On January 24, 1943, the only train ever to transport non-Jewish women of the French Resistance to the Nazi death camps pulled out of Compiègne station, in northern France. On board were 230 women aged between 17 and 67. Many of them were members of the French Communist Party, which the Nazis feared as the sole organization capable of rallying those in search of a political cause. Prior to their arrest, many of them had sheltered resisters, propagated anti-German pamphlets, hidden weapons, manipulated explosives, and, in at least one case, executed known Nazi collaborators.
The story of these indomitable women, 49 of whom miraculously survived the war, is told in the new French documentary Matricule 31000, le Courage de l’Ombre (Registration No. 31000, the Courage of Shadow). The film is so named because each of the women had numbers between 31625 and 31854 tattooed on their left forearms when they arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau on January 27, 1943. Their courage, as the film’s title also suggests, existed in the shadows for many years and is only now being fully recognized, eight decades on.
