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Le Train weaves together three true stories. The first is the return by train to Paris of the first 300 French women liberated from the Nazis’ Ravensbrück concentration camp for women and of the heroic Canadian POWs who delivered them while the war still raged all around them. The second is the running theme of executioners — one guillotiner and two hangmen — and the death by hanging of 11 Ravensbrück guards, five of them women, as well as the seldom-told true story of the botched executions of the top 10 Nazis hanged after conviction by the Nuremberg War Crimes trials. These two threads are told partly through the eyes and writings of legendary New Yorker magazine correspondent Janet Flanner, who under the pen name Genêt contributed her “Letter from Paris” columns for half a century, one of the unparalleled highlights in all of American journalism. Flanner was there on the platform along with Gen. Charles de Gaulle when the train arrived with the 300 women (11 of them died en route). De Gaulle’s niece, a member of the French resistance, was a prisoner in Ravensbrück, and he hoped she was on that train.
Le Train explores Flanner’s life, many loves and storied career from the Paris nightclubs of the Roaring 20s to the restoration of artwork stolen from the Louvre by the Nazis, coverage of which won her France’s highest award, the Legion of Honor. Flanner just wanted to spend her life “hanging around” the café Les Deux Magots partying and writing lightweight pieces about the arts and the colorful expatriates of the Lost Generation. Two decades later she was touring Buchenwald, interviewing Ravensbrück survivors and covering the Nuremberg trials, columns that would eventually win her two National Book Awards.
Cameos include her best friend Ernest Hemingway (and his four wives), Hemingway’s fellow Nobel-Prize-winning novelist Albert Camus, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Shakespeare and Company founder Sylvia Beach and her partner, Adrienne Monnier, Josephine Baker, Djuna Barnes, New Yorker founders Harold Ross and Jane Grant, OSS officer and POW Jack “Bumby” Hemingway, Col. David K. E. Bruce, head of the OSS in Europe, and Army historian S.L.A. “Slam” Marshall, and a slew of famous journalists from Martha Gellhorn and Mary Welsh (Hemingway wives number three and four), Rebecca West, and Margurite Higgins, to Edward R. Murrow, Ernie Pyle, and Howard K. Smith. Last but not least are the three main loves of Flanner’s life, Solita Solano, Noel Murphy and Natalia Danesi Murray.
Le Train is illustrated with 45 historical photographs from 1923 to 1975 and includes an extensive annotated bibliography/reference section and notes.