Convoy to Auschwitz

In January 1943, a train left France carrying 230 women, most of them arrested for resistance work, to Auschwitz. Charlotte Delbo was one of them, and she was among the 49 who came home. Years later she set out to record every woman on that convoy: who she was, how she was caught, and whether and how she died. The result is a roll call built from short portraits of farmers' wives, students, typists, communists and mothers.

The entries are brief and plainly told, and their accumulation is what makes the book so powerful. Each life is given its own space rather than dissolved into a statistic. It sits alongside Delbo's better known Auschwitz and After as an act of witness and remembrance. It is for readers of wartime history and testimony who want the Resistance and the camps seen through the women who lived them.