Such acts of courage form, in the scales of history, a counterbalance to the abject disgrace of Vichy France, the collusive silence of a majority and the monstrous cruelty of the French torturers who were often worse than the Germans.Ĭaroline Moorehead’s book introduces us to one group of brave, noble and righteously angry people. Significantly, there were 119 active communists, as well as women from all over France who had sheltered resisters, written anti-German pamphlets, hidden weapons in shopping bags, helped to carry out acts of sabotage, and so on. One was actually a Dutch female arrested simply because she’d written a letter to her brother in Holland predicting Hitler’s defeat. The oldest woman was a widow of 67, the youngest a schoolgirl of 17. The front half of the train was reserved for the men, many of whom were their husbands and lovers. It’s the first full account of the Convoi des 31000 - the cattle trucks that took 230 French woman resisters to Auschwitz on January 24, 1943.
Yet, believe me, this is also a story of almost unmitigated horror. Caroline Moorehead’s uplifting subtitle is A Story Of Resistance, Friendship And Survival. Sixty-seven years later, with all the information we have, new stories from World War II still have the power to stun - leaving you overwhelmed by the simultaneous awareness of evil and of miraculous human courage, and by terror and pity - the two ancient emotions that tragedy awakens in the human soul. Victims: Women in Auschwitz were subject to horrors including vile experimental surgery
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