The Red Cross was the dream of the Swiss businessman Henri Dunant that grew into the pre-eminent international humanitarian charity. The story begins in 1859, when almost by chance, Dunant witnessed the butchery and lack of care for injured soldiers during the battle of Solferino. Realizing that, although modern warfare meant more, and worse, wounded, medical treatment for the first time could save significant numbers of them, he began a crusade leading to 137 national societies and 250 million members today. Caroline Moorehead, a popular columnist on human rights for the London Independent, is the first writer to be granted wide access to the Red Cross's closed archives in Geneva. Her resulting book engrossingly recounts the Red Cross's full history and the moral dilemmas it has faced from the two World Wars to the post-Cold War conflicts of Somalia, Chechnya, and Bosnia.

Dunant's Dream: War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross

History

caroline-moorehead

Historical Study & Educational Resources

Harpercollins

Village of Secrets Defying the Nazis in Vichy France

HARPER/COLLINS

A Bold and Dangerous Family The Remarkable Story of an Italian Mother, Her Two Sons, and Their Fight Against Fascism

Train In Winter

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Vintage Books

This is a Sunday Times Top Five Bestseller Shortlisted For The Samuel Johnson Prize 2014. From the author of the New York Times bestseller A Train in Winter comes the extraordinary story of a French village that helped save thousands who were pursued by the Gestapo during World War II. High up in the mountains of the southern Massif Central in France lies a cluster of tiny, remote villages united by a long and particular history. During the Nazi occupation, the inhabitants of the Plateau Vivarais Lignon saved several thousand people from the concentration camps. As the victims of Nazi persecution flooded in - resisters, freemasons, communists and Jews, many of them children - the villagers united to keep them safe. The story of why and how these villages came to save so many people has never been fully told. But several of the remarkable architects of the mission are still alive, as are a number of those they saved. Caroline Moorehead has sought out and interviewed many of the people involved in this extraordinary undertaking, and brings us their unforgettable testimonies. It is a story of courage and determination, of a small number of heroic individuals who risked their lives to save others, and of what can be done when people come together to oppose tyranny.

Village Of Secrets

Leaders & Notable People

Vintage

In spring 1945, the Red Army entered Berlin. Not far from the Reichs Chancellery was the Berlin Zoo with an anti-aircraft tower. Inside were crates containing Heinrich Schliemann's famed collection of gold from the lost city of Troy, King Priam's riches - gold diadems with leaf and flower pendants, gold bottles, gold earrings and 9000 gold rings and buttons - one of the most complete and valuable finds ever made by an archaeologist. On June 3rd the crates were despatched to Moscow by military aircraft. And there they and their contents vanished. Caroline Moorehead has spent two years searching for the treasures of Troy. In this book she tells the full story of where they have been for the past 49 years.

The lost treasures of Troy

Europe

Weidenfeld&Nicolson

Martha Gellhorn: A Life

Arts & Literature

Chatto&Windus

On an icy dawn morning in Paris in January 1943, a group of 230 French women resisters were rounded up from the Gestapo detention camps and sent on a train to Auschwitz - the only train, in the four years of German occupation, to take women of the resistance to a death camp. The youngest was a schoolgirl of 15, the eldest a farmer's wife of 68; there were among them teachers, biochemists, sales girls, secretaries, housewives and university lecturers. The women turned to one another, finding solace and strength in friendship and shared experience. They supported and cared for one another, worked together, and faced the horror together. Friendship, almost as much as luck, dictated survival. Forty-nine of them came home. Caroline Moorehead's breathtaking new book is the story of these women - the first time it has been told. It is about who they were, how and why they joined the resistance, how they were captured by the French police and the Gestapo, their journey to Auschwitz and their daily life in the death camps - and about what it was like for the survivors when they returned to France. "A Train in Winter" covers a harrowing part of our history but is, ultimately, a portrait of ordinary people, of bravery and endurance, and of friendship.

Train in Winter: A Story of Resistance, Friendship and Survival

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Train in Winter

Historical

Random House Export

From the author of the New York Times bestseller A Train in Winter comes the absorbing story of a French village that helped save thousands hunted by the Gestapo during World War II - told in full for the first time.Le Chambon-sur-Lignon is a small village of scattered houses high in the mountains of the Ardèche, one of the most remote and inaccessible parts of Eastern France. During the Second World War, the inhabitants of this tiny mountain village and its parishes saved thousands wanted by the Gestapo: resisters, freemasons, communists, OSS and SOE agents, and Jews. Many of those they protected were orphaned children and babies whose parents had been deported to concentration camps.With unprecedented access to newly opened archives in France, Britain, and Germany, and interviews with some of the villagers from the period who are still alive, Caroline Moorehead paints an inspiring portrait of courage and determination: of what was accomplished when a small group of people banded together to oppose their Nazi occupiers. A thrilling and atmospheric tale of silence and complicity, Village of Secrets reveals how every one of the inhabitants of Chambon remained silent in a country infamous for collaboration. Yet it is also a story about mythmaking and the fallibility of memory.A major contribution to WWII history, Village of Secrets sets the record straight about the events in Chambon, and pays tribute to a group of heroic individuals, most of them women, for whom saving others became more important than their own lives.

Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France

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