Castles’s Reviews > A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France > Status Update

For twenty years, Cécile kept having the same nightmare. An SS guard, carrying a revolver, was coming up the stairs to kill her. It only stopped, she said, when, in her dream, she told the man, ‘I don’t care if you shoot me.’

Charlotte arrived back in Paris with the feeling that she had indeed survived, not as herself, but as a ghost, floating in a world that in some way did not exist. When she tried to read a book, she was filled with a curious sensation that she could see through the words to emptiness and banality.

Simone Veil, deported as a Jew with her family, would later say that the surviving resisters were quick to scorn and marginalise Jewish survivors. ‘They, they had fought against the Nazis. We, we were nothing.’ 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

It was generally agreed, however, that a great many prominent writers had sat out the occupation in shameful silence and inaction, and it would long be remembered that Simone de Beauvoir worked for a while for Radio Nationale under the Germans, and that Sartre had been happy to replace a Jewish professor of philosophy who was dismissed from his post under the anti-Semitic edicts.

It was not long after this that Alice Varailhon found the body of a little girl lying by a well with a doll in her arms. Picking the doll up and brandishing it furiously in the direction of the SS guards, Alice shouted out: ‘Assassins!’ One of the men calmly took out his revolver and shot her. That night, Hélène Bolleau and the others helped her back to camp; she died soon after roll call.