Free A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead

admirably suited. There was as yet no very clear goal to their activities, beyond the constant harassment of the Germans, whose forces they hoped to keep in a state of perpetual uneasy alert. They also wanted to send a message to Vichy that collaboration was an odious affair, unacceptable to decent people, and that it would, when sanity and victory returned to France, be severely punished.
    These schoolgirls, mothers, grandmothers, housewives and professional women were joining the Resistance because of their fathers and brothers who were already part of it; or because they had heard their grandfathers talking about the Dreyfus affair and Verdun; or because they had watched the Spanish refugee children struggle over the Pyrenees; or because, like Cécile, they did not want their children to grow up in a world run by Nazis; or, quite simply, because they were frondeuses —rebels against authority and dogmatism, true daughters of the French Enlightenment. As the Serre women saw it, they really had no choice.
    What none of them knew, as they hurried around the streets of their villages and towns, carrying messages and tracts, feeling oddly safe in a country in which women were still not perceived to be active in the Resistance, was how lethal it was about to become.
    The late spring of 1941 was marked throughout the German occupied zone of France by sporadic acts of sabotage, a continuing war of posters, and the arrests and internment of ever more ‘enemies of the Reich’. A number of clandestine printing presses were discovered, and their operators tried and sent to prison. In May, hundreds of French policemen were dispatched into the traditionally Jewish quarters of Paris to ‘invite’ the residents to present themselves for an ‘examination of their status’. Disoriented, stupefied to find that French laws would not protect them, 3,710 foreign-born Jews were subsequently interned. Posters offering rewards of 1,000 francs for information leading to the arrest of a militant communist went up on the walls of the capital. By June, 2,325 communists were in prisons or internment camps all over France. On the fête de Jeanne d’Arc, thousands of students gathered to sing patriotic songs and shout: ‘Joan of Arc, deliver us from the barbarians!’
    Since it had quickly become clear that the communists were not alone in backing the Resistance, but that all over France acts of rebellion were also being carried out by Catholics, Jews and Gaullists, it was decided, early in May, to try to co-ordinate their forces. On the 15th, a joint communiqué was issued to the entire Resistance, both in the occupied and in the free zones. All French men and women, regardless of their political affiliations, who ‘thought French and wished to act French’, were invited to unite under a National Front for the Independence of France. The idea was to set up little National Fronts all over the country, in factories, in mining areas, in villages. ‘To live under defeat,’ read one pamphlet, quoting Napoleon, ‘is to die every day.’ Even so, Otto von Stülpnagel and the occupying German forces continued to maintain that the state of France caused little alarm. The Communists, at this stage still the strongest element in the Resistance, continued to be regarded as pariahs by much of the public on account of the Nazi–Soviet pact.
    Then, early on the morning of 22 June 1941, everything changed.
    As dawn broke, two million German soldiers, 3,200 planes and 10,000 tanks invaded the Soviet Union along a 300-kilometre front. Overnight, among the worldwide opponents of Hitler, the Communists ceased to be perceived as in league with the enemy. Stalin redefined the war, from being one of imperialism to being a ‘great anti-Fascist and patriotic war of liberation’. The Soviets—and the Communists—were now the allies. The message that went out to the communist parties across occupied Europe was clear: the German invaders were to be resisted,