A Train in Winter

In early spring 1942, in a crackdown on the French Resistance that would become known as L’Affaire Pican, the French police dealt what they called a decisive blow to the Resistance. Their haul included three million anti-German and anti-Vichy tracts, three tonnes of paper, two typewriters, eight roneo machines, 1,000 stencils, 100 kilos of ink and 300,000 francs. One hundred and thirteen people were detained, thirty-five of them women. The youngest of these was a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl called Rosa Floch, who was picked up as she was writing Vive les anglais! on the walls of her lycée. The eldest was a forty-four-year-old farmer’s wife, Madeleine Normand, who told the police that the 39,500 francs in her handbag were there because she had recently sold a horse.

Nine months later, on the snowy morning of 24 January 1943, these women – along with others arrested like them in raids across occupied France – were transported on the only train to take women from the French Resistance to the Nazi death camps during the entire four years of German occupation.