The Phantom Train: Deporting Prisoners from Occupied France

On 3 July 1944, a train of cattle wagons set out from Toulouse, heading for Germany. Crammed inside eventually were 724 souls of various nationalities and backgrounds, all of whom the German occupiers had held captive in concentration camps and prisons across south-western France. Among them was Francesco Fausto Nitti, an Italian antifascist activist who had survived Mussolini’s gaols and the Spanish Civil War. The journey to Dachau was expected to take three days. Instead – bombed, re-routed and often immobilised – it lasted for two months, making it the longest of all deportation journeys out of France during the Second World War. Nitti kept a daily log of the odyssey of the Phantom Train, as it has become known, and the document was in his pocket when, on 25 August, he and some fellow captives made a perilous last-minute escape by removing some of their wagon’s floorboards and lowering themselves onto the track as the train sped through the night. Once back with his family and the Resistance, Nitti turned his log into a book, which was published at the end of 1944 by a small press run by a Resistance member. Now, with this first English translation of The Phantom Train and an extended introduction, a whole new readership can learn about that never-ending journey to Dachau and everything that led up to it, and marvel at the determination and endurance of some courageous people, notably the remarkable Francesco Fausto Nitti.

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