. In Lima, an elephant can change the course of a man's life—or the manner of his death. Jennie Dixianna entices men with her dazzling Spin of Death and keeps them in line with secrets locked in a cedar box. The lonely wife of the show’s manager has each room of her house painted like a sideshow banner, indulging her desperate passion for a young painter. And a former clown seeks consolation from his loveless marriage in his post-circus job at Clown Alley Cleaners. In this collection of linked stories spanning decades, Cathy Day follows the circus people into their everyday lives and brings the greatest show on earth to the page. “[An] exquisite story collection.” —The Washington Post “Often funny, always graceful, and rich with a mix of historical and imaginative detail.” —Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried “Sublimely imaginative and affecting.” —The Boston Globe

Download or read book The Twentieth Train written by Marion Schreiber and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2005-02-11 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the publisher. Marion Schreiber's gripping book about the only Nazi death train in World War II to be ambushed draws on private documents, photographs, archive material, and police reports, as well as original research, including interviews with the surviving escapees. One day in April, 1943, resistance fighter Youra Livchitz, a young doctor, discovered the departure date of the next transport train and recruited two school friends to pull off one of the most daring rescues of the entire war. Equipped with only three pairs of pliers, a hurricane lamp covered in red paper, and a single pistol, the men ambushed the train, which was transporting 1,618 Jews to Auschwitz. These three lone men freed seventeen men and women before the German guards opened fire. Miraculously, by the time the convoy had reached the German border another 225 prisoners had managed to escape unharmed and found shelter with the locals. In a testament to the solidarity of the Belgians, no one was betrayed. No one, that is, except the three young rescuers, who were turned in by a double agent, imprisoned, and killed. Like Schindler's List, The Twentieth Train creates a vivid, moving portrait of heroism under impossible circumstances.